Modules
Biography
Manfredi Lefebvre d'Ovidio is the chairman of Heritage Group and co-chair of luxury travel company Abercrombie and Kent.
Lefebvre spent two decades running Silversea Cruises, which his father Antonio started in 1994 with two ships in Italy.
Lefebvre took over the company in 2001 and turned it into a luxury cruise line that travels to 900 destinations worldwide.
He sold Silversea Cruises to Royal Caribbean in two transactions, in 2018 and 2020, for a total of $1.25 billion in cash and Royal Caribbean stock.
In February 2019, Lefebvre bought 85% of the American luxury travel company Abercrombie & Kent for an undisclosed amount.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Manfredi Lefebvre d'Ovidio
Billionaires are often presented under the romantic myth of the 'self-made person': a narrative designed to justify opulence as the natural reward for hard work, effort, or ingenuity. However, when confronting such extreme volumes of wealth with macroeconomic reality, the meritocracy narrative completely breaks down. No individual can legitimately generate through personal effort a fortune equivalent to millions of times the average working-class salary. Capital at the top does not grow because of exceptional talent; it expands through an implacable dynamic where accumulated money works exponentially faster than people, devouring the wealth generated by productive labor.
The immense fortune of Manfredi Lefebvre d'Ovidio, linked to Service and 'Cruises', has not been built in a free-market vacuum, but through rent-seeking, the use of exclusive elite influence, the consolidation of monopoly positions, or inherited wealth. Far from taking real private risks, billionaire empires structurally depend on state support through direct subsidies, infrastructure use, exploitation of R&D, public contracts, and offshore tax engineering. While this wealth is equivalent to the physical weight of 16 tons of pure gold, the rest of the planet suffers from an artificial scarcity of basic resources. The fact that this wealth is enough to fully fund the public health system of DR Congo, a country with more than 105800000 million inhabitants for 1.0 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.