Martua Sitorus
Source of wealth: Palm oil
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Modules
Biography
Martua Sitorus cofounded Wilmar with Kuok Khoon Hong, now also a billionaire, in 1991.
Sitorus stepped off the board of Wilmar, one of the world's largest palm oil traders, in 2018.
He and his brother Ganda cofounded KPN, formerly known as Gama, with interests in palm oil plantations, property development and cement manufacturing.
In partnership with the Ciputra Group, KPN's property arm Gama Land built a township in Medan, North Sumatra in 2024.
The family's cement maker Cemindo Gemilang listed its shares in 2021 raising $77 million. Their hospital company Murni Sadar raised $21 million through an IPO in 2022.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Martua Sitorus
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 Martua Sitorus, linked to Manufacturing and 'Palm oil', 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 25 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 1.6 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.