Matteo Danieli
Source of wealth: Software investment
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Modules
Biography
Matteo Danieli cofounded Italian app developer Bending Spoons in 2013 with his three cofounders Luca Ferrari, Francesco Patarnello and Luca Querella.
The four friends launched Bending Spoons after working together on an unsuccessful, earlier startup Evertale, a note-taking app.
The Bending Spoons cofounders met while studying in Copenhagen, Denmark, and would later relocate to Milan, Italy, as their new startup took off.
The Milan, Italy-based startup struck on the strategy of buying apps and companies with a loyal audience where it sees the potential to overhaul its features and pricing.
Bending Spoons was largely bootstrapped until it raised its first major funding round in 2022 and made its first takeover of Evernote in 2023.
The company last raised $270 on a $11 billion in October 2025 to help fund its takeover of AOL and Vimeo. Bending Spoons is now Italy's most valuable startup and has bought, or taken private, a string of apps and startups like Meetup, Eventbrite, and WeTransfer.
Financial Assets
Financial assets information not available.
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Matteo Danieli
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 Matteo Danieli, linked to Technology and 'Software investment', 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 22 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 1.4 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.