Melanie Perkins
Source of wealth: Software
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Modules
Biography
Melanie Perkins is cofounder and CEO of design software maker Canva, which was valued by private investors at $42 billion in August 2025.
Canva was launched in 2013 by Perkins, now-husband Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams in Sydney, Australia, but was met by investor skepticism due to its location.
Like Obrecht, Perkins owns an estimated 18% stake. The couple has pledged to transfer more than 80% of their stake to the Canva Foundation for charitable causes.
Defying the doubts, Canva has attracted 240 million monthly users to its freemium software, with 6 million teams from companies like Zoom paying for it.
Canva's software enables the creation of attractive visuals for menus, resumes and Instagram graphics.
Financial Assets
Financial assets information not available.
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Melanie Perkins
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 Melanie Perkins, linked to Technology and 'Software', 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 54 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 3.4 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.