Michael Moritz
Source of wealth: Venture capital
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Biography
Wales native Michael Moritz got his start as a journalist at Time Magazine after immigrating to America in 1976.
Moritz wrote an early biography of Steve Jobs and Apple, "The Little Kingdom," while he was Time's San Francisco bureau chief.
After making the jump to venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, Moritz invested in companies such as Google, LinkedIn and PayPal.
He stepped back from a leadership role at Sequoia in 2012 after being diagnosed with a rare and undisclosed medical condition.
In 2023, Sequoia announced in a letter to its limited partners that Moritz had left the firm after 38 years.
Moritz said in the letter he intended to shift focus to Sequoia Heritage, a wealth management business that runs independently to the venture practice.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Michael Moritz
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 Michael Moritz, linked to Finance & Investments and 'Venture capital', 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 58 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 3.7 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.