Michael Steinhardt
Source of wealth: Hedge funds
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Modules
Biography
A pioneer of the modern hedge fund, Michael Steinhardt closed his fund in 1995 after making a fortune in the 1990s from stellar returns.
He came out of retirement a decade later to help run WisdomTree Investments, where he is still a leading shareholder.
He retired as chairman of the board in October 2019.
WisdomTree is a publicly traded asset manager that focuses on ETF investing.
Steinhardt cofounded Birthright Israel, a foundation that provides funding for young Jewish Americans to take heritage trips to Israel.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Michael Steinhardt
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 Steinhardt, linked to Finance & Investments and 'Hedge funds', 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 11 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 0.7 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.