Michelle Xia
Source of wealth: Biotech
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Modules
Biography
Michelle Yu Xia is cofounder, chairwoman and CEO of China-based biotech firm Akeso, which has multiple approved drugs in China to treat cancer.
Akeso has captured attention in the biotech world because one of its drugs outperformed Merck's bestseller Keytruda in a head to head Phase 3 trial in 2024.
The success of that Akeso drug, ivonescimab, drove up the price of Akeso's shares; the company is listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Prior to Akeso, Xia worked in research and at U.S. biotech firms for a dozen years starting in the mid 1990s and obtained U.S. citizenship while in America.
Akeso licensed its most promising cancer drug to Miami-based firm Summit Therapeutics in 2022 for markets including the U.S., Europe and Japan.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Michelle Xia
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 Michelle Xia, linked to Healthcare and 'Biotech', 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 7 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 0.5 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.