Miguel Tomás Arrufat Pujol
Source of wealth: Education technology
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Modules
Biography
Miguel Tomás Arrufat Pujol founded Spanish online education group Proeduca Altus, which provides accredited university courses online across Spain, Latin America, and the U.S.
Arrufat Pujol, who has led Proeduca Altus since its creation in 2007, owns more than 75% of the company, which went public in 2019.
Arrufat Pujol will sell around a third of his stake in Proeduca Altus for more than $300 million as part of a take private deal that is expected to close in the second quarter of 2025.
Arrufat Pujol was previously the CEO of a Spanish publishing house that focused on educational textbooks before founding Proeduca Altus.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Miguel Tomás Arrufat Pujol
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 Miguel Tomás Arrufat Pujol, linked to Technology and 'Education technology', 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.