Mohammad Abunayyan
Source of wealth: Diversified
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Modules
Biography
Mohammad Abunayyan is the founder and chairman of ACWA Power, a Saudi power generation and water desalination firm.
He founded the company in 2004 and took it public on the Saudi stock exchange in 2021; he now owns 3.5% of the shares.
Abunayyan also chairs Vision Invest, a Saudi holding company that owns stakes in several publicly traded and privately held companies.
He also owns 8% of Abdullah Abunayyan Trading Company, a Saudi holding company that owns 50% of Vision Invest.
Vision Invest and Abunayyan Holding own shares in several Saudi publicly traded companies in wastewater treatment, logistics and flour milling.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Mohammad Abunayyan
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 Mohammad Abunayyan, linked to Diversified and 'Diversified', 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 13 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 0.8 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.