Nancy Mills Barnett
Source of wealth: Medical supplies
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Modules
Biography
Nancy Mills Barnett is a shareholder of Illinois-based medical supplies giant Medline, which her father Jon Mills and uncle Jim Mills founded in 1966.
The extended Mills family, which includes four other billionaires, owns roughly 17% of the company, which IPO'd on the Nasdaq in December 2025 and ended its first trading day with a market cap of more than $55 billion.
The Mills family previously sold 79% of Medline to a group of private equity firms in a leveraged buyout that valued the company at more than $30 billion in 2021.
Barnett's cousin Charlie Mills served as Medline's CEO for 26 years until 2023, while her brother Andy Mills served as president during that same period. Charlie still serves as chairman and Andy still sits on the board.
Barnett's brother-in-law Jim Abrams served as chief operating officer of Medline from 1997 to 2023. The company is now run by non-family executives.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Nancy Mills Barnett
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 Nancy Mills Barnett, linked to Healthcare and 'Medical supplies', 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 29 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 1.8 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.