Patrick Soon-Shiong
Source of wealth: Pharmaceuticals
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Modules
Biography
Medical doctor Patrick Soon-Shiong invented the cancer drug Abraxane. It became a blockbuster thanks to its efficacy against pancreatic cancer.
He sold his drug companies Abraxis in 2010 and American Pharmaceutical Partners in 2008 for a combined $9.1 billion.
He took his cancer drug maker NantKwest public in 2015 and his biotech startup NantHealth public in 2016.
He owns NantWorks, a network of health startups, and has stakes in media firm Tribune Publishing and the Los Angeles Lakers.
He bought the Los Angeles Times and San Diego Tribune for $500 million in June 2018.
In May 2020, Soon-Shiong's ImmunityBio was selected for the federal government's "Operation Warp Speed" to help quickly develop a Covid-19 vaccine.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Patrick Soon-Shiong
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 Patrick Soon-Shiong, linked to Healthcare and 'Pharmaceuticals', 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 65 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 4.1 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.