Prasanna Sankar
Source of wealth: software
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Modules
Biography
Prasanna Sankar cofounded human resources software startup Rippling with fellow billionaire Parker Conrad in 2016.
Sankar owns an estimated 9% of the company, which private investors valued at $16.8 billion in May 2025.
Before cofounding Rippling, Sankar served as director of engineering at another human resources software startup Zenefits, which Conrad founded in 2013.
Sankar served as chief technology officer of Rippling until 2020, before leaving to found 0xPPL, which he describes as a decentralized social network for crypto natives, in 2023.
Born in India, Sankar studied computer science at the National Institute of Technology in Tiruchirappalli. He now lives in Singapore.
Financial Assets
Financial assets information not available.
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Prasanna Sankar
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 Prasanna Sankar, linked to Technology and 'software', 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.