Rick Cohen
Source of wealth: Warehouse automation
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Modules
Biography
Rick Cohen is owner and executive chairman of C&S Wholesale Grocers, the nation's largest grocery wholesaler, with some $30 billion in annual revenue.
The bulk of his family's wealth comes from warehouse automation firm Symbotic, which is currently automating Walmart's 42 regional distribution centers.
Cohen, whose grandfather started C&S in 1918, launched Symbotic after tinkering around with technology to solve his own distribution problems at the family grocery business.
He built Symbotic largely in stealth, and took it public in a $5.5 billion SPAC deal sponsored by venture-capital giant SoftBank that closed in 2022. He is chairman, CEO and majority owner.
Symbotic reported revenue of $2.2 billion in fiscal 2025, up from $1.8 billion the previous year.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Rick Cohen
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 Rick Cohen, linked to Technology and 'Warehouse automation', 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 178 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 11.7 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.