Rick Smith
Source of wealth: Tasers
...
...
Modules
Biography
Rick Smith is the founder and CEO of taser maker Axon Enterprise.
He founded the company as TASER International in 1993 and took it public on the Nasdaq in 2001.
Smith is a billionaire thanks to a hefty performance-based stock option package (equaling an 8% stake in Axon) he was awarded in 2018.
He still owns 4% of the company after exercising and selling nearly half of those options for an estimated $200 million after-tax.
Axon had a market cap of more than $40 billion at the end of March 2025, up more than 600% from five years earlier.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Rick Smith
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 Smith, linked to Technology and 'Tasers', 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 14 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 0.9 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.