Roberto Crippa
Source of wealth: Microchip testing
...
...
Modules
Biography
Roberto Crippa is the son of Giuseppe Crippa (d. 2025), the late founder of Technoprobe, an Italian manufacturer of probe cards, small devices that test the functionality of microchips.
His father founded Technoprobe in 1989 in his garage and attic alongside his son Cristiano, while still working at semiconductor firm ST.
Technoprobe went public on Euronext Milan in 2022; Roberto owns an 18% stake.
Roberto joined the firm in 2002 and took over the management of the company's Italian operations
He has served as Technoprobe's vice president since 2013.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Roberto Crippa
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 Roberto Crippa, linked to Manufacturing and 'Microchip testing', 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 31 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 2.0 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.