Rodger Riney
Source of wealth: Discount brokerage
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Modules
Biography
Rodger Riney is the cofounder of discount brokerage firm Scottrade, which is now part of Charles Schwab.
After college, Riney turned down a job at a top engineering firm and joined a Missouri investment company for less pay.
A decade later, he quit his job, drove 1,500 miles from St. Louis to Scottsdale, Ariz. and cofounded Scottrade in 1980.
Riney, who bought out his partner in 1985, expanded the firm to 3 million client accounts with a total of $170 billion in assets under management.
He sold out to Joe Ricketts' TD Ameritrade for $4 billion in 2017, 2 years after he was diagnosed with blood cancer multiple myeloma.
He has since donated $40 million to Washington University in St. Louis to research the disease and develop treatments for neurodegenerative illnesses.
Financial Assets
Financial assets information not available.
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Rodger Riney
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 Rodger Riney, linked to Finance & Investments and 'Discount brokerage', 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 30 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 1.9 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.