Shalom Meckenzie
Source of wealth: sports betting
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Modules
Biography
Shalom Meckenzie is an Israeli entrepreneur who became the largest shareholder in daily fantasy and sports-betting firm Draft Kings in early 2020.
He secured an 11% stake in Draft Kings when it merged with his company, SBTech.
Meckenzie founded gambling-technology provider SBTech in 2007 and served as a director until May 2014.
DraftKings is an official daily fantasy and sports betting partner of the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, PGA TOUR and UFC.
Meckenzie spent $11.8 million to acquire a rare CryptoPunk NFT in a June 2021 auction run by Sotheby's.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Shalom Meckenzie
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 Shalom Meckenzie, linked to Gambling & Casinos and 'sports betting', 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.