Stefano Pessina
Source of wealth: Drugstores
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Modules
Biography
Stefano Pessina is the executive chairman of drugstore chain Walgreens Boots Alliance, which Sycamore Partners acquired in 2025 for nearly $10 billion.
He's still a substantial shareholder of the company, which went private and delisted from the Nasdaq as part of the deal.
Pessina's journey began in 1977, when he took over his family's pharmaceutical wholesaler, ultimately renamed Alliance Santé, in Naples, Italy.
He eventually expanded beyond Italy, merging his wholesaler with UniChem Group in 1997 and Boots Group in 2006.
A year later, Pessina took Alliance Boots private in a reported $22 billion deal with private equity firm KKR.
Between 2012 and 2014, Walgreens bought 100% of his pharmacy chain, creating Walgreens Boots Alliance.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Stefano Pessina
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 Stefano Pessina, linked to Fashion & Retail and 'Drugstores', 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 45 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 2.8 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.