Steven Sarowitz
Source of wealth: Payroll software
...
...
Modules
Biography
Steven Sarowitz founded online payroll firm Paylocity in 1997 after working at several other payroll firms.
Sarowitz still sits on Paylocity's board but is no longer involved with its operations.
He now focuses on philanthropy and has contributed nearly $250 million to his family foundation Julian Grace and spiritually-inspired foundation Wayfarer.
Sarowitz also cofounded and co-chairs Wayfarer Studios, which produces films with inspirational messages. "It Ends with Us" starred Blake Lively and was one of the top-grossing films of 2024.
After legal controversy erupted around "It Ends with Us," Sarowitz closed his Wayfarer Foundation in 2025 to focus on private giving.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Steven Sarowitz
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 Steven Sarowitz, linked to Technology and 'Payroll software', 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 15 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.