Stewart Horejsi
Source of wealth: Berkshire Hathaway
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Modules
Biography
Stewart Horejsi began buying stock in Berkshire Hathaway for as little as $265 per share after reading John Train's "The Money Masters" in 1980.
He attended annual meetings when they were fewer than a dozen people in folding chairs; now Berkshire's class A stock is one of the world's most valuable.
After graduating from the University of Kansas in 1962, Horejsi returned home to Salina, Kansas to take over his family's welding supply company.
He expanded the business, investing profits in Berkshire Hathaway stock, and has spent much of his life managing his family's money.
Horejsi (pronounced hor-ish) still owns some Berkshire shares, but has also put hundreds of millions of dollars into his own closed-end mutual fund.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Stewart Horejsi
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 Stewart Horejsi, linked to Finance & Investments and 'Berkshire Hathaway', 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.