Modules
Biography
Taha Mikati cofounded Beirut-based holding company M1 Group.
Its investments include stakes in South African telecom firm MTN, fashion retailer Pepe Jeans and prime real estate in New York, London and Monaco.
Mikati and his billionaire brother Najib founded Investcom in 1982, selling satellite phones at the height of Lebanon's civil war.
They expanded into Africa where they built cellphone towers in Ghana, Liberia and Benin, among other countries.
In 2005, Investcom went public on the London Stock Exchange, and in 2009, South Africa's MTN bought the Mikatis' stake for $3.6 billion.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Taha Mikati
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 Taha Mikati, linked to Telecom and 'Telecom', 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 27 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 1.7 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.