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#2579

Vijay Shekhar Sharma

Source of wealth: financial technology

Net Worth

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Earnings per second

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Biography

Son of a schoolteacher from a small city in north India, Vijay Shekhar Sharma founded mobile wallet Paytm in 2011.

One of the biggest beneficiaries of India's 2016 demonetization, Paytm has notched up more than 540 million users with 46 million daily active users.

Sharma made a splash in August 2018 by getting Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway to invest $300 million in Paytm.

In August 2025, Antfin (Netherlands), an affiliate of China's Alibaba Group, sold its entire stake in Paytm.

Financial Assets

Exchange
BSE INDIA
Ticker
543396-IN
Company
One 97 Communications

The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Vijay Shekhar Sharma

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 Vijay Shekhar Sharma, linked to Service and 'financial technology', 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.

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