Yasuhide Uno
Source of wealth: Payment services
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Modules
Biography
Yasuhide Uno runs U-Next Holdings, a company that's become a streaming services giant in Japan.It also provides payment and point-of-sales services to restaurants and stores, broadband services and energy to companies.
His father Mototada started the Osaka-based company providing background music via cable to retailers and restaurants. Yasuhide joined the firm in 1998, just before his father died.
In 2001, it listed on the Osaka Stock Exchange's bourse for startups and moved to the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2013.
In June, the company announced a tie-up with Tokyo-based e-commerce giant Rakuten for a mobile package to enable unlimited U-Next videos and data usage.
The Tokyo-based company posted nearly $2.5 billion in revenue in the fiscal year through August 2025.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Yasuhide Uno
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 Yasuhide Uno, linked to Technology and 'Payment services', 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 9 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 0.6 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.