Every year, like clockwork, the headlines arrive: The World’s Richest People Revealed. There they are again—Musk, Arnault, Bezos, Zuckerberg—jostling for the top, like contestants on a high-stakes leaderboard. Billions rise and fall daily, fortunes swelling or shrinking with share prices, takeovers, or even a single tweet. In Australia, names such as Gina Rinehart, Andrew Forrest, and Mike Cannon-Brookes dominate the local equivalent. Among them, successful Greek Australians like Dennis Bastas, who recently acquired the beauty brand MCoBeauty; Nick Politis, the car retail magnate and Sydney Roosters chairman; and Theo Andrianakos and family, expanding their commercial property empire, continue to feature prominently on Australia’s rich list.
But one must wonder: what is the purpose of publishing these lists? What do they offer us—the readers, the viewers, the everyday Australians who may never come close to such astronomical wealth?
Let’s start with the obvious: fascination. Humans are drawn to extremes. We’re wired to be curious about the lives of others—especially when those lives exist in a different universe altogether. The Rich List is our modern mythology. In place of gods and titans, we have moguls and tech billionaires. They don’t wield thunderbolts, but their power—economic, political, cultural—is arguably more far-reaching.
There’s a certain voyeuristic pleasure in seeing how the ultra-wealthy live, what they invest in, which jets they own, how much they donated (or didn’t) to charity. These lists offer us a glimpse behind the gilded curtain, even if it’s only the part of the curtain someone wants us to see.
From another angle, such lists are marketed as informative. They’re framed as business journalism—tools that reveal the tides of the global economy. Who’s rising? Who’s falling? Which industries are thriving? In this sense, the list becomes a mirror of our economic system: tech dominates, luxury thrives, and financial services consolidate. It’s an index of late capitalism in all its glittering (and sometimes grotesque) glory.
But the question lingers: what does it do to us?
For some, these lists serve as inspiration. The story of a uni dropout who built an empire from a garage is repeated like scripture. If they made it, so can you. In this reading, the Rich List becomes a motivational text, a ladder of ambition. It feeds the dream that effort, ingenuity and risk-taking will be rewarded handsomely. American psychologist Carol Dweck, known for her research on the “growth mindset,” puts it simply: “The view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life.” The list reinforces this mindset gospel—work hard, think big, reap billions (Dweck, 2006).
Yet, for others, these lists are a bitter pill. They highlight inequality in its rawest form. When a single individual’s net worth exceeds the GDP of small nations, it raises uncomfortable questions. French economist Thomas Piketty, whose work on wealth and inequality has shaped a generation of discourse, warns that “When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income… capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.” (Piketty, 2014). What kind of world allows such concentration of riches while millions struggle to put food on the table?
When the lists are published with an air of celebration rather than scrutiny, they can feel like an endorsement of imbalance—a public spectacle that ignores the systems beneath the surface.
And then there is the emotional impact. These lists can distort our sense of value—personal and societal. The figures become so abstract, so surreal, that we begin to think in billions rather than human needs. It shifts the lens of success from contribution to accumulation, from community to competition. British epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson, whose research explores the societal harms of inequality, observes: “We feel instinctively that societies with huge income gaps are somehow going wrong.” (Wilkinson, 2011).
For Australian readers of Greek heritage, there’s an added layer. Seeing names like Bastas, Politis and Paspaley peppered among the nation’s wealthiest is a point of communal pride—proof that the children and grandchildren of post-war migrants can scale the highest echelons of business. For the Greek community, whose parents once ran milk bars and fish-and-chip shops, these fortunes symbolise hard-won integration and opportunity.
Yet the success stories also spark debate inside the community about responsibility: how much of that wealth circles back into Greek-Australian charities, cultural institutions and scholarships? Italian-American economist Mariana Mazzucato, who advocates for a new role of the state in value creation, argues that “What is needed is both a New Deal in terms of mission-oriented investments but also a new deal in terms of a modern social compact—one that allows the state to socialise not only risks but also rewards.” (Mazzucato, 2018). It’s a reminder that the richest Hellenes, like all rich Australians, stand on a web of collective effort—public health, public roads, public schools.
The truth is, the Rich List says more about us than about them. It’s a reflection of what we choose to admire, what we choose to measure. In a world awash with crises—climate collapse, social unrest, housing unaffordability—how telling that one of our most repeated stories is who added a few more zeros to their fortune. As Tim Soutphommasane, former Race Discrimination Commissioner and now an academic at the University of Sydney, reminds us: “We know that a large majority of the Australian society is extremely comfortable with a multicultural society, that we accept that living in a democracy means having a freedom to practise your religion within the limits of the law.” (Soutphommasane, 2015). The list forces us to confront how we’re doing on that score, too.
Perhaps it’s time to publish a different kind of list.
What if we ranked those who lifted the most people out of poverty? Those who built the greenest cities, improved mental-health care access, or re-imagined education? What if we used our attention—our media real estate—to spotlight impact over income?
Because wealth, in itself, is neutral. But what we do with it—how we glorify it, chase it, question it—reveals who we are.
So next time the Rich List hits the front page, ask yourself: is this a map to where we’re going—or a mirror to where we already are?
References
Dweck, C.S., 2006. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York: Random House.
Mazzucato, M., 2018. The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. London: Allen Lane.
Piketty, T., 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Soutphommasane, T., 2015. I’m Not Racist But… 40 Years of the Racial Discrimination Act. Sydney: NewSouth Publishing.
Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K., 2009. The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. London: Allen Lane.
