Capitalism urgently needs generative entrepreneurs

The financialisation of the economy is not a recent phenomenon, but over the last two decades it has changed in nature, shifting from a driver of growth to a driver of concentration. In the United States, the richest 10 per cent account for 47 per cent of national income, the highest level since the end of the Second World War. The top five American Big Tech companies are collectively worth 16,400 billion dollars, a figure rivalling China’s GDP.

Artificial intelligence amplifies this dynamic, because those who control data and infrastructure reap economic rents that normal markets do not produce. Capital begets capital, scale begets scale, power begets power. The Trump case is a prime example. A sitting president launches a meme coin, signs an executive order for a strategic Bitcoin reserve, then sells hedge funds early access to his posts via ‘Truth API’, a subscription costing $100,000 a month. His announcements shift global indices and currencies to such an extent that financial law experts have described it as insider trading by definition.

Presidential power has become a financial asset sold on a subscription basis; the distinction between referee and player seems to have vanished. Financial capitalism has ousted the authentic entrepreneur: the figure whom Cantillon defined as one who assumes risk by channelling resources towards uncertain ends, whom Marshall saw as the organiser of the forces of production, and whom Schumpeter called the ‘creative destroyer’. In all these traditions, though very different from one another, there is a common element: the entrepreneur is not simply the one who owns, but the one who makes things happen. In his place has stepped the income manager, who extracts and optimises existing positions without creating shared value.

An analysis by Unioncamere Emilia-Romagna of 200,000 Italian businesses over the decade 2015–2024 documents the so-called post-pandemic ‘great divergence’: between 2019 and 2024, profits per employee rose by 12 per cent whilst real wages fell by 5 per cent. However, a minority emerges – the ‘generative businesses’ – which drive growth in profits, wages, employment and investment simultaneously. They account for 6.2 per cent of the sample and refute the false dichotomy between equity and efficiency, because they are not ‘better’ businesses but ‘more capable’ ones.

The key difference lies in the generation: CEOs under 40 have seen profits rise by 27 per cent and salaries remain almost stable (down 1 per cent); those over 65 have seen profits rise by 10 per cent and salaries fall by 6 per cent. The 135-point gap in the corporate citizenship index is not a matter of ethics, but of business model. This difference is not a new phenomenon of our time, but the statistical confirmation of an insight that the history of business had already developed. Adriano Olivetti knew that the entrepreneur is a civic actor before being an economic one. Léon Harmel, a textile industrialist who in the nineteenth century built homes, a school, a mutual aid fund and a workers’ council in Val-des-Bois, had distilled this into a formula that still feels uncomfortable today: ‘everything for the worker and through the worker’. Not philanthropy, but a competitive model in which the worker’s fulfilment was a structural factor of production.