Instagram is rehabilitating the super-rich, but there’s no such thing as a ‘self-made billionaire’

The highly popular Instagram channel The School of Hard Knockz has almost 10 million followers which carries out short face-to-face interviews with dozens of usually secretive billionaires and multi-millionaires. It’s a mix of celebrating the super-rich and offering business insight. But the thing is, the idea of a ‘self-made billionaire’ is a myth.

Billionaires myth

One ‘study’ found that 70% of UK billionaires are ‘self-made’. But it’s actually impossible for any billionaire to fall under such a category.

Imagine you earn an £100,000 a year salary. Providing one enjoys the work, that would be nice. In fact, it’s unimaginable income for most people. Yet it would take you 10,000 years of working probably long weeks to become a billionaire. And that’s without spending anything.

The only way to become a billionaire is to get rich off other people’s work. For example, the UK’s richest household is the Hinduja family, a dynasty owning the Indian-British conglomerate Hinduja Group.

Forget that the household’s fortune comes from inherited wealth, which is unearned income. The average salary for someone working at Hinduja is around £8,102 per year. Yet one of the group’s main banking holdings made £200 million in profit in 2025. This is called ‘surplus labour’, where the actual value of an employee’s’ work is partly withheld and extracted from their paycheck.

The Hinduja Group operates in finance, oil, media, healthcare and real estate. So it’s also getting rich from destroying the planet, treating homes as assets and people getting sick.

Instagram rehabilitation

The School Of Hard Knockz has 9.1 million followers on Instagram, yet only a couple of those followers – if that – has any chance of becoming a billionaire, given there’s around 3,000 billionaires worldwide and 8.3 billion people. The odds are terrible and becoming a billionaire takes luck. And besides, it involves a lot of wealth extraction and exploitation.

Featured image via the Canary