Why Are German Billionaires Afraid to Get Political?

“I certainly meet more of you on a golf course on a Sunday than I do on evening talk shows. That is why I have an appeal to make: get out there. Take your message to the public. Show people what entrepreneurship means today.”

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz made those remarks during a speech to business leaders at the Foundation for Family Businesses and Politics last week. He urged entrepreneurs to engage more directly with the public and defend the role of business in society. He also criticized business leaders for their reluctance to speak publicly. Yet he did not stop to ask why they might be hesitant.

Germany’s wealthy are certainly more reserved than those in countries such as the United States. Elon Musk is not only the richest man in the world but also one of the best-known public figures, appearing constantly in the media and posting dozens of times a day on X, the social media platform he owns. Others, such as the German-born Peter Thiel, are equally visible and willing to involve themselves in politics. By contrast, apart from a handful of family offices and charitable donations, most German business leaders remain largely invisible.

A nation often reflects its elites. In Germany's case, that has too often meant business acumen combined with an unwillingness to challenge what is the cultural dominance of the left. Politicians from Die Linke and the Greens routinely call to “tax the rich" and denounce what they describe as “unearned income", while advocating higher inheritance taxes to fill strained public finances. History suggests that such measures rarely remain confined to the wealthy and often expand to affect the middle class as well.

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The Roots of Billionaires Living in Hiding

Where does this public reluctance come from? One answer may lie in Germany's long history of attacks on business leaders by criminals and far-left terrorists. The most notorious of these was the Red Army Faction (RAF), a far-left militant group that waged a campaign of terror against the West German state for nearly three decades.

Among its victims was Hanns Martin Schleyer, president of the Confederation of German Employers' Associations, who was kidnapped in Cologne in 1977. His driver and three police officers were murdered in the ambush. Schleyer was held for more than a month as RAF members attempted to exchange him for imprisoned members of the group. After several of those prisoners committed suicide, the RAF murdered Schleyer and abandoned his body in the trunk of a car.

Another victim was Jürgen Ponto, chairman of Dresdner Bank, who was murdered in his home in 1977. The RAF is believed to have intended to kidnap him, but he was shot instead. Karl-Heinz Beckurts, a Siemens executive, was killed alongside his driver in a roadside bombing that the RAF later claimed responsibility for. Alfred Herrhausen, chairman of Deutsche Bank, was assassinated in 1989 by a sophisticated roadside bomb.

The Red Army Faction routinely issued threats and hit lists targeting West Germany's business elite, forcing many executives to travel under constant security protection.

It was not only the far left that targeted Germany’s wealthy. Common criminals also saw business leaders as lucrative targets. The best-known example was Theo Albrecht, one of Aldi’s co-founders. In 1971, he was kidnapped by two criminals, one of them a lawyer, and released only after a ransom of DM7m was paid. The experience profoundly affected him. For the rest of his life, he traveled in an armored car, frequently varied his daily routine and refused to be photographed.

If you think such hostility disappeared with the RAF, recent history suggests otherwise. During a Die Linke press conference in 2020, one participant publicly spoke about shooting "the richest one percent". The party's chairman at the time, Bernd Riexinger, responded by joking that the rich would instead be put to useful work. There is a certain irony in that remark, given that many leading figures in Die Linke have spent most or all of their careers in the public sector or trade unions.

Clearly, the end of the Red Army Faction's terrorism did not end hostility toward the wealthy. Instead, it took new forms. One recent example is Theo Müller, the billionaire owner of the Müller dairy group. Müller became the target of a nationwide campaign after his friendship with Alternative for Germany (AfD) leader Alice Weidel became public. The activist organization Campact organized protests and publicity campaigns against Müller, calling for consumer boycotts of Müller products because of the association.

Müller repeatedly stated that he was not a member of the AfD and had never donated money to the party. Nevertheless, he failed in a legal attempt to prevent campaigners from describing him as an AfD supporter. The Hamburg Regional Court ruled that such statements constituted a permissible expression of opinion based on factual indications, including his public association with Weidel.

Campact activists accuse Müllermilch owner Theo Müller of supporting the AfD during a campaign launch outside the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. Photo: snapshot-photography/F Boillot/Shutterstock Editorial/Profimedia

The Müller affair illustrates how activists can apply social and commercial pressure to business leaders over their political views or even their personal associations. What makes the affair even more controversial is that Campact has received government funding through HateAid, which is itself financed largely with taxpayer money.

One notable exception to the broader reluctance of German billionaires to engage openly in politics is IT entrepreneur Frank Gotthardt, who funds NIUS, a right-leaning online news platform that seeks to challenge the dominance of Germany's public broadcasters. Gotthardt has said he feels a sense of “civic responsibility" to provide a counterpoint to what he describes as the "overwhelming power of the left-wing media". As one of Germany's 100 richest people, he has been able to withstand the criticism directed at him, but doing so requires courage as well as wealth.

The Rich Who Learned to Hate Their Own Civilization

Sometimes the problem is not that business leaders are afraid, but that they have become some of the loudest cheerleaders for the destruction of their own society. Previous generations built the industries that powered Germany's economic model. Too often, their heirs now seem intent on undermining that prosperity.

Over the last two decades, Germany's wealthy dynasties have increasingly embraced the moral fashions of the political and media elite, including climate alarmism, net zero and degrowth. At times, they appear embarrassed by the very industrial civilization their ancestors created.

The Klatten family exemplifies this contradiction. Their fortune is inseparable from Germany's industrial success and BMW's position as a symbol of engineering excellence. Yet their corporate language echoes the assumptions of the Energiewende consensus: decarbonization at any cost, ever-expanding environmental targets and a fanciful belief that Germany can continue to prosper while systematically increasing energy costs for its own industries.

The result has been entirely predictable. Energy-intensive production is increasingly leaving the country. Investment is moving elsewhere. Manufacturing competitiveness continues to erode. Yet rather than questioning the assumptions behind these policies, much of the business elite has chosen to compete for moral prestige by demonstrating an ever-greater commitment to them.

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The phenomenon is even more pronounced among heirs whose wealth no longer depends on active industrial management. Detached from the practical realities of production, they seek status through ideological conformity. The heirs of old fortunes no longer aspire to be builders; they aspire to be applauded.

The Reemtsma family illustrates this tendency. Although they built their wealth on cigarettes, they have increasingly focused on philanthropy since selling the controlling stake in their company in 1980. That has led them to associate themselves with causes that are fashionable among activists, academics and cultural institutions.

The youngest members of the Reemtsma family, Luisa Neubauer and Carla Reemtsma, became the German equivalents of Greta Thunberg and were hugely influential until very recently with their climate change movement Fridays for Future. They were frequent guests on talk shows and often appeared in newspapers to advocate for the self-destructive decarbonization of the German economy.

Luisa Neubauer stands on the red carpet on the opening night of the Berlinale in a dress bearing the words “Donald & Elon & Alice & Friedrich?”. Photo: Christoph Soeder/picture alliance via Getty Images

However, the most extreme example is Marlene Engelhorn. Unlike earlier philanthropists, who viewed their wealth as something to steward responsibly, Engelhorn has made opposition to inherited wealth the centerpiece of her public identity. The heiress became famous not for creating value, building businesses or expanding prosperity, but for condemning the very institution that made her position possible.

German-Austrian millionaire heiress and social activist Marlene Engelhorn holds a sign reading “tax the rich!" during a rally. Photo: Hannes P Albert/picture alliance via Getty Images

The Anti-Entrepreneurial Mindset

The contradiction is difficult to ignore. A society produces enormous wealth. That wealth is inherited. The heirs then devote their time and resources to attacking the legitimacy of wealth, promoting policies hostile to the creation of new wealth and demanding greater redistribution of fortunes they themselves did nothing to create.

This is not generosity. It is a peculiar form of self-loathing.

The deeper problem is that such figures help legitimize policies whose costs are borne not by billionaires but by ordinary Germans. When energy becomes more expensive, factories close, investment leaves and economic dynamism declines, the consequences are not borne by wealthy heirs living on inherited assets. They are borne by workers, engineers, small business owners and families whose livelihoods depend on a productive economy.

What presents itself as moral enlightenment is often little more than a luxury belief. Protected from the consequences of their ideas, wealthy heirs can afford to celebrate policies that would likely have horrified the entrepreneurs who built their fortunes. It would have equally horrified them that Germany has become so unviable for business that 16% of millionaires find paying a hefty exit tax of 26.4% preferable to staying.

That is why it is important for members of the business elite who still want Germany to succeed to step into the public arena and not to flee abroad. If they leave the future of the country to those who seek to dismantle Germany's wealth or expropriate it, they will eventually find that the conditions necessary to create new wealth and preserve Germany's prosperity have disappeared. It is not enough to remain silent and make some money. Eventually the well runs dry for all.