The heiress creating her own wealth tax

Marlene Engelhorn hopes giving away €25m will shake up democracy in a country that has no inheritance tax

- Ashifa Kassam

As Marlene Engelhorn made her way through Davos last month, she was greeted a handful of times with expletives. The frosty welcome was not necessarily aimed directly at the millionaire heiress, but rather the message emblazoned on the metrehigh placard she was lugging around with her: "Tax the Rich."

Since 2021, Engelhorn, whose wealth traces back to the German chemical company BASF and pharmaceutical company Boehringer Mannheim, has called for taxes to be raised on herself and her peers in the 1%.

She's now taking matters into her own hands. "I'm basically creating the tax that I would want to pay," the 31-year-old said.

Earlier last month, she launched an initiative whereby 50 randomly chosen people in Austria, where she lives, decide how best to spend the €25m ($27m) Engelhorn inherited.

The Good Council for Redistribution, or Gute Rat für Rückverteilung, as the initiative has been named, will also be tasked with exploring the often overlooked question of how societies redistribute wealth. "Because we always do distribute it," said Engelhorn. "To not redistribute wealth is as much of a distributional decision as to redistribute it."