Class Warfare
Can the ultra rich actually have people killed?
I was watching a show on Netflix recently with an evil billionaire villain. The ending turned into a standard Hollywood shootout with the heroes running away chased by nameless goons and bullets. I turned to my wife and wondered, “Do you think in real life a billionaire’s bodyguards would be willing to commit murder for him?”
It’s a common trope that we all just take for granted that in movies the evil villain has a stable of henchmen ready to kill and die for him. Real life villains like warlords and dictators of course always have their inner circle of clandestine killers and armed guards but what about the ultra powerful and rich civilians? With the recent IPO of SpaceX we’re now living in a world of trillionaires and some of the highest levels of income inequality since the great depression. Over the last 40 years the ultra rich have gotten richer while the middle and lower classes suffered. How much more suffering could the rich impose on the rest of us? Could Elon Musk have someone killed without any consequences?
I turned to the historical record to see what has happened in the past before looking at more modern examples. What I found was surprising.
History
In the late 1800s, American states had given corporations the legal right to build their own private police forces. Pennsylvania’s Coal and Iron Police became notorious. Violence against workers wasn’t just tolerated by the law but chartered by it.
Andrew Carnegie’s steel empire showed how the system worked in practice. In 1892, his partner Henry Clay Frick hired 300 Pinkerton detectives to break a strike at the Homestead plant. When the resulting gun battle killed workers and guards alike, Frick called in 8,500 state militia to finish the job. Carnegie, vacationing in Scotland, was branded a coward by the press for letting Frick act in his name. Neither man faced any legal consequence.
Twenty-two years later, the same playbook produced a massacre. John D. Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel & Iron Company evicted striking miners from its company towns in 1914. The miners built a tent colony at Ludlow and Rockefeller paid the wages of the National Guard unit that surrounded it. On April 20, the Guard opened fire on the camp and burned it down. Eleven children and two women suffocated in a cellar dug beneath their tent, hiding from the bullets. Twenty-five people died in total. More than 400 miners were eventually tried for the violence that followed. None were convicted and no company official was ever charged.
The pattern wasn’t confined to American soil. In Colombia in 1928, the United Fruit Company leaned on its political weight with Washington and Bogotá after banana plantation workers went on strike. The Colombian army opened fire on a crowd of strikers and their families in the town of Ciénaga. Estimates vary, but some place the death toll at over a thousand. No United Fruit executive was ever named as having ordered the shooting.
Germany’s industrialists didn’t even bother with the pretence of distance. In 1910, mine owners in the Ruhr campaigned publicly for the army to intervene against striking workers, demanding the demonstrative use of machine guns. They got the law’s sympathy if not always its bullets. The request itself, on the public record, is the clearest thing to an explicit demand for lethal force found anywhere in this period.
What’s notable across all of these cases isn’t that the wealthy pulled the trigger. It’s that they never had to. Owners funded the forces, demanded the intervention, and benefited from the outcome, while the legal liability landed on a militia, a foreign army, or no one at all. The robber barons of the late 19th and early 20th century didn’t need a private army of hired guns to do their killing. They had connections in governments, militaries, and police forces willing to do the work for them instead.
Why does this history lesson from over 100 years ago matter today? It shows that in relatively recent and modern history, the powerful and wealthy are not above using violence against the workers for their own gain. Have things changed in the last 100 years? Well…
Modern Cases
The robber barons needed governments to do their killing. A century later, at least one company didn’t bother waiting for one.
Berta Cáceres spent two decades defending Indigenous Lenca land in Honduras. In 2015, she won the Goldman Environmental Prize for leading the fight against the Agua Zarca dam, a project that threatened to flood Lenca territory. A week after she held a press conference naming the people she believed wanted her dead, she was shot and killed in her home.
Eight men were eventually convicted. Seven were hitmen and intermediaries, including the head of security for DESA, the dam company building Agua Zarca. The eighth was Roberto David Castillo, DESA’s own former president, convicted as a collaborator in planning the murder. DESA has denied any connection to the killing, calling Castillo’s conviction the result of “international pressure and campaigns by various NGOs against the company.”
No member of the Atala Zablah family has been charged. Castillo remains the only person at that level of the company ever convicted. The pattern from a century of company towns held: the people who pulled the trigger went to prison, and the people who owned the company did not.
We see the other way this plays out with the oil company Shell in Nigeria. In 1995, the Nigerian military hanged writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa along with eight other Ogoni leaders, after they organized against the environmental damage Shell’s drilling caused in the Niger Delta. Families of the dead later sued Shell in U.S. court, alleging the company paid Nigerian security forces it knew were committing human rights abuses against the same communities protesting it.
Shell settled the case in 2009 for $15.5 million. The company admitted no wrongdoing. A Shell executive said the payment was a humanitarian gesture, not an acknowledgment that the company had any part in the violence.
The American version of this story doesn’t involve hired guns or foreign armies at all. In April 2010, an explosion at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia killed 29 workers, the worst U.S. mine disaster in four decades. Prosecutors found the company had manipulated its ventilation system during safety inspections and disabled a methane monitor months before the blast.
Don Blankenship was Massey’s chairman and CEO. A former company manager testified he personally warned Blankenship before the explosion that the pattern of defrauding federal safety regulators couldn’t continue without risking deaths, and evidence showed Blankenship received daily reports on safety violations. He was convicted, but only of a misdemeanor conspiracy charge. Twenty-nine deaths bought him the statutory maximum: one year in prison.
Three companies, three outcomes. DESA paid hitmen directly and saw an executive convicted of collaborating in a murder. Shell allegedly paid the security forces that did the killing, and walked away with a settlement and a denial. Massey killed 29 of its own workers through documented, years-long fraud, and its CEO served one year, the shortest sentence of the three for the largest body count. The people who owned each company kept their fortunes. Only one of them ever wore a number.
Sure, Evil Billionaires Exist But Do They Kill?
This is where the question gets harder to answer with a paper trail. Companies leave contracts, board minutes, and court records; a billionaire’s personal security mostly doesn’t. But three tech executives now disclose enough through SEC filings and reporting to see the actual shape of the apparatus.
Meta spent $27 million protecting Mark Zuckerberg in 2024, more than Apple, Nvidia, Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft spent on their own CEOs combined. Amazon spends $1.6 million a year on Jeff Bezos, including $180,000 for bulletproof panels in his Seattle office rated to stop rifle fire. Tesla discloses only $500,000 for Elon Musk, but that figure is misleading because Musk’s real security runs through Foundation Security, a firm he himself created and owns.
The people behind these details reveal the same pattern. Musk’s Foundation Security is run in part by Justin Riblet, a former U.S. Army Special Forces weapons sergeant who came from Gavin de Becker & Associates, the firm that has protected Bezos since 2014. Zuckerberg’s personal security chief is Liam Booth, a former U.S. Secret Service officer. Gavin de Becker & Associates itself claims early ties to the CIA and Secret Service, and says its staff has included someone who served as the CIA’s Deputy Director of the National Clandestine Service.
What this shows is a talent pipeline, not a marketplace. A billionaire doesn’t shop for a guard service the way a company shops for a vendor; he hires a specific person with an intelligence or special-operations background, sometimes builds a private company around that person the way Musk did with Foundation Security, or simply installs them as a direct hire the way Zuckerberg did with Booth.
So now that we know who is typically guarding the billionaires and their capabilities we can ask the harder question: has that capability ever been turned toward something other than protection? Do the rich commit murder?
Confirmed Murders
The answer is yes, but not the way the movies tell it. The documented cases of wealthy individuals personally killing someone don’t involve a private army at all. They involve the wealthy person pulling the trigger themselves.
Robert Durst, heir to one of New York’s largest real estate fortunes, shot his confidante Susan Berman in her Los Angeles home in 2000 to keep her from talking to investigators about his first wife’s disappearance. A year later he killed and dismembered a neighbor while hiding out in Texas in disguise. His money bought him a defense team that won an acquittal on the dismemberment charge in 2003, though he was separately convicted of tampering with evidence. It didn’t buy him a way out of the system forever. A 2021 conviction for Berman’s murder followed, secured after his own recorded words on a documentary became the evidence that broke the case. He died in prison at the age of 78 from COVID the following year.
John du Pont, heir to the du Pont chemical fortune, is the only member of the Forbes 400 ever convicted of murder. In 1996 he drove to the home of Olympic wrestler Dave Schultz, who lived and trained on du Pont’s estate, and shot him three times in his driveway in front of his wife. Du Pont’s legal team spent millions arguing he was legally insane. Four defense psychiatrists testified to it. A jury convicted him anyway.
Neither case fits the Bond-villain image of hired muscle carrying out a boss’s orders. Both are wealthy men who killed with their own hands, in moments of personal crisis, not strategic calculation, and both were convicted despite spending enormous sums on their defence.
Accusations of Murder
Daphne Caruana Galizia spent years investigating corruption in Malta, including the offshore financial structures exposed in the Panama Papers. On October 16, 2017, a car bomb killed her outside her home.
The men who built and detonated the bomb have been convicted. Two brothers received 40-year sentences for planting and triggering it. A third man pleaded guilty and testified against the others in exchange for a reduced sentence. Two more men received life sentences for supplying the military-grade explosives used to build it, upheld on appeal earlier this year.
The accused mastermind is Yorgen Fenech, head of one of Malta’s largest business groups. Prosecutors allege he ordered the killing through a middleman, motivated by Caruana Galizia’s reporting on his company’s offshore dealings with senior government officials. Fenech has pleaded not guilty and in his own court filings, has pointed elsewhere, accusing the former prime minister’s chief of staff of being the actual mastermind. As of the writing of this article, his trial is ongoing.
Speculative Murders
The territory here borders conspiracy theory, and the line between documenting a pattern and inventing one is thin enough that I have to mention it. But the record does contain deaths where the official explanation has been disputed by credentialed professionals.
Karen Silkwood was a Kerr-McGee lab technician and union activist documenting falsified safety inspections at a plutonium plant in 1974. Days after being mysteriously contaminated with plutonium herself, she died in a single-car crash while driving to meet a New York Times reporter with a folder of evidence. The folder was never found in the wreckage. Investigators disputed whether her car had been forced off the road. Fifty years later, no one has ever been charged, and the case remains formally unresolved.
More recently, two separate Boeing whistleblowers died in the same year in 2024. John Barnett, a quality manager who had spent years raising safety concerns about 787 production, was found dead of a gunshot wound midway through giving a deposition against the company. The coroner ruled suicide, and the physical investigation behind that ruling was substantial. His family and lawyers, however, have disputed the conclusion. Weeks later, Joshua Dean, a quality auditor at Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems who had raised similar concerns about 737 Max fuselage defects, died suddenly of a fast-moving bacterial infection. No evidence of foul play has emerged in his case.
The most famous case in recent history is of course the death of Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein’s 2019 death in federal custody was preceded by documented irregularities that the Justice Department’s own Inspector General later attributed to negligence, including malfunctioning cameras, falsified checks, and unauthorized cellmate removal. Although the investigation found no evidence of homicide, that finding has done little to quiet the public furor, and “Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself” has become one of the most persistent memes of the internet era.
What can be said: people who threatened powerful interests by telling the truth have died under circumstances serious enough to draw sustained, credible scrutiny.
Conclusion
I started this piece with a question inspired by a movie trope: would a billionaire’s bodyguards actually kill for him? The historical record answers a version of that question clearly. From the Pinkertons at Homestead to Rockefeller’s National Guard at Ludlow to DESA’s hitmen in Honduras, the wealthy have funded, demanded, and benefited from violence for over a century.
What the record does not show, anywhere, is a documented case of a wealthy civilian using deniable, concealed violence, made to look like an accident or a natural death, and getting away with it. Not Durst or du Pont, who killed with their own hands and were convicted. Not Fenech, who stands accused through a traceable chain of hitmen and a middleman. Not Silkwood, Epstein, or the Boeing cases, where the deaths are genuinely unresolved or disputed but never conclusively tied to anyone at all, let alone a billionaire acting in his own interest.
At the same time, it would be dishonest to end there without saying what else is true. Governments have used exactly this kind of violence, and used it well. The CIA’s assassination programs and Mossad’s Operation Wrath of God are declassified fact, not speculation. Soviet and Russian intelligence have refined poison specifically because it mimics natural death, most recently with Litvinenko in 2006. And the people who carry out this work for governments: special forces and intelligence officers, are the ones who form the talent pool that billionaires hire to build personal security details.
On its own, this is not evidence of anything. A method is not a crime but when the purpose of a method is to leave no trace, its use would produce no evidence. And unlike governments, there is no public disclosure or information requests with private security. If a wealthy person has ever done this, the record would look exactly as empty as it does now. If no wealthy person ever has, the record would also look exactly this empty.
So the honest answer is not a simple “yes” or “no.” It’s that the capability clearly exists, the incentive to prefer invisibility over the backlash of public violence is easy to argue, and the historical record shows that the wealthy are not above the use of violence when it suits their interest. The Bond-villain premise I started with doesn’t hold up as documented fact but it also can’t be ruled out. A century of records shows the wealthy funding violence in public. It has nothing to say about what they might fund in the dark.