• Marlene Engelhorn joined protesters in Davos ahead of the World Economic Forum.
• Engelhorn, heiress to a German fortune, has been a vocal advocate for taxing the superrich.
• She told Business Insider why she is protesting against the World Economic Forum annual meeting.

Protests against the World Economic Forum in Davos began on Sunday, with the wealthy heiress of a German business empire among those participating.

As some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world gathered in Switzerland, hundreds of protesters blocked traffic, while others marched, holding signs with messages like "Economy for all" and "Tax the rich."

Marlene Engelhorn, who inherited a fortune as the descendant of a 19th-century German industrialist, was among those marching through Davos, calling for higher taxation on the superrich.

In an interview with Business Insider, Engelhorn said that Davos sees billionaires and entrepreneurs who can afford to be there talking to world leaders, while the people "who are going to be affected by the decisions" are left out of the conversations.

The rich, she said, "already hold too much power."

"The problem we are facing here is that this is called the World Economic Forum, but they hide away in the Swiss Alps, protected by the military and the police, in order to talk about things where no decisions are being made," she added.

Engelhorn's ancestor founded BASF, which would become the world's largest chemical producer.

She received an inheritance of about $27 million after her grandmother Traudl Engelhorn-Vechiatto died in September 2022. According to Forbes, Engelhorn-Vechiatto's net worth was $4.2 billion at the time of her death.

However, Engelhorn decided to redistribute her inheritance, sending out invitations to randomly selected Austrians to help her choose how best to share it.

Fifty people were chosen to decide how the bulk of the money would be spent, through an initiative called the "Good Council for Redistribution" (Guter Rat für Rückverteilung in German).

Last June, the group decided to distribute roughly $27 million to 77 charitable initiatives, including several women's shelter associations, children's charities, and climate crisis organizations.

The largest sum, of about $1.75 million, went to an environmental group. Other beneficiaries included the World Inequality Lab.

Engelhorn has advocated taxing people like her more heavily. Austria, for example, doesn't have an inheritance tax.

"I never worked for it," she told Le Monde in November 2022.

Engelhorn also took part in protests in Davos last year, and is the cofounder of a group called Tax Me Now, which lobbies for higher taxes on the superwealthy.

Pointing to the US, Engelhorn told BI: "We see what happens when wealth and politics become too intimate. The new government in the US, the cabinet, as it is presented as of now, shows up quite clearly. Thirteen of 25 people are billionaires."

President-elect Donald Trump's cabinet is expected to be the wealthiest in history.

"They're so far away from the actual population," Engelhorn said.

Correction: January 21, 2025 — This story was updated to clarify one of Marlene Engelhorn's positions. She supports inheritance taxes in Austria but is not calling for specific amounts of her inheritance to be taxed. She has separately pledged to give away at least 90% of her inheritance.

• Paul Hokemeyer has been a therapist to the ultra-rich for the last decade.
• There are certain issues his clients experience because of their wealth, which he shared with Business Insider.
• These include feeling valued only for their money and internalizing negative stereotypes.

A therapist to the ultra-rich shared what his clients talk about in sessions, from the wealthy father troubled by his children's entitlement to a man who feared leaving his home in case people asked him for money.

Paul Hokemeyer, a licensed marriage and family therapist who for 10 years has worked with clients with a net worth of at least $30 million, told Business Insider that his typical client is middle-aged and with inherited wealth. Only a handful of his clients have earned their own money because, in his experience, such people tend to feel more in control of their lives.

He previously told BI that ultra-rich people "suffer from the same mental health and relational issues as the rest of humanity."

But there are certain problems his wealthy clients talk about in therapy that are specific to their ultra-high net worth.

Feeling objectified

"The most common comments I hear from my clients are along the lines of 'people aren't interested in me, they are only interested in my money,' or 'my children are just waiting for me to die so they can get their hands on my money,'" Hokemeyer said.

"People of wealth are expected to provide. When they say no or create boundaries around what they are willing to give, they are perceived as villains," he said. The constant expectations on ultra-wealthy people can be exhausting and lead to painful, transactional relationships.

Hokemeyer gave the example of a father in his 80s whose adult children had spent their €40 million inheritances and expected him to continue to bankroll their extravagant lifestyles by taking money from their own children's inheritances. He started drinking heavily to manage the stress and the guilt he felt about his children's entitlement.

Hokemeyer helps clients address the sadness and disappointment they feel toward their relationships and create boundaries with people who rely on their financial support.

Feeling isolated

"While providing material comfort, wealth and power elevates people into a very isolated and too frequently self-destructive sphere of existence," Hokemeyer said.

There are a tiny number of ultra-rich people in the world — about 627,000, BI previously reported — and they can feel excluded from the rest of society. Plus, dealing with constant demands from others can lead them to retreat from normal life, he said.

One of his clients with a huge fortune from manufacturing stopped going out because he felt constantly accosted by everyone, Hokemeyer said — even in his apartment building's elevators, where his neighbors kept asking for charity donations.

"Over time, he became severely depressed and morbidly obese. He came to see me after suffering a near-fatal heart attack and realizing he needed to make some significant changes to reconnect with other human beings," he said.

Substance abuse

Hokemeyer finds that people of wealth often suffer with substance abuse problems, because they have easy access to intoxicants and because they can use their resources to avoid negative consequences.

This means that clients tend to come to Hokemeyer for help when those consequences have become "dire," he said — when their health is severely compromised, they've lost a lot of money, or their spouse has left them, for example.

The path out of substance abuse can be tricky for these individuals too, because, being used to being in control, they often resist treatment.

Feeling vilified

From teachings in the New Testament and Buddhist beliefs to the popular phrase "eat the rich," Hokemeyer said that we are surrounded by images of wealth as a form of moral decay and wealthy people as selfish and corrupt.

Many of his patients internalize these negative stereotypes and feel they are bad people, he said. So he works with them to address any guilt or shame they feel about their net-worth and to develop personalized ideas of what is healthy, within the context of their wealth and social status.