Author Bios

Rainer Zitelmann was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1957. He studied history and political science from 1978 to 1983 and was awarded his first doctorate summa cum laude in 1986 with his dissertation Hitler: The Policies of Seduction.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Zitelmann worked at the Central Institute for Social Science Research at the Free University of Berlin. He became editor in chief of Ullstein-Propyläen-Verlag, at the time Germany’s third-largest book publishing group. From 1992 to 2000, he headed various departments at one of Germany’s leading premium daily newspapers, Die Welt. In 2000, Zitelmann started his own company, Dr Zitelmann PB GmbH, which is the leading public relations firm for real estate companies in Germany. He sold the company in 2016.

In 2016, Zitelmann received a doctorate in sociology under the mentorship of the wealth researcher Prof Wolfgang Lauterbach at the University of Potsdam. Zitelmann’s second dissertation was published as The Wealth Elite: A Groundbreaking Study of the Psychology of the Super Rich.

To date, Zitelmann has written and edited 23 books, which have been published worldwide in numerous languages. He writes for prestigious European media such as Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Switzerland); Die Welt, Focus, and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Germany); and The Daily Telegraph and City AM (London). Every Monday, he publishes a column on Forbes.com.