Other people that stand to earn a tidy sum on the merger? Well, Family Dollar’s CEO Howard Levine owns roughly eight percent of the shares outstanding, so the deal price would land him with paper gains of about $130 million.

But it'd be a stretch to say Levine deserves it. The entire reason the company was pushed to sell by the activist investors was because its numbers under Levine haven’t been great. The fact that a CEO at the helm of a struggling company is able to harvest such a rich payout is quite in keeping with Piketty’s contention that outsized pay packages for corporate executives—even when there is less-than-clear evidence that they’re deserved—are key drivers of US inequality.

On top of that, as if to emphasize the points about the growing importance of inheritance that Piketty makes in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Levine is the son of the firm's founder, Leon Levine. (We put in a request to Family Dollar asking for comment, but haven’t heard back.)