From “Sh*thole” to Billionaire: Herriot Tabuteau’s Forbes Debut Is the Latest Reminder That Haiti Keeps Giving America Its Best

By Christopher Louissaint | December 11, 2025

When @Mahalliachery’s tweet hit timelines yesterday—“Le milliardaire américain d’origine haïtienne Herriot Tabuteau CEO de Axsome a accordé sa première entrevue relayée par @Forbes”—it was more than a social-media moment. It was a cultural receipt. A single line that quietly shredded every racist headline and slur ever hurled at Haitians, including the infamous 2018 “sh*thole countries” insult still lodged in our collective memory.

Today we cash that receipt.

The Pill That Eases America’s Pain—Designed by a Haitian Immigrant’s Son

Axsome Therapeutics, the $3-billion biotech company Tabuteau built from scratch, is not a Wall Street fairy tale. It is the direct result of a Haitian-American mind who watched his parents leave Port-au-Prince so their kids could “be somebody.” AXS-05, the firm’s flagship antidepressant, is already on the market lifting treatment-resistant depression; AXS-07 is nearing approval for migraine; AXS-14 waits in the wings for fibromyalgia. In plain English: millions of U.S. patients—veterans, new moms with post-partum depression, chronic-pain sufferers—will swallow a pill conceived, financed, and shepherded by the son of Haitian immigrants. That is not a footnote; that is public-health infrastructure stamped “Made by Haiti.”

Not a Lone Wolf—A Whole Pack

Tabuteau joins a Haitian-American cohort that keeps America running:

• Dr. Jean William Pape, Cornell professor, co-founder of GHESKIO, the world’s first HIV/AIDS clinic, now advising New York State on infectious-disease policy.
• Carloine Wanga, CEO of Essence Ventures—she decides which Black stories get told on the biggest cultural stages.
• Jeffrey Julmis, Olympic sprinter turned Kansas City firefighter—speed on the track, safety in the community.
• The 40,000 Haitian-American nurses in New York, Florida, Massachusetts—so many that Creole echoes in hospital corridors from Jackson Memorial to Mount Sinai.
• The 1,500 Haitian-own ed grocery stores in South Florida alone, keeping food on shelves when hurricanes empty big-box chains.

Culture That Refuses to Be Erased

Open Spotify’s U.S. Top 50 this week and you’ll find “Mwen Poko” by Rutshelle, “No No No” by G-Unit’s Haitian-raised producer Kyze, and samples of Kompa drums under Drake’s newest track. Brooklyn’s East Flatbush still hosts the largest outdoor Carnival north of the Caribbean, drawing 300,000 revelers who spend $18 million in one night—money that stays in local cash registers, tax coffers, and tip jars. Haitian Creole is now the third-most-spoken language in Miami-Dade public schools, and the district hires Haitian teachers to match—paychecks, pensions, and prestige flowing from an island some politicians still caricature.

Wealth That Circulates, Not Extracts

According to the New York Federal Reserve, Haitian-American households send $1.3 billion in remittances home each year—yet the reverse flow is just as real. Haitian entrepreneurs in the diaspora have opened 8,600 LLCs in Florida since 2010, creating 22,000 jobs that pay payroll taxes, unemployment insurance, and 401(k) matches. The Haitian-American Chamber of Commerce estimates diaspora-owned businesses contribute $2.8 billion annually to the U.S. GDP—larger than the GDP of 14 sovereign states. Every time a Haitian restaurant leases a vacant storefront, a credit-union loan finances a new truck fleet, or a biotech IPO rings the opening bell, the stereotype of the “permanent dependent” loses another tooth.

Knowledge That Rewrites Textbooks

MIT’s Haitian Creole-language astrophysics course—yes, astrophysics—was co-written by Dr. Michel DeGraff, Haitian linguist turned tenured professor. His work proves Creole is as mathematically precise as Latin, forcing academia to retire the “broken French” slur. At Duke, Dr. Marie Marcelle Deschamps researches cholera vaccines tested in Port-au-Prince but manufactured in North Carolina—science that travels north, not south. Meanwhile, 15,000 Haitian-American students are enrolled in U.S. medical schools right now, paying tuition that subsidizes scholarships for classmates of every background.

Today’s Receipt, Tomorrow’s Reckoning

So when Herriot Tabuteau sits down with Forbes and the headline reads “Billionaire CEO Who Conquered Depression,” remember the subtext: the conquering began in a one-bedroom Flatbush apartment where Creole lullabies mixed with dreams of patents. Remember every Haitian mother who pressed scrubs the night before a double shift, every father who drove a taxi so his daughter could pipette in a lab. Their children are not exceptions; they are the rule Haiti has always known and America is finally forced to see.

We are not the hellhole a president once muttered.
We are the pill in the medicine cabinet, the rhythm in the chart-topper, the nurse at 3 a.m., the code in the biotech server, the professor canceling class because the Nobel committee is on line two.

We are Haiti—exporting not poverty, but possibility.
And the Forbes interview is just the latest invoice.