Fifteen years ago, the world’s billionaires had a combined $4.5 trillion.
By 2024, her wealth had more than tripled to $14.2 trillion.
Their total wealth now stands at $20.1 trillion – an amount equivalent to almost a fifth of the world’s total annual output.
The stunning figures – calculated by French economist Gabriel Zucman, director of the International Tax Observatory, a European Union-funded research organization – show more than a surprisingly rapid rise in wealth concentration at the top.
They also reflect a number of important global trends: the growing dominance of a few technology companies leading the development of artificial intelligence; the shrinking slice of the economic pie going to workers; and increasing inequality that is passed on to the next generation.
These developments are particularly pronounced in the United States, where about a third of the world’s nearly 3,000 billionaires live – and perhaps the first trillionaire, Elon Musk, depending on how the IPO of his rocket and satellite company SpaceX goes on Friday.
Their rising wealth, a 40 percent increase in just two years, has coincided with major changes in U.S. tax laws over the past decade that have largely benefited the country’s wealthiest families and shareholders and led to a rise in their political influence.
Why have billionaires’ wealth increased so rapidly?
One reason for the sudden surge in growth at the top of the wealth ladder is the artificial intelligence boom, which has funneled trillions of dollars in capital investment into a small group of technology companies. Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, for example, are each worth more than $1 trillion. Its founders and early investors reaped most of the financial profits.
We can imagine this will happen with SpaceX’s IPO – which is expected to be the largest in history. The expected day-1 valuation of the company, whose shares are expected to begin trading on Friday, is $1.77 trillion. With 42 percent of the shares, Mr. Musk is well on his way to becoming an instant trillionaire.
It is difficult to imagine such large sums. But consider that only 21 countries in the world have economies capable of producing enough annually to reach the trillion-dollar mark.
The stock market is where much of the billion-dollar alchemy takes place. The rapidly increasing stock profits were disproportionately captured by the richest class. Yes, you may have exposure to stock prices if you have a 401(k) retirement plan. And these emergency funds will help pay for housing, food, car, gas, electricity and other bills when you stop working.
However, according to Federal Reserve data, it is the top 1 percent of Americans who own half of all stocks. The top 0.1 percent of Americans – a group of about 135,000 households – own a total of $13.7 trillion in stocks. That’s nearly double the $7.1 trillion owned by the bottom 90 percent of Americans, a group of about 115 million households.
The technology companies that play a large part in generating these returns have created jobs – but so far the number of employees is relatively small. Billionaires’ earnings rely much more on capital investments than on the employees of these companies.
Inequality is growing.
The rise of billionaires is accelerating, while at the same time workers are receiving a smaller share of the wealth that economies create.
Financial assets traditionally provide higher returns than a weekly paycheck. But since the early 2000s, the gap between the two has been widening. Economists cite several reasons: the declining bargaining power of unions; the spread of automation, artificial intelligence and other technologies that can replace workers; the relocation of manufacturing and other jobs to countries such as China; and policies that tax wages much more heavily than income from investments.
But another culprit is the rise of what David Autor, an MIT economist and faculty co-director of the Stone Center on Inequality and Shaping the Future of Work, and other economists have called superstar firms — giants that dominate industries.
These companies have shifted the balance of power in the economy, allowing owners, rather than workers, to gobble up more financial rewards.
Superstar firms can also act like monopolies by setting prices and keeping workers’ wages and benefits low or enforcing uncomfortable working conditions.
Mr. Author emphasized that many billionaire entrepreneurs have created enormous added value for the economy. But he added that the way they had at times used their money to distort the political process could be “fundamentally destructive.”
“The problem is not necessarily how the billions are made,” he said, “but how that money distorts politics and how our political process is increasingly becoming a pay-to-play operation.”
Measuring inequality is difficult. There is much debate about exactly how big the gap is between those with the most and those with the least, and to what extent work’s share of the pie has declined. But there is general agreement among economists who study the topic that the richest are rising above everyone else faster than ever before.
Tax policy plays a role in billionaires’ wealth creation.
In the United States, changes in tax laws over the past decade have increased benefits for the wealthiest households and reduced the amount of taxes they pay.
A dramatic cut in the corporate tax rate has increased the wealth of the super-rich and allowed them to double their profits as companies use the higher profits to buy back their shares.
Reducing the taxes owed by corporations and the wealthy increases the tax burden on workers, who pay both income and payroll taxes – two types of taxes that do little to dent billionaires’ wealth. It also reduces public revenue available to finance health, education, defense, infrastructure and other public services at a time when governments are deeply indebted.
The stunning fortunes have led to some political support for wealth taxes. The idea was adopted at the Global Inequality Conference in Paris last week. Proposals for a wealth tax were most hotly debated in France, but also in Germany, Great Britain, Brazil and the United States.
In California, home to more than 200 billionaires, labor leaders helped push the Billionaire Tax Act of 2026 to a vote in November. It would impose a one-time 5 percent tax on a billionaire’s net worth.
The measure, created with input from Mr. Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, another economist at the forefront of research on global wealth and inequality, was based on calculations that found the wealth of California billionaires is now more than $2 trillion — an amount equivalent to half what the entire California economy produces in a year. From 2023 to 2025, the wealth of the state’s billionaires grew by 144 percent.
They point out that the growing financial and political power of a few hundred individuals is contributing to growing inequality that is likely to persist for generations as most of this wealth escapes taxation and creates a self-perpetuating aristocracy.
As Dario Amodei, the billionaire chief executive of Anthropic, creator of the chatbot Claude, wrote this year: “We are already at a historically unprecedented level of wealth concentration,” adding: “The thing to worry about is a level of wealth concentration that will destroy society.”