LONDON — Fifteen years ago, the world’s billionaires collectively had $4.5 trillion. By 2024, its wealth had more than tripled, reaching $14.2 trillion.
Now their combined wealth totals $20.1 trillion — a value equivalent to nearly a fifth of the world’s entire annual output.
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The staggering numbers — calculated by French economist Gabriel Zucman, director of the International Tax Observatory, a research organization funded by the European Union — reveal more than a surprisingly rapid increase in the concentration of wealth at the top.
They also reflect a number of important global trends: the growing dominance of a few technology companies that are leading the development of artificial intelligence, the shrinking share of the economy going to workers, and the deepening inequality that will be passed on to the next generation.
These phenomena are particularly evident in the United States, where about a third of the world’s nearly 3,000 billionaires live — and the first trillionaire, Elon Musk, following the initial public offering of shares of his rocket and satellite company, SpaceX, last Friday, the 12th.
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The rise in billionaires’ wealth, 40% in just two years, has coincided with significant changes to US tax laws over the past decade that have largely benefited the country’s richest families and shareholders and expanded their political influence.
Why have billionaires seen their wealth grow so quickly?
One of the reasons for the recent surge at the top of the wealth pyramid is the boom in artificial intelligence, which has funneled trillions of dollars in investment into a small group of technology companies.
Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, for example, are individually worth more than $1 trillion. Its founders and early investors kept most of the financial gains.
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We can see this happening with SpaceX’s IPO. With 42% of shares, .
It is difficult to understand such gigantic values. But consider that only 21 countries in the world have economies capable of producing more than US$1 trillion annually.
The stock market is where much of the billionaire alchemy takes place. The extraordinary profits from the stock markets were disproportionately appropriated by the richest part of the population.
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Yes, you can participate in stock appreciation if you have a private 401K corporate retirement plan in the US. And these reserves will help pay for housing, food, car, fuel, electricity and other expenses when you stop working.
But it is the richest 1% of Americans who own half of all stocks, according to data from the US central bank. The richest 0.1% — a group of around 135,000 families — own shares valued at US$13.7 trillion.
That’s almost double the $7.1 trillion held by the poorest 90% of Americans, a group made up of about 115 million families.
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The technology companies that play a disproportionate role in generating these returns have created jobs — but so far, the number of employees has been relatively small.
Billionaires’ returns are based much more on capital investments than on the workers at these companies.
Inequality is growing
The rise of billionaires is accelerating at the same time that workers receive a smaller share of the wealth generated by national economies.
Traditionally, financial assets offer greater returns than a weekly salary. But since the early 2000s, the gap between the two has been widening.
Economists point to several reasons for this: the loss of strength of unions in negotiations; the spread of automation, artificial intelligence and other technologies capable of replacing workers; the transfer of industrial jobs and other sectors to countries like China; and policies that tax wages much more heavily than investment income.
Another factor, however, is the rise of what David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and academic co-director of the Stone Center on Inequality and Shaping the Future of Work, and other researchers call superstar companies — giants that dominate entire industries.
These companies have altered the balance of power in the economy, allowing owners, not workers, to absorb a greater share of the financial gains.
Superstar companies can also function as monopolies by setting prices, containing worker wages and benefits, or imposing uncomfortable working conditions.
Author highlighted that many billionaire businessmen added enormous value to the economy. But he added that the way they, in some cases, used their money to influence the political process could be “fundamentally corrosive.”
“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 system in which influence depends on the ability to pay.”
Measuring inequality is difficult. There is much debate about the exact size of the gap between those who have more and those who have less, as well as about the degree to which labor’s share of the wealth produced is reduced.
But there is a general consensus among economists who study the topic that the richest are moving away from the rest of the population more quickly than before.
Tax policy plays a role in the formation of billionaires’ wealth
In the United States, changes in tax laws over the last ten years have directed more benefits to the wealthiest portion of families, reducing the amount of taxes they need to pay.
A dramatic reduction in the corporate tax rate boosted the wealth of the ultra-rich, allowing them to expand their earnings as companies used the additional profits to buy back shares.
Reducing taxes paid by companies and rich people increases the tax burden on workers, who pay both income tax and payroll contributions — two taxes that barely affect the wealth of billionaires.
It also reduces public resources available to finance health, education, defense, infrastructure and other public benefits, at a time when governments face high levels of debt.
These hard-to-imagine fortunes have sparked political support for the creation of wealth taxes. The idea was defended at the Global Conference on Inequality held in Paris last week.
Proposals of this type have been discussed more intensely in France, but also in Germany, the United Kingdom, Brazil and the United States.
In California, where more than 200 billionaires live, union leaders helped include the Billionaires Tax Act of 2026 on the November ballot. The measure provides for a one-time 5% charge on billionaires’ net worth.
The proposal, prepared with contributions from Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, another economist who is at the forefront of research on global wealth and inequality, was based on calculations that indicate that the wealth of California’s billionaires currently exceeds US$2 trillion — a value equivalent to half of everything the state’s economy produces in a year. Between 2023 and 2025, the wealth of Californian billionaires grew by 144%.
They point out that the growing financial and political power of a few hundred individuals contributes to ever-increasing inequality, which will likely persist for generations, because much of this wealth escapes taxation, creating a self-perpetuating aristocracy.
As Dario Amodei, billionaire and executive director of Anthropic, maker of the Claude chatbot, wrote this year: “We are already at historically unprecedented levels of wealth concentration”, adding that “what should worry is a level of wealth concentration capable of disrupting society”.
c.2026 The New York Times Company
