"Billionaire wealth jumped by over 16 per cent in 2025, three times faster than the past five-year average, to $18.3 trillion – its highest level in history, according to a new Oxfam report today as the World Economic Forum opens in Davos.
Billionaire wealth has increased by 81 per cent since 2020. This comes as one in four people don’t regularly have enough to eat and nearly half the world’s population live in poverty.
The report Resisting the Rule of the Rich: Protecting Freedom from Billionaire Power analyses how the super-rich are securing political power to shape the rules of our economies and societies for their own gain and to the detriment of the rights and freedoms of people around the world.
The surge in billionaire wealth coincides with the US Trump administration pursuing a pro-billionaire agenda. It has slashed taxes for the super-rich, undermined global efforts to tax large corporations, reversed attempts to address monopoly power and contributed to the growth of AI-related stocks that have provided a boon to super-rich investors world-wide.
His presidency has sent a clear warning sign to the rest of the world about the power of the ultra-rich. Rather than solely a US phenomenon Oxfam’s paper demonstrates that rising oligarchy is undermining societies worldwide. Oxfam’s report finds:
- The collective wealth of billionaires last year surged by $2.5 trillion, almost equivalent to the total wealth held by the bottom half of humanity – 4.1 billion people.
- The number of billionaires topped 3,000 last year for the first time, while the richest, Elon Musk, became the first ever to surpass half a trillion dollars.
- Billionaires are 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than ordinary people.
- The $2.5 trillion rise in billionaires’ wealth would be enough to eradicate extreme poverty 26 times over."
