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Global System 'Rigged for the Wealthy' Delivers World With 'More Billionaires Than Ever'
New annual report on "ambitions" of billionaires by wealth management giant UBS shows just 2,919 individuals have a combined wealth of $15.8 trillion.
Dec 05, 2025
A new assessment by the international wealth management giant UBS this week shows that the number of billionaires in the world has reached new heights and that the acceleration of inherited wealth represents a new chapter for the ultra-rich in the 21st Century.
The latest UBS Billionaire Ambitions Report, unveiled Thursday, details how just 2,919 individual billionaires have a combined wealth of $15.8 trillion. The number of billionaires in the world is up nearly 9 percent from the previous year. In the United States—where nearly a third of those on the list reside—924 billionaires hold a collective $6.9 trillion in wealth.
The assessment by UBS—which surveyed its own billionaire clients as part of the survey, now its eleventh edition—emphasizes a surge of inherited wealth among the billionaire class. According to the report:
In 2025, 91 heirs (64 of them male and 27 female) inherited a record USD 297.8 billion. That’s 36% more than in 2024, despite fewer people inheriting overall. Globally, inheritance bolstered the number of multigenerational billionaires, with some 860 multi-generational billionaires now overseeing total assets of USD 4.7 trillion. That’s up from 805 with USD 4.2 trillion in 2024.
Across the world, multi-generational billionaires are slowly extending down the generations, with the number of second-generation billionaires growing by 4.6% in the 2025 report, the number of third generation
by 12.3%, and the number of fourth generation and beyond by 10%.
The growing number of billionaires, including a rapidly increasing share who inherited their wealth rather than generating it themselves, says UBS, "heralds a new era" for the ultra-rich as "the great wealth transfer is intensifying as heirs inherit more than ever before.
The coming decades, the report notes, "will see growing numbers of billionaires and centi-millionaires as the Great Wealth Transfer continues to accelerate. Billionaires are estimated to transfer approximately USD 6.9 trillion of wealth globally by 2040, with at least USD 5.9 trillion set to be passed to children—either directly or indirectly through spouses."
Of the $6.9 trillion currently held by US billionaires, the report estimates that $2.8 trillion of that wealth will be passed down to heirs over the next 15 years.
"The world has more billionaires than ever because of a system that’s broken for workers and rigged for the wealthy and CEOs who already make 285 times what workers do," said the AFL-CIO in response to the report.
The union federation says that organized workers winning better collective bargaining is the first step needed to "level the playing field" for working people, while others see the surging fortunes of the ultra-wealthy as just more evidence that taxing the rich must remain at the top of the economic and political agenda both at the national level and internationally.
With the UBS report showing that 91 of the new billionaires created this year arrived at their financial status through inheritance, Hal Singer, economics professor at the University of Utah, said, "That's 91 additional reasons for a wealth tax."
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As Trump Recession Looms, New WSJ Poll Backs Call for Democrats to Embrace Economic Populism
"It feels like it's on the brink, it's on the precipice of this recession," one economist said this week.
Sep 02, 2025
A new poll from The Wall Street Journal released Tuesday is sparking calls on more Democrats to embrace economic populism, as it shows that Americans are still feeling gloomy about their financial prospects.
According to the poll, a record-low 25% of Americans now say they have a good chance at improving their standard of living, while almost 70% said they no longer believe that merely working hard is enough to get ahead.
On top of all this, more than 75% lack confidence that future generations will be better off than they are today.
The poll shows that US President Donald Trump is facing problems similar to the ones that former President Joe Biden faced over his last year in office, in that economic pessimism appears high even as the unemployment rate and the rate of inflation appear low by historical standards.
One major issue that appears to be weighing down economic sentiment is the cost of housing, as The Wall Street Journal writes that "fewer than one-quarter of respondents said they were very confident they could buy a home if they wanted to," while "some 56% said they had little or no confidence they could do so."
Democratic pollster John Anzalone took stock of the poll in a post on X and said that it "shows how important it is for Dems to get a strong economic message" given that "70% of people said they believe the American dream no longer holds true."
Democratic media operative Dan Ancona zeroed in on a question in the poll showing that a majority of Americans agreed with the statement that Trump and the GOP "are trying to scare and divide Americans so they can cut their own taxes and keep wealth flowing to the very rich."
In fact, roughly 27% of respondents who voted for Trump in the 2024 presidential election either somewhat or strongly agreed with that statement. Given this, Ancona called the populist economic framing "a pretty good starting point."
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) also jumped at the findings of the WSJ poll and said that stamping out economic inequality in the US needed to be Democrats' priority.
"We must tackle the economic divides tearing our nation apart and make the economic independence of every family and community our highest mission," he declared. "I call it a new economic patriotism."
The WSJ poll showing Americans' sour economic mood comes as more economic forecasters have been raising the odds of a recession hitting the US economy.
Fortune reported on Tuesday that investment bank UBS believes the probability of a recession occurring in the near future has grown significantly in recent months, although it notes there is still a great deal of uncertainty over what the economy will look like in six months.
"The key message is the US economy, by these hard data measures, is locked in a prolonged phase of stagnation or slow contraction, warranting caution even as outright collapse has not yet materialized," wrote Fortune. "This aligns with other analysts' warnings that, even if a recession doesn't materialize, the economy is headed for a bout of 1970s-style 'stagflation,' a combination of a stagnating economy and rising inflation."
Moody's Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi has also been sounding the alarm about the state of the American economy, and he believes state-level data are already showing the US "on the edge of recession," according to Newsweek.
As Zandi explained this week, both California and New York, which together account for over 20% of American gross domestic product, are essentially flat at the moment, while southern states that have been the strongest in terms of economic growth in recent years have been slowing down.
"I don't think the economy is in a recession, at least not at this point," Zandi said in an interview with Newsweek. "But it feels like it's on the brink, it's on the precipice of this recession."
Along with a potential impending recession, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich pointed out that Americans are well aware of structural inequalities.
"CEO pay is up 1,085% since 1978, while worker pay is up just 24%. Millions live paycheck to paycheck as they struggle to afford basic goods," said Reich. "Is it any wonder why 70% of people said they believe the American dream no longer holds true or never did?"
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Wealth of World's Richest Has Doubled Over Past Decade
The total wealth of billionaires increased by 121% from 2015-24.
Dec 06, 2024
Driven largely by the accumulation of massive wealth by the richest people in the United States, the Swiss wealth manager UBS said Thursday the assets of billionaires around the world more than doubled over the past decade.
Between 2015-24, the total wealth of billionaires increased by 121%, from $6.3 trillion to $14 trillion.
Meanwhile, the MSCI AC World Index of global equities, which measures the performance of more than 3,000 stocks from both developed and emerging markets, rose by 73%.
The planet's total gross domestic product is about $105.4 trillion, with a population of just over 8 billion, underscoring the extreme concentration of wealth among the very richest people.
The number of billionaires rose from 1,757 to 2,682 over the past decade, while the wealthiest people in the world boasted significant gains over just the past year.
Billionaires' wealth jumped by about 17% in 2024, with the accumulation of wealth among the richest people in the U.S. offsetting a decline in China.
U.S. billionaires amassed wealth gains that were 27.6% higher than the previous year, accumulating a total of $5.8 trillion—more than 40% of international billionaire wealth.
The tax cuts pushed through by President-elect Donald Trump and the Republican Party in 2017 are still in effect in the U.S. Tax policy analysts have found that the law was skewed to the rich, with households in the top 1% of incomes expecting to receive an average tax cut of more than $60,000 in 2025 compared to an average tax cut of less than $500 for people in the bottom 60%.
As Common Dreams reported this week, the top 12 U.S. billionaires now control $2 trillion. The wealth of the four richest people in the U.S.—Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—has hit $1 trillion.
"These four men were worth $74 billion 12 short years ago," said Americans for Tax Fairness. "Tax billionaires."
At the G20 Summit last month, world leaders agreed to "engage cooperatively to ensure that ultra-high-net-worth individuals are effectively taxed."
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Gilded Age for Billionaire Offspring as $5.2 Trillion Wealth Transfer Accelerates
"Without robust wealth and inheritance taxes," said one analyst, "the children and grandchildren of today's billionaires will dominate our future politics, economy, culture, and philanthropy."
Nov 30, 2023
The Swiss bank UBS released a report Thursday showing that a massive transfer of wealth from billionaire business founders to their heirs is underway and accelerating, with trillions of dollars in assets moving from those who accumulated fortunes through entrepreneurship to family members whose vast riches are owed to the simple accident of birth.
In the 12-month period between April 2022 and April 2023, newly created billionaires acquired more wealth through inheritance than entrepreneurship for the first time since UBS began studying billionaire wealth trends in 2015. The bank, a friend of the super-rich, said that 53 heirs inherited nearly $151 billion in wealth during the study period, exceeding the $140.7 billion amassed by billionaire entrepreneurs.
"This year's report found that the majority of billionaires that accumulated wealth in the last year did so through inheritance as opposed to entrepreneurship," Benjamin Cavalli, head of strategic clients at UBS Global Wealth Management, said in a statement. "This is a theme we expect to see more of over the next 20 years."
The latest edition of the Billionaire Ambitions Report estimates that the number of global billionaires rose by 7% during the one-year period analyzed by UBS, up from 2,376 to 2,544. The U.S. alone had 751 billionaires as of April 2023, 20 more than it had in 2022.
After falling in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic—during which billionaire wealth soared as millions died across the globe—billionaires' collective net worth "recovered by 9% in nominal terms from USD 11.0 trillion to USD 12.0 trillion," UBS found.
UBS estimates that more than 1,000 billionaires are over the age of 70 and poised to hand a combined $5.2 trillion down to their heirs over the next several decades, perpetuating inequality that is eroding democracies and fueling social uprisings worldwide.
"While this great wealth handover has long been anticipated," UBS said, "data suggests that it is now gathering momentum."
"A new, powerful, and unaccountable aristocracy is being created in front of our eyes."
Chuck Collins, director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), told Common Dreams that "this is how wealth dynasties are formed."
"The so-called 'self-made' billionaires invest in 'wealth defense' to pass as much wealth to future generations within their families," he said.
Collins argued that this ongoing wealth transfer "should be an occasion for substantial inheritance taxes, but given the porous and weak state of such taxes, we're seeing dynastic oligarchies grow."
"Without robust wealth and inheritance taxes, these intergenerational concentrations of wealth and power will grow," said Collins. "The children and grandchildren of today’s billionaires will dominate our future politics, economy, culture, and philanthropy—with huge billion-dollar legacy foundations. It is true that a small segment of the next generation will redeploy and redistribute some of this wealth to more socially positive ventures and organizations. But at this point, this is a tiny percent and not a substitute for a progressive tax system where the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes."
The UBS report notes that billionaires with inherited wealth "seem more reticent" than first-generation billionaires to pledge their fortunes to philanthropy, which the ultra-rich often use to avoid taxes.
According to UBS, just under a quarter of first- and later-generation billionaires said they are concerned about "developments in taxation," an indication that they don't believe world leaders will heed growing global calls for new taxes targeting the fortunes of the mega-rich and their offspring.
Oxfam International observed earlier this year that two-thirds of countries don't have any inheritance taxes and half of the world's billionaires live in those countries, allowing them to pass huge wealth down to future generations tax-free.
"A new, powerful, and unaccountable aristocracy is being created in front of our eyes," the group said.
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The US Leads the World in Millionaires, but the Wealth Is Not Trickling Down
The spectacular wealth of America’s wealthy is paying no great dividends for average Americans; those dividends are funneling instead to the top of the U.S. economic ladder.
Aug 21, 2023
Five-star hotels. So yesterday. Today’s super rich, The Wall Street Journal reports, are picking palatial luxury villas over swanky suites when they need a quick pick-me-up.
Italy, France, and Greece currently offer the widest array of villa options, but Portugal seems to be catching up fast. So many options!
How can our deepest pockets find the right one? A “high-end travel consultant,” the Robb Report on luxury living points out, can identify just the perfect villa vacation. The cost for joining the circle that can access one top consultant’s advice: $25,000 in annual fees on top of a $150,000 joining fee.
The world’s distribution of wealth remains remarkably top-heavy. Individuals with less than $10,000 to their name—52.5% of the world’s adult population—hold just 1.2% of the world’s assets.
The cost of actually renting a high-end villa? The realtor agency Oliver’s Travels was offering at one point this summer three dozen villas renting for over $130,000 a week.
How many people on our Earth today can afford to put down—without batting an eye—that sort of cash? Some of our best annual stats on our global super rich have been coming out, over recent years, from the Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse. But this fabled 167-year-old institution stumbled royally during the pandemic and, earlier this year, ended up the property of its Swiss rival UBS.
UBS, fortunately, has opted to continue Credit Suisse’s annual Global Wealth Report tradition, and the 2023 edition—covering data through 2022—has just appeared. As usual, this annual report’s release has enjoyed substantial media coverage worldwide, especially in the business press.
Most all the latest coverage has generally emphasized the news in the 2023 report’s opening lines. As one typical headline, from Bloomberg, reads: “Global Wealth Fell Last Year for First Time Since 2008.”
Wealth per global adult, the new Global Wealth Report does indeed show, fell by 3.6% in 2022. But most of that decline, the report goes on to add, “came from the appreciation of the U.S. dollar against many other currencies.” Hold those exchange rates constant and the story changes. Wealth per adult increases by 2.2%.
This year’s Global Wealth Report actually has a much more important story to tell than the global wealth per adult, and the global media coverage has by and large missed it. That story: The world’s distribution of wealth remains remarkably top-heavy. Individuals with less than $10,000 to their name—52.5% of the world’s adult population—hold just 1.2% of the world’s assets.
Those numbers almost exactly reverse at the other end of the Credit Suisse Research Institute’s “global wealth pyramid.” The 1.1% of the global adult population worth over $1 million individually holds 45.8% of the world’s wealth.
One nation—the United States—is driving this incredibly top-heavy statistical picture. Some 38% of the world’s millionaires call the USA home. China, the next largest contributor to the global millionaire population, claims just 11%. Japan and France, the next two highest millionaire manufacturers, each claim only 5% of our globe’s at least seven-digit set.
Worldwide, about a quarter-million individuals—243,060, to be exact—qualify for Credit Suisse’s more exclusive “ultra-high-net-worth” status. These ultras each hold at least $50 million in personal wealth, and over half of them, 51%, hail from the United States. That U.S. ultra-rich share nearly quadruples China’s ultra-rich population, the world’s second largest.
America’s richest of the rich, in short, dominate the ranks of our global deep-pockets. But the rest of us Americans, cheerleaders for our rich love to assure us, have no cause for unease about that domination. The more wealth that America’s wealthy accumulate, their reasoning goes, the more our rich can invest in creating better futures for ordinary working Americans.
The latest Credit Suisse numbers totally undercut that claim. In other developed nations—societies with the rich holding significantly smaller shares of their national wealth than in the United States—typical people have seen substantially greater growth rates in their personal wealth.
Back in the year 2000, the typical American had a net worth of $46,479. The typical net worth of French adults that year: $51,360. By the end of 2022, the typical French adult held $145,591 in personal wealth. The typical—median—U.S. adult wealth last year: just $107.739. Over that same two-decade-plus span, the typical Dutch median net worth jumped from $44,513 to $120,270, the typical Canadian from $37,295 to $143,862.
The spectacular wealth of America’s wealthy, in other words, is paying no great dividends for average Americans. Those dividends are funneling instead to the top of the U.S. economic ladder.
Just one final illustrative example of that dynamic from the new 2023 Global Wealth Report: Japan’s top 1 percenters hold 18.8% of their nation’s wealth. The U.S. top 1% wealth share? Almost twice as much: 34.2%.
Japan’s most typical adults, meanwhile, hold personal net worths of $124,258, some 15% higher than the $107,739 U.S. wealth median.
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Credit Suisse Complicit in 'Massive' Conspiracy to Help Rich Americans Dodge Taxes: Senate Report
"Republican budget cuts have decimated the IRS's ability to root out this kind of offshore tax evasion scheme," said Sen. Ron Wyden.
Mar 29, 2023
The Senate Finance Committee on Thursday published the results of a two-year investigation showing that the scandal-plagued Swiss bank Credit Suisse has been complicit in a "massive, ongoing conspiracy" to help wealthy U.S. citizens dodge taxes.
Spearheaded by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the chair of the Senate panel, the probe found that Credit Suisse violated the terms of a 2014 plea agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) that required the bank to crack down on tax dodging by its U.S. clients.
As part of the 2014 deal, according to the Justice Department, Credit Suisse admitted to "knowingly and willfully" helping U.S. clients hide offshore assets and income from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
The Senate Finance Committee report states that it obtained "voluminous records detailing the role Credit Suisse employees played in assisting U.S. businessman Dan Horsky in concealing over $220 million in offshore accounts from the IRS."
"The committee's investigation also uncovered almost two dozen additional large, potentially undeclared accounts held by Credit Suisse belonging to ultra-high net worth U.S. persons," the report continued. "In 2022, Credit Suisse disclosed to the committee that in connection with its ongoing cooperation with DOJ, it had identified 10 additional large client relationships involving U.S. persons, with each client holding accounts in excess of $20 million."
Wyden said in a statement Wednesday that "at the center of this investigation are greedy Swiss bankers and catnapping government regulators, and the result appears to be a massive, ongoing conspiracy to help ultrawealthy U.S. citizens to evade taxes and rip off their fellow Americans."
"Credit Suisse got a discount on the penalty it faced in 2014 for enabling tax evasion because bank executives swore up and down they'd get out of the business of defrauding the United States," the Oregon senator continued. "This investigation shows Credit Suisse did not make good on that promise."
"Republican budget cuts have decimated the IRS's ability to root out this kind of offshore tax evasion scheme, but Democrats are committed to stepping up enforcement against wealthy tax cheats."
The report was published days after the Switzerland-based investment banking giant UBS agreed to purchase Credit Suisse for more than $3 billion as the latter firm faced growing questions about its financial health amid fears of a broader banking crisis.
Wyden said Wednesday that Credit Suisse's "pending acquisition does not wipe the slate clean," urging the U.S. Justice Department to follow through on its pledge to "crack down on corporate offenders, particularly repeat offenders like Credit Suisse."
"In addition to a significant penalty for the bank, the individual bankers involved in these schemes must also face criminal investigation," Wyden added. "It simply makes no sense to allow the bankers who have their hands on these hidden accounts and enable tax evasion to get away scot-free. Finally, the cases detailed in this investigation are textbook examples of why Democrats gave the IRS new funding for enforcement. Republican budget cuts have decimated the IRS's ability to root out this kind of offshore tax evasion scheme, but Democrats are committed to stepping up enforcement against wealthy tax cheats."
In total, the Senate Finance Committee said it found evidence that Credit Suisse helped potentially more than two dozen American families hide upwards of $700 million at the bank after the 2014 plea agreement with the Justice Department.
Citing two former Credit Suisse employees, CNBC reported Wednesday that "although the bank did disclose and close many American accounts after its 2014 plea agreement, some bankers worked with high net worth clients to keep certain Americans at the bank, by changing the nationalities listed on their accounts and ignoring evidence that the account holders were Americans."
"In other cases, they helped American clients move money to other banks, without reporting those transfers to U.S. authorities," the outlet added.
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Top Economist at Major Global Bank Says Corporate Profits Are Fueling Inflation
"Companies have passed higher costs on to customers," wrote Paul Donovan of UBS Global Wealth Management. "But they have also taken advantage of circumstances to expand profit margins."
Nov 03, 2022
The chief economist at the global investment bank UBS, the world's largest wealth manager, argued in an op-ed for the Financial Times on Wednesday that inflation in the United States "is more a product of profits than wages" and criticized Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell for refusing to acknowledge that fact as he plows ahead with massive interest rate hikes.
"Powell's public remarks offer little insight into how he expects higher rates to tame inflation," Paul Donovan of UBS Global Wealth Management wrote just ahead of the Fed's latest interest rate increase of 75 basis points. "This is the current inflation story. Companies have passed higher costs on to customers. But they have also taken advantage of circumstances to expand profit margins. The broadening of inflation beyond commodity prices is more profit margin expansion than wage cost pressures."
"Even a major bank's chief economist now admits that corporations are price gouging under the guise of inflation."
"Despite negative real wages, consumers have carried on consuming," Donovan added. "Consumers seem to be buying stories that seem to justify price increases, but which really serve as cover for profit margin expansion... This unconventional inflation means higher unemployment and lower wages are not the only possible cure for it. Policy has more routes to lower inflation if the cause is about profits."
Thus far, though, the Powell-led Federal Reserve has primarily used interest rate increases in its as-yet unsuccessful effort to bring down inflation, even as critics warn that such an approach harms workers and risks a devastating recession without tackling the primary drivers of price increases.
At his Wednesday press conference, Powell once again conceded that rate hikes "don't directly affect for the most part food and energy prices," two major sources of inflation dictated by profit-seeking corporations such as Exxon, Chevron, and PepsiCo.
"We increased prices at the beginning of the fourth quarter based on what we knew at that point," Pepsi's chief financial officer said on the company's earnings call last month. "And going forward, with the investments that we've made in brands, I still think we're capable of taking whatever pricing we need."
During his public appearance Wednesday, Powell wasn't asked a single question about the role corporate profiteering has played in causing high inflation even as executives boast about their enormous pricing power.
Progressive advocates and economists who have been spotlighting corporate America's inflationary profiteering for months seized on Donovan's Financial Times op-ed as further evidence that their data-driven argument is gradually piercing the mainstream, even as Powell ignores it.
"Even a major bank's chief economist now admits that corporations are price gouging under the guise of inflation," the American Economic Liberties Project tweeted Thursday.
Christian Hallum, tax justice lead at Oxfam International, added that "skyrocketing profits are to blame for inflation, according to the chief economist at UBS Global Wealth Management."
"Maybe we should tax windfall profits instead of trying to create unemployment through interest rate hikes?" Hallum suggested.
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