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Move over billionaires. The first trillionaires are on their way.
Five people are expected to amass at least $1 trillion in wealth within the next decade, if current trends continue, according to Oxfam’s annual inequality report, released Sunday. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, currently the world’s richest person worth more than $430 billion, should cross the mark in just under five years.
He will soon be joined by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault and family.
The Oxfam report, which draws on data compiled by Forbes, is timed to coincide with the kickoff of the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, an elite gathering of some of the richest people and world leaders. Its release also comes the day before billionaire President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration.
2024 was a very lucrative year for the world’s wealthiest individuals and families, fueled in part by a soaring US stock market, Oxfam found. Their net worth expanded so quickly that Oxfam revised its estimate from last year that only one trillionaire would be crowned in the next decade.
“That’s an unimaginable amount,” Rebecca Riddell, senior policy lead at Oxfam America, said of $1 trillion. “This extreme inequality is nothing to celebrate.”
The ranks of the billionaire class last year grew by just over 200 to nearly 2,770 people. Their wealth skyrocketed by $2.1 trillion three times faster than the year before to a total of $15 trillion. In the United States alone, where 816 billionaires reside, the net worth of this group soared by $1.4 trillion.
What’s more, if any of the 10 richest men lost 99% of his wealth, he’d still be a billionaire, Oxfam found.
Meanwhile, the number of people living in poverty is roughly the same as it was in 1990, according to the report, citing World Bank data.
This year’s Oxfam report, titled Takers not Makers, also points out that more than one-third of billionaires’ wealth stems from inheritance. In 2023, more billionaires amassed their wealth through inheritance than through entrepreneurship for the first time. Plus, all of the 17 billionaires under 30 had their fortunes passed down to them.
This transfer of assets is aided by the fact that two-thirds of countries don’t tax inheritances to direct descendants, Riddell said. And in the United States, the estate tax has been gutted by tax cuts and strategies to dodge it.
“Unchecked, we’re about to see the biggest transfer of generational wealth in human history hardly earned and hardly taxed, unless we take action,” she said, adding that Oxfam is calling on governments to ensure that the rich and corporations pay their fair share of taxes.
The wealthy are also increasingly exerting influence over politics. Case in point, Oxfam says, is the incoming Trump administration. It is stocked with nearly a dozen people worth at least $1 billion on their own or with their spouses, making it one of the richest in history.
Musk, who pumped more than $260 million into Trump’s 2024 campaign, is serving as a prominent advisor to the president-elect and is co-leading the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
“Musk and the immense influence he has over policy and politics is really emblematic of the unchecked billionaire power that’s come to define our economic and political system,” Riddell said.
In his farewell address from the Oval Office last week, President Joe Biden warned of the concentration of power among a “very few ultra-wealthy people.”
“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead,” he said.
