The number of world billionaires dropped by 87 in 2022, with 2,688 people maintaining a global net worth of $12.7 trillion, down from last year’s $13.1 trillion, according to an annual ranking from Forbes.
But the number of billionaires in the US has grown to 725 people, worth a combined $4.7 trillion, or roughly one-third of all billionaire wealth in the world.
Eight of the top 10 wealthiest people in the world on the Forbes list – Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Larry Ellison and Steve Ballmer – are all in the US, with a combined wealth of more than $1 trillion.
A total of 329 people dropped off the list in 2022, the most in a single year since the 2009 financial crisis, according to Forbes.
The 36th annual ranking – relying on a snapshot of wealth using stock prices and currency exchange rates, as of 11 March – reveals that despite volatile stock markets and the economic fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic, “more than 1,000 billionaires got wealthier over the past year,” according to Forbes assistant managing editor of wealth Kerry Dolan.
The top 20 wealthiest people in the world are worth a combined $2 trillion, alone, up from $1.8 trillion in 2021.
Within the first year of the pandemic, the world’s billionaires added more than $5 trillion to their wealth, with the richest 2,755 people on earth amassing more than $13 trillion, according to Forbes.
Despite the public health crisis and a global economic fallout leaving millions of people unemployed, the annual list grew roughly 30 per cent between 2020 and 2021, with 86 per cent of the world’s wealthiest people growing wealthier than they were the previous year.
Within that time, a new billionaire emerged every 17 hours on average, Forbes found.
Forbes began publishing its annual assessment in 1987, when the world’s billionaires’ combined wealth reached more than $295bn.
Over the following 35 years, that figure exploded by more than 45 times.
In 1987, the world’s richest man was Yoshiaki Tsutsumi of the Seibu Railway Group, whose net worth totalled $20bn.
Mr Gates entered the number one spot in 1995 with a net worth of $12.9bn. By the end of the decade, that figure reached more than $90bn. When he stepped down in 2000, his net worth fell to $60bn, still more than five times his net worth just five years earlier.
Now-former Amazon president Bezos was listed as the world’s wealthiest man since 2018. He was ousted by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Musk in 2022, 10 years after making his first appearance on the list, when he debuted in 2012 with an estimated net worth of $2bn.
Today, Mr Musk is estimated to be $68bn richer than just one year ago alone, with an estimated net worth of $219bn.
A 2022 report from Fight Inequality Alliance, Institute for Policy Studies, Oxfam and Patriotic Millionaires found than an annual wealth tax among the wealthiest US households – with rates at 2 per cent over $5m, 3 per cent over $50m and 5 per cent over $1bn – would raise more than $928bn.
A more progressive annual wealth tax at 10 per cent on wealth over $1bn would raise more than $1.3 trillion.
Such revenue “could raise the government’s health budget by a third or it could eliminate half of US households’ out-of-pocket health costs,” according to the report.
US billionaires own half a billion more in wealth than the bottom 60 per cent of the country, the report found.
