To celebrate the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, Oxfam releases a study of how much of the world’s wealth the ultra-rich own. This year’s was a doozy. The five richest men in the world were revealed to have doubled their wealth in the years since 2020. Seven of the 10 biggest corporations in the world have a billionaire as their CEO or principal shareholder. Combined, the value of these companies – which include Apple, Microsoft and Saudi Aramco – exceeds the GDP of every single country in Africa and Latin America combined. That’s 87 countries: virtually everything bought, sold, consumed produced and dreamed up by two billion people in a whole year.
The charity also reported that, within a decade, the world will probably see its first trillionaire. A trillion is a number (it’s one followed by 12 zeros) to numb the mind. Even Ronald Reagan – a friend and ally to the ultra-rich if there ever was one – could not wrap his head around it. The best he could come up with, “A few weeks ago I called such a figure, a trillion dollars, incomprehensible, and I’ve been trying ever since to think of a way to illustrate how big a trillion really is,” he said in 1981 when talking about the US national debt. “And the best I could come up with, is that if you had a stack of thousand-dollar bills in your hand only four inches high, you’d be a millionaire. A trillion dollars would be a stack of thousand-dollar bills 67 miles high.” But what does it mean for a society to mint its first trillionaire, and how is it different from the wealth of oligarchs in the past?
