2,755 Billionaires in the World
Every year Forbes magazine compiles a list of all the world’s billionaires. In 2021 they report that there are 2,755 billionaires (660 more than in 2020) and their combined wealth totals $13.084 trillion ($5 trillion more than in 2020). This group of billionaires represents approximately 0.000035% of the world’s 7.8 billion people while their wealth comprises about 3.6% of the world’s total of $360.6 trillion.
This relatively tiny group of people are extraordinarily rich. The wealth of even the poorest billionaire is more than 15,000 times as large as an ordinary American (the median wealth per adult in the United States was $65,904 in 2019) and more than 140,000 times as much as ordinary people across the world (median wealth just $7,087). Moreover, the poorest billionaire still has 1,000 times as much wealth as a millionaire, so the wealth of every billionaire far exceeds the wealth even of ordinary rich people. [In the United States, the total wealth of the 664 U.S. billionaires far exceeds the combined wealth of the poorest 50% of Americans (165 million people).]
Skew Among the Billionaires
But even among this extremely elite and relatively small group of 2,755 billionaires, the wealth distribution is skewed dramatically towards the high end, as shown in the chart above.
The richest person, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, has wealth totaling $177 billion. This is more than 77 times as much as each billionaire in the poorer half of the group, who each have between $1 billion and $2.3 billion. The 28 billionaires comprising the top 1% of this extremely elite group (shown lined up along the far right side of this graph) have a combined total wealth of $2,212 billion which is more than the combined wealth of the bottom 50% of the billionaire group (1,378 billionaires along the bottom left half) whose wealth only totals $2,160 billion. And the 276 billionaires comprising the top 10% of this billionaire group have total wealth of $6,321 billion, which is almost as much wealth as that held by the 2,480 billionaires in the bottom 90%, whose wealth totals $6,772 billion.
So even among this extreme elite, wealth inequality is tremendously high.
Money = Power
In a world in which money conveys power, it is dangerous to have 2,755 billionaires who are each more than 140,000 times as powerful as the average person and then to have the richest of these billionaires be 177 times as powerful as the poorest billionaire. This much concentrated power can’t help but dominate.
We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both. — Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis