Fiscal systems designed around income and consumption struggle to capture wealth, and billionaires are highly mobile
WHEN Forbes magazine released its first global billionaires list in 1987, just 140 names appeared on it. The 2025 version featured more than 3,000 people, worth a collective US$16 trillion.
Even allowing for factors such as the rise of China and over three decades of inflation, it is a staggering increase in both numbers and values; the net worth of Elon Musk, judged the world’s richest person in April 2025, was estimated at US$342 billion – compared with US$295 billion for the entire class of 1987.
Globally, the average wealth of the top 0.0001 per cent of the population grew on average 7.1 per cent a year between 1987 and 2024, compared to 3.2 per cent for the average adult, according to Gabriel Zucman, a professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics and at the University of California, Berkeley.
