A small group of 24 people now has $ 3.3 trillion, or 16 % of wealth, an amount equal to GDP in France. These men are now called “superior millions” by Forbes, because they have a new level of intense wealth and strength.
In 1987, Forbs’s first billionaires list had 140 people worth $ 295 billion. At that time, the richest person was Yoshiaki Tsutsumi in Japan, a real estate pole of $ 20 billion. Today, its value is the richest person in the world, Elon Musk, 419.4 billion dollars, or 21 times what Tsutsomi had at its peak and more than two million times more than the average American family.
Millionaires fill a strong wealth
To qualify as a wonderful millionaire, a person needs at least $ 50 billion. Among them, 16 have more than 100 billion dollars, making them a millionaires. A decade ago, these types of wealth were barely present. In 2014, this group held only 4 % of all billionaire wealth. Now, a segment of their quadruple.
“It is clear that billionaires have always controlled large quantities of wealth, but you are now talking about the differences in the number of billionaires themselves,” He said Maya Embrag from Altrata, a global wealth intelligence company. “It is completely amazing to what extent has the pure value of some of these people grew.”
Their money feeds luxury real estate, and each of them has at least $ 100 million of personal residential properties. This number is likely to reduce the reduction because many real estate holds the names of companies or through partners. Markets such as New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and I have seen a boom in homes of nine numbers and long residential towers that were specially designed for the billionaire category.
Technology founders dominate the great millionaire list
Most of the great billionaire owners have made their money in technology or industries enhanced by technology. Among the 10 richest people, 6 years of technology, including Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Elison, Sergey Brin and Steve Ballmer.
Unlike industrialists in the past, technical billionaires today built fortunes based on stock prices instead of material assets. Their wealth can fluctuate in tens of billions in one year, depending on the morale of the investors. Zuckerberg, Bezos and Nvidia of Jensen Huang had fluctuations of this size.
Technology monopoly also helped these billionaires collect their wealth. Joseph Steglitz, Nobel Prize -winning economist, noted that current anti -monopoly laws were designed for companies such as Standard Oil, not technology giants. He said: “The monopolistic force has led to the emergence of huge amounts of wealth.”
It also highlighted the tax gaps, described by the key to the accumulation of modern billionaire wealth. He said: “These men, at the level of the company and at the individual level, was better in avoiding taxes than making good products.” Tesla CEO of compensation is $ 50 billion, an example of this system at work.
New money replaces old wealth
Unlike the generations that came before, as wealth has been built for decades, the technology -based economy today allowed the founders to collect huge sums within just a few years. Before his arrest in 2022, the value of the founder of Sam Bankman, an unprecedented FTX founder, amounted to FTX, $ 26 billion before the age of thirty, for example. The 2024 Heritage Foundation report indicated that names such as Rockefeller, Carnegie and Vanderbilt have largely disappeared from billionaire lists.
“The great wealth of the day today is new money, not old,” the report said. Of the 97 billionaires who inherited a fortune from the FORBES 400 list, 2005, remain less than half. Those who are still there are three times more likely to fall into the rank rather than rise.
The transformation began in the 1980s and nineties, when the globalization and technology reshaped. The Internet and digital platforms allowed project owners to expand companies’ range faster than ever. Sam Bankman Farid, deformed billionaire, built a $ 26 billion wealth before he was 30 years old-although he lost it at the same speed.
At the same time, wealth has increased. In 2024, the highest 1 % of American families dominated 49.2 trillion dollars, or 30 % of all American wealth. In the late 1980s, this number was 23 %.
With the fortunes of this size, the owners of wonderful billionaires had a great influence over politics, media and economics. Musk Tesla, Spacex and X (formerly Twitter) owns, BEZOS Washington Post has Zuckerberg on Facebook, Instagram and Threads. Their authority extends beyond wealth, and it constitutes public opinion, politics and markets.
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