World could get its first trillionaire within 10 years

The world could have its first trillionaire within a decade, anti-poverty organisation Oxfam International said on Monday in its annual assessment of global inequalities timed to the gathering of political and business elites at the Swiss ski resort of Davos.

Oxfam, which for years has been trying to highlight the growing disparities between the super-rich and the bulk of the global population during the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting, reckons the gap has been “supercharged” since the coronavirus pandemic.

The group said the fortunes of the five richest men — Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault and his family of luxury company LVMH, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Oracle founder Larry Ellison and investment guru Warren Buffett — have spiked by 114 per cent in real terms since 2020, when the world was reeling from the pandemic.

Oxfam’s interim executive director said the report showed that the world is entering a “decade of division.”

“We have the top five billionaires, they have doubled their wealth. On the other hand, almost 5 billion people have become poorer,” Amitabh Behar said in an interview in Davos, Switzerland, where the forum’s annual meeting takes place this week.

“Very soon, Oxfam predicts that we will have a trillionaire within a decade,” Behar said, referring to a person who has a thousand billion dollars. “Whereas to fight poverty, we need more than 200 years.”

If someone does reach that trillion-dollar milestone — and it could be someone not even on any list of richest people right now — he or she would have the same value as Saudi Arabia.

For the bottom 60 per cent of the global population, Oxfam used figures from the UBS Global Wealth Report 2023 and from the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2019. Both used the same methodology.