#billionaires

#billionaires

The world's richest people saw their wealth increase more than ever in 2025, but a funny thing happened along the way. Many of them seemed to decide that their best prospects for the future don't lie in on the west side of the Atlantic, even though the exceptional performance of U.S. equity markets are driving much of these gains. A growing share of the ultra-elite are quietly voting with their feet against the idea that the American Dream is still worth living in America.

In many historic calculations of net worth, individual fortunes weren't measured in isolation; instead, they were compared to the GDP of the US at the time. When the US economy was much smaller than it is today, the wealthiest families and individuals carried more weight in the economy than others during more prosperous times. One of the richest Americans of all time is widely considered to be Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller, whose wealth, at its peak in 1937, was equal to 1.5% of the country's GDP.

On Wednesday, shares of MetaX Integrated Circuits Shanghai - a GPU startup founded by former AMD executives - skyrocketed as much as 755% on their first day of trading on the Shanghai Stock Exchange's tech-focused STAR Market, before closing up about 700%. The surge catapulted its chairman and cofounder, Chen Weiliang, into one of China's fastest-rising tech moguls. Chen's stake in MetaX is worth about $6.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The Alphabet cofounders have respectively grown $66 billion and $60.7 billion richer in just under 10 months, outpacing Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's $56.8 billion gain and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's $51.9 billion gain. The pair only trail Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison's $150 billion increase. Page and Brin are now worth $234 billion and $219 billion each, ranking them fifth and sixth on Bloomberg's rich list - not far behind Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in fourth with a $250 billion fortune.

The world's 10 wealthiest people have added a remarkable $523 billion to their fortunes this year, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index shows. Mastercard, Exxon Mobil, and Netflix are all worth less than that; their market values were between $460 billion and $520 billion at Monday's close. Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison has notched the biggest wealth gain so far this year with a $150 billion increase in net worth, to $343 billion.

Kevin Koenig, a journalist at The Wall Street Journal, took a closer look at this curious phenomenon. He spoke to several billionaires who have taken to working in 'floating offices', including Jimmy John Liautaud, the proprietor of the sandwich chain Jimmy John's. Liautaud is something of a workaholic, as he finds time to work whether he is - and that includes any superyacht he happens to be stationed on. And he's not alone.

Germany now boasts a record 256 billionaires, the highest number since records began according to Manager Magazin. The total wealth of the 100 richest Germans has nearly tripled since 2001, reaching €758 billion, while the combined asset value of the 500 richest stands at €1.16 trillion. More than half of those on the list now possess fortunes exceeding €1 billion.

The world's 10 richest people lost nearly $70 billion on Friday as fresh fears of a global trade war rattled markets. The value of their stock holdings tumbled after President Donald Trump said the US would impose an additional 100% tariff on imports from China from November 1, and restrict its access to "any and all critical software," after China tightened export controls on rare earth elements and other key materials for advanced tech manufacturing.

As the housing crisis and wealth inequality emerge as top issues for voters in New York City, mayoral hopeful Zohran Mamdani has called for higher taxes on the rich to pay for services and famously suggested that billionaires should not exist. Mamdani's viral campaign handily defeated Andrew Cuomo, New York's former governor, in a Democratic primary earlier this year. As expected, billionaires and billionaire-owned companies such as Airbnb and DoorDash are now spending big to defeat Mamdani and influence the race.

The AI boom has created a record-breaking wave of new billionaires and high company valuations in the past year at a rate unprecedented in history.

If we want progress-real, sustainable, transformative progress-we need more billionaires. Not the ones who sit atop dynasties of inherited wealth. Not the extractors.

Parents have been making these judgy comments to each other forever--in the '90s it was about too much tv. And it's especially gross coming from a billionaire with a gaggle of nannies. Keeping kids engaged in activities and/or responding to 'I'm bored' 24/7 sounds exhausting when you don't have hired help to do it for you, and there's nothing wrong with a reasonable amount of screen time.

"My neighbors, my friends, my family, the people who are most deserving are going to be basically reverse Robin Hooded by these billionaires, and we can't be lining their pockets while we're cutting a trillion from Medicaid, SNAP, food assistance and other vital services," said Ashmu Murakami, Sunrise Movement.

The average billionaire worldwide is 67.3 years old, but many countries see their billionaires aging into their seventies, eighties, or even nineties.