Billionaire wealth soars 3 times faster by $2 trillion in 2024: Oxfam
Davos: Billionaire wealth across the globe surged by $2 trillion in 2024 to $15 trillion at a rate three times faster than the previous year, a study showed on Monday here as the richest of the world began to assemble for their annual jamboree in this ski resort town.
In its flagship inequity report released every year on the first day of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, Oxfam International contrasted the huge jump in the billionaire wealth with the number of people living in poverty barely having changed since 1990.
Wealth of billionaires in Asia increased by $299 billion in 2024, Oxfam said while predicting that there will be at least five trillionaires within a decade from now.
The year 2024 saw 204 new billionaires getting minted — an average of nearly four every week. Asia itself got 41 new billionaires in the year.
In its report titled ‘Takers, not Makers’, Oxfam said the richest 1 per cent in the Global North extracted $30 million an hour from the Global South through the financial systems in 2023.
It further said that 60 per cent of billionaire wealth is now derived from inheritance, monopoly power or crony connections, showing that “extreme billionaire wealth is largely unmerited.”
The rights group urged governments across the world to tax the richest to reduce inequality, end extreme wealth, and dismantle the new aristocracy.
It also sought that the former colonial powers must address past harms with reparations.
The billionaire’s wealth grew in 2024 at an average of $5.7 billion a day, while the number of billionaires rose to 2,769, from 2,565 in 2023. The wealth of the world’s ten richest men grew on average by almost $100 million a day — even if they lost 99 per cent of their wealth overnight, they would remain billionaires, Oxfam said.
Oxfam, whose annual inequity report is debated extensively at WEF Annual Meeting, said that contrary to the popular perception, billionaire wealth is largely unearned — 60 per cent of billionaire wealth now comes from inheritance, monopoly power or crony connections.
Unmerited wealth and colonialism — understood as not only a history of brutal wealth extraction but also a powerful force behind today’s extreme levels of inequality — stand as two major drivers of billionaire wealth accumulation, it said.
“The capture of our global economy by a privileged few has reached heights once considered unimaginable. The failure to stop billionaires is now spawning soon-to-be trillionaires. Not only has the rate of billionaire wealth accumulation accelerated —by three times— but so too has their power,” Oxfam International Executive Director Amitabh Behar said.
“The crown jewel of this oligarchy is a billionaire president, backed and bought by the world’s richest man Elon Musk, running the world’s largest economy. We present this report as a stark wake up-call that ordinary people the world over are being crushed by the enormous wealth of a tiny few,” he said. Oxfam calculated that 36 per cent of billionaire wealth is now inherited.
