UK billionaires’ wealth increased by £35m a day to £182bn in 2024,enough to cover city of Manchester in £10 notes almost 1.5 times over
Global billionaire wealth grew by $2 trillion in 2024, three times faster than the year before, equivalent to roughly $5.7 billion a day. The world is now on track to see five trillionaires within a decade, the latest annual Oxfam inequality report reveals today.
Meanwhile, according to the World Bank, the number of people still living in poverty – around 3.5 billion – has barely changed since 1990.
It warns that progress on poverty reduction has slowed to a standstill and that extreme poverty could be ended three times faster if inequality were to be reduced.
Oxfam’s report, Takers Not Makers calls for bold solutions to radically reduce inequality and hardwire fairness into our economies.
It’s published as business elites gather in the Swiss resort of Davos and Donald Trump is inaugurated as President of the United States. This ever-growing concentration of wealth is enabled by a monopolistic concentration of power, with billionaires increasingly exerting influence over industries and public opinion.
In 2024, the number of billionaires rose to 2,769, up from 2,565 in 2023. Their combined wealth surged from $13 trillion to $15 trillion in just 12 months. This is the second-largest annual increase in billionaire wealth since records began.
The wealth of the world’s ten richest men grew on average by almost $100 million a day and even if they lost 99 per cent of their wealth overnight, they would remain billionaires.
Anna Marriott, Oxfam Inequality Policy Lead said “Last year we predicted the first trillionaire could emerge within a decade, but this shocking acceleration of wealth means that the world is now on course for at least five. The global economic system is broken, wholly unfit for purpose as it enables and perpetuates this explosion of riches, while nearly half of humanity continues to live in poverty.
“The UK Government should be prioritising economic policies that bring down inequality and crucially, start supporting higher taxation on the super-rich. Huge sums of money could be raised, to tackle inequality here in the UK and overseas and provide crucial investment for our public services. For the first time, with the groundbreaking G20 agreement to cooperate on taxing the world’s super-rich, there is genuine momentum to implement fairer taxation globally. The UK should champion this opportunity to help build more equal societies at home and abroad.”
The report examines 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. It shines a light on how, contrary to popular perception, billionaire wealth is largely unearned. Oxfam’s analysis finds that 60 per cent of billionaire wealth globally now comes from inheritance, monopoly power or crony connections – between the richest and governments. In the UK, 37 per cent of billionaire wealth is derived from cronyism, 15 per cent from monopolies – both highest among G7 countries – and seven per cent from inheritance.
Many of the super-rich, particularly in Europe, owe part of their wealth to historical colonialism and the exploitation of poorer countries. This dynamic of wealth extraction persists today; vast sums of money still flow from the Global South to countries in the Global North and their richest citizens, in what Oxfam describes as modern-day colonialism:
