2,100 billionaires lost a combined $388 billion in ’18
More billionaires walk the earth than ever before, their ranks surging 40% in five years, new research shows.
The world’s 2,100 billionaires saw their fortunes swell 34.5% from 2013 to 2018, to $8.5 trillion, according to UBS’s 2019 Billionaire Insights report released Friday. But 2018 was actually a losing year for most of them, thanks to global trade friction and stock market volatility. They lost a combined $388 billion.
Tech billionaires bucked that trend, growing their wealth by 3.4%, or $1.3 trillion, in 2018, according to the report. They’ve nearly doubled their ranks the past five years, from 76 to 148 in 2018,
“If tech billionaires’ wealth were a country, it would rank second only to the US,” the report said. “Looking back over five years, tech billionaires have driven almost a third of the growth in billionaire wealth. US tech billionaires accounted for more than half of that growth.”
UBS is one of the world’s largest wealth managers with close to 1,000 billionaire clients.
But the burgeoning roster of the super-rich feeds into a wider debate about income inequality, which has become a signature issue for presidential hopefuls Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.
The number of female billionaires has skyrocketed the past five years, climbing 46% to 233. Their collective wealth grew to $871 billion, led by progress in Asia, according to the report.
Asia has seen some of the greatest advances in wealth and is now home to more than a third of the world’s billionaires, their fortunes totaling $2.5 trillion. China recently surpassed the United States for the first time in claiming the largest share of the world’s richest people.
But China’s ultrawealthy have been hammered by the nation’s cooling economic growth, market fluctuations and weakening yuan; their net worth declined by 12.3% in 2018.
Sanders and Warren have made taxing billionaires prominent features of their presidential campaigns. Warren this week released a billionaire calculator to help the ultrawealthy see how much they’d have left under her plan, which would impose an annual 2% tax on households with more than $50 million in assets and a 6% levy on fortunes in excess of $1 billion.