The fortunes of billionaires have more than doubled globally in nearly ten years, showing higher growth than the stock markets, according to a study by UBS, for which this enrichment is mainly due to billionaires in the technology sector.
Between 2015 and 2024, the cumulative fortune of billionaires increased by 121%, from $6.3 trillion in 2015 to $14 trillion in 2024, the Swiss bank said in a press release on Thursday.
Their fortunes have therefore increased more than the MSCI AC World index, used to measure the evolution of stock markets globally. During the same period, this index recorded an increase of 73%.
During these ten years, the number of billionaires in the world increased from 1757 to 2682, the peak having been reached in 2021 with 2686 billionaires. “Since then, it has remained stable,” specifies the bank, a large part of which focuses on wealth management.
The bank therefore regularly publishes a study on the expectations of billionaires and takes stock of the evolution of their assets for this tenth edition.
Around the world
According to this study, the fortunes of Chinese billionaires more than doubled between 2015 and 2020 to reach $2.1 trillion, but then declined to $1.8 trillion.
North American billionaires, on the other hand, continued to see their fortune increase throughout this decade, with an increase of more than half between 2015 and 2020, then 58.5% between 2020 and 2024 to 6.1 trillion dollars.
In Western Europe, their wealth increased from 1,500 to 2,100 billion dollars between 2015 and 2020, with the rate of growth subsequently slowing. In 2024, the cumulative fortune of billionaires there will amount to 2700 billion dollars.
Despite regional differences, the enrichment of billionaires is largely explained by the “rapid growth” of fortunes accumulated in the technology sector.
The fortune of billionaires in this sector has tripled during this period to reach 2.4 trillion dollars in 2024.
Then come the fortunes linked to industry, which increased from 480.4 billion to 1,300 billion dollars during these ten years.
According to the authors of the study, “the most lagging sector is real estate”. If the evolution in this sector was comparable to that of other billionaires until 2017, fortunes in real estate have “underperformed since then, perhaps due to the real estate correction in China, upheavals in certain parts commercial real estate due to the Covid-19 pandemic and higher interest rates in the United States and Europe,” according to them.
