China Still Grows the Most Billionaires
But Western Europe, surprisingly, isn’t that far behind.
A few months ago, there were serious discussions in the US regarding who would become the world’s first trillionaire, with most predicting it would be a Magnificent 7 grandee.
Elon Musk of Tesla and two other companies with X in their names, was mentioned as a popular choice to lead the pack, a little more than a century after John D. Rockefeller became the first billionaire in 1916.
Sound of Ticker Tape
Enter the rough and tumble of Trump 2.0’s stop-and-go tariffs and a substantial market correction that has lopped 40 percent off Tesla’s market value and you can almost hear ticker tape spooling unread onto a barren 20th century trading floor.
Ironically, the more than $800 billion in market capitalization the EV maker is down by is roughly the same number Musk is trying to save in the first year as federal government job and cost-cutter in chief at DOGE.
A While Yet
It seems like a good old case of what the right hand gives, the left hand takes away. Still, it will be a while before we talk about the world’s first trillionaire, and Musk himself may have become one of history’s also-rans, at least in that context.
But let’s return to the more comfortable and well-trodden space of the mere billionaire set. The conventional wisdom here is, again, that the US and tech have been the world’s leader in that respect, particularly after things went quiet in China at the outset of the real estate crisis.
China First
A graphic released Monday by the Visual Capitalist, however, shows that this is far from the truth.
The number of billionaires in China has risen by 25 between 2015 and 2024, and the growth still leads the rest of the world by a long shot.
Doubling of Wealth
According to them, the total number of billionaires in China is now 501, with their collective wealth doubling since 2015.
Surprisingly, Western Europe comes second, showing the number up by 20 in the same period. The US is only in third place, with the number of individuals with ten digits to their name up by only 13, barely in front of the Middle East and North Africa, where they rose by 8.
Surge in Wealth
That latter region has also done the best in the last five years, with the UAE seeing a 39.5 percent surge in billionaire wealth between 2023 and 2024 alone.
But US President Donald Trump, as he says, is just getting started with trying to tear down the postwar Pax Americana. For the ultra-high net worth, and the rest of us, that means it will be pretty hard to guess from where the next decade’s billionaires will be coming from.
