This is according to a new Oxfam report released as the World Economic Forum opened in Davos. Overall, billionaire wealth has risen by 81% since 2020, even as one in four people worldwide struggles to eat regularly and nearly half the global population lives in poverty.
The report, Resisting the Rule of the Rich: Protecting Freedom from Billionaire Power, examines how the super‑rich increasingly use their wealth to shape political and economic systems to their advantage, undermining democracy and worsening inequality.
Oxfam links the latest surge in billionaire wealth partly to policies pursued under the Trump administration in the United States (US), including tax cuts for the wealthy, reversed efforts to regulate monopoly power and a boom in artificial intelligence‑related stocks benefiting the richest investors.
The organisation warns that rising oligarchic influence is a global phenomenon, not one confined to the US.
Key findings show:
- Billionaires’ collective wealth increased by $2.5 trillion last year, almost equal to the total wealth of 4.1 billion people, the poorest half of humanity.
- The number of billionaires surpassed 3 000 for the first time.
- The world’s richest individual, Elon Musk, became the first person to exceed $500 billion in net worth.
- Billionaires are 4 000 times more likely than ordinary people to hold political office.
- The$2.5 trillion rise in billionaire wealth could eliminate extreme poverty 26 times over.
Oxfam International Executive Director Amitabh Behar warned that the widening gap between the rich and the rest is creating a “highly dangerous and unsustainable” political deficit. Nearly half of people surveyed in 66 countries believe the wealthy often buy elections.
Behar said governments were “pandering to the elite” while suppressing public anger over living costs and eroding basic freedoms. Poverty reduction has stalled, with extreme poverty rising again in parts of Africa. Aid cuts worldwide could lead to more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, Oxfam warns.
Civil liberties continue to decline, with 2024 marking the nineteenth consecutive year of shrinking political freedoms. Authorities in many countries responded violently to anti‑government protests.
Oxfam also raises concerns about the concentration of media ownership. Billionaires now control more than half the world’s major media outlets and all main social media platforms, from Elon Musk’s X/Twitter to Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post. In the United Kingdom, four wealthy families control three‑quarters of newspaper circulation.
Women and racialised groups remain vastly underrepresented in global newsrooms, making up just 27% of top editors and 23% of staff respectively, fuelling marginalisation and enabling harmful narratives that scapegoat minorities.
“Our societies feel increasingly toxic because the ultra‑rich hold outsized influence over politicians, media and economies,” Behar said. He urged governments to refocus on people’s needs, from healthcare to climate action and fair taxation.
–Oxfam/ChannelAfrica–
