Global Billionaire Count Surged 13% in 2025 as Median Wealth Fell in Most Countries, UBS Report Finds
Global personal wealth expanded by 10.8% in 2025, the fastest annual pace since 2017 and the third consecutive year of growth, according to the UBS Global Wealth Report 2026, released Tuesday. The report — the most comprehensive annual accounting of personal wealth, drawing on data from 56 markets representing more than 92% of global wealth — found that nearly one million new US dollar millionaires were created during the year, at a rate of approximately 2,680 per day. More than 440,000 of those new millionaires were American, meaning the United States was responsible for close to half of the global increase. The United Kingdom added more than 43,000 new millionaires, while France, Spain, Japan, and India each added more than 30,000.
At the apex of the wealth pyramid, the gains were even more striking. UBS identified 3,302 US dollar billionaires globally — an increase of 383 individuals, or roughly 13.1%, compared to the prior year. As The Guardian reported, UBS economist James Mazeau attributed a substantial portion of billionaire wealth gains to the AI boom in equity markets, with billionaires' wealth growing by 25% on average in the year to April, compared with an average rise of 10.8% in personal wealth globally. The World Inequality Report 2026 added a sharper structural indictment: just 56,000 ultra-wealthy individuals — the top 0.001% — now control more wealth than the poorest four billion people on Earth combined, with their share of global wealth having nearly doubled since 1995.
The aggregate figures, however, obscure a more troubling dynamic at the level of typical households. UBS reported that median wealth — a measure more representative of ordinary adults than the arithmetic mean — actually fell in the majority of the 56 markets it tracked, even as mean wealth surged. Fortune's analysis of the UBS data illustrated this divide with particular clarity in the American context: while average wealth per US adult stands at approximately $696,000, making Americans the second-wealthiest people per capita in the world after Switzerland, the median American ranked only 28th globally in wealth terms, with roughly $69,000 in net assets — poorer at the median than the Portuguese, British, Slovenians, and Irish. UBS chief economist Paul Donovan acknowledged that while a broadening global middle class remains a meaningful positive trend, wealth inequality is becoming more visible.
The political fallout from this divergence is accelerating. In California, unions have gathered more than 1.5 million signatures to place a one-time 5% billionaire wealth tax on the November ballot, according to Axios. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has championed a concept of universal basic compute in place of cash transfers, arguing that giving citizens access to AI's productive power addresses the structural cause of inequality rather than its symptoms. OpenAI also published a New Deal-style policy blueprint in April proposing a public wealth fund, taxes on AI-driven returns, and a four-day workweek. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei made a pragmatic argument in a January essay for billionaires to support higher taxes on AI wealth, a position echoed in different registers by politicians from Senator Elizabeth Warren to California Governor Gavin Newsom, who cautioned Democrats not to ignore the populist forces building around AI-driven inequality.
The economic context makes the inequality debate not merely philosophical but urgent for policymakers. With the OECD projecting G20 consumer price inflation at 4.0% in 2026 — up from 3.4% in 2025 — and UNCTAD warning that high prices continue to erode real incomes particularly for low-income households through food, energy, and housing costs, the gap between asset-rich and wage-dependent households is widening in real purchasing power terms, not merely in nominal wealth statistics. Chinese hedge funds have separately warned that the AI-driven bull market in global equities may represent an unsustainable bubble, a risk that would disproportionately deflate the paper wealth of the newly minted millionaire class while leaving the underlying structural inequalities intact. How governments respond — through wealth taxes, AI levies, or transfers — will define both the fiscal and social contract of the decade ahead.