“Last year alone there were 41 new billionaires created in the United States,
but 36 also dropped out of billionaire status in the U. S. Our billionaire population is growing but only by a net of five.”
In the United States, Mr. Mathews said, most people fall off the billionaire list because they sell the company that created their wealth.
Across the billionaire spectrum, the biggest proportion of billionaires’ wealth — about half — is in the business
that created the wealth in the first place, according to Wealth-X’s research.
Of course, people who sell their $1 billion company
and end up with $500 million after taxes — or whose wealth tops out at $800 million — aren’t scraping by.
“We know that things are quite different for a billionaire individual or a billionaire family than they are for even a very wealthy
ultra-high-net-worth family,” said Belinda Sneddon, national practice executive in the family office group at U. S. Trust.
“It is obscene for so much wealth to be held in the hands of so few when one in 10 people survive
on less than $2 a day,” Winnie Byanyima, executive director of Oxfam, said in a statement.
A recent report from Oxfam International, the antipoverty charity, argued
that eight billionaires had as much wealth as half of the world’s population — or 3.6 billion people — and that that was a travesty.
“Once a billionaire doesn’t mean you’ll stay a billionaire,” Mr. Mathews of UBS said.
The top 10 — nine from the United States, one from Spain — have a combined net worth of $582 billion.
