Elon Musk earns as much in four seconds as the average person worldwide earns in a year.Image: keystone
There are more and more billionaires in the world – and their wealth is growing rapidly. The aid and development organization Oxfam has published an explosive report on assets worldwide.
01/19/2026, 01:01Jan 19, 2026, 10:14 am
The wealth of billionaires grew faster in 2025 with growth of 16 percent than in the previous five years. The increase in wealth corresponds to almost the entire wealth of the poorer half of the world’s population.
The wealth of the approximately 3,000 super-rich grew by $2.5 trillion and has reached a new high with total assets of $18.3 trillion. This is what the report shows “Resisting the Rule of the Rich” by the aid organization Oxfam, which was published on Monday at the start of the World Economic Forum in Davos GR.
Billions in wealth worldwide
In billions of US dollars
Source: Forbes annual and real-time billionaires list
Since March 2020, the total wealth of billionaires has increased by 81 percent, or $8.2 trillion, adjusted for inflation. The twelve richest people now have more money than the poorest half of the world’s population, which is more than four billion people.
In Switzerland, 41 billionaires have total assets of around 197 billion francs. In 2025 alone, this wealth grew by 14.6 billion francs. A comparison shows how big the imbalance is: a billionaire needs an average of 107 minutes to earn as much as an average person in Switzerland does in a whole year.
Entrepreneur Elon Musk is the richest man in the world. He earns as much in four seconds as the global average person earns in a year, wrote Oxfam. Almost half of the world’s population lives in poverty, living on less than $8.30 a day. He would have to give away more than $4,500 per second for his wealth to shrink.
Further Oxfam research revealed:
- The four richest men – Elon Musk, Larry Page, Larry Ellison and Jeff Bezos – are worth more than all the cows in the world combined.
- The world’s billionaires could buy more than 600 billion “Labubu blind boxes” – it would take almost six million years to unpack them all. (Blind Boxes are randomly packaged Labubu collectible figures.)
- Billionaires earn an average of $6,000 during a 20-minute power nap and $145,000 during an eight-hour sleep.
“We are in the era of billionaires – and that is not a good sign for the world,” comments Charlotte Becker, CEO of Oxfam Germany. It is particularly worrying that the economic power of the super-rich is increasingly reflected in political power and is undermining democracy: “We see this, for example, in the USA, where the billionaire Donald Trump is fueling inequality with his pro-rich agenda, with global consequences,” said Becker.
The wealth figures for the super-rich are based on the November 2025 Forbes billionaires list and the poverty figures come from the World Bank in Washington. (pre/sda)