Collective wealth of top 500 billionaires soared more than $1 trn in 2021

Elon Musk’s wealth soared to levels only ever achieved by John D. Rockefeller. Bill Hwang lost $20 billion in days, Bill Gates—once the world’s richest man—divorced under a Jeffrey Epstein cloud. For the wealthiest people on the planet, 2021 was a year of enormous gains, extreme losses and unprecedented scrutiny. Mostly, it was a good time to be a multibillionaire. Soaring equity markets and rising valuations of everything from mansions to crypto to commodities boosted the collective fortune of the world’s 500 richest people by more than $1 trillion even as the Covid-19 pandemic roiled the globe for a second year.
 
The gains mean there are now a record 10 fortunes in excess of $100 billion, more than 200 above $10 billion and Musk reached the level of riches, inflation-adjusted,achieved by modern history’s wealthiest person. The combined net worths on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index now exceeds $8.4 trillion, more than the GDP of all countries except the U.S. and China.
 
The enormous fortunes amassed by the 0.001% also underscored how the uneven recovery from the economic shock of Covid-19 has become more entrenched. As the very richest benefited from bumper markets and loose fiscal policy, the pandemic pushed as many as 150 million people into extreme poverty, according to World Bank estimates, a number that stands to increase if inflation continues to rise.  

“Since the mid-1990s, the share of wealth held by the global richest .01% has risen from around 7% to 11%,” said Lucas Chancel, co-director of the World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics. “The crisis did not reverse this trend. It slightly amplified it.”

From Washington to Moscow to Beijing, lawmakers ratcheted up rhetoric around the ultra-affluent, vowing to hike taxes and close loopholes in response to public pressure and drained budgets. In October U.S. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden unveiled a proposed levy specifically aimed at 10-digit fortunes.

The billionaires tax though quickly drew scorn from the likes of Musk, and disappeared within days. An earlier proposal pitched by President Joe Biden to raise taxes on inheritances and almost double those on capital gains, a prime source of income for many billionaires, also withered. Senator Joe Manchin’s objection to the Build Back Better plan could rule out higher taxes of any kind for the rich in the near future.

It was a different story in China. The country’s financial elite had their worst year since Bloomberg began tracking wealth in 2012, losing $61 billion as Beijing attacked big tech and promoted “common prosperity.” Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Jack Ma disappeared from the public stage and real estate moguls shed $35 billion amid a spiraling debt crunch that’s drawn a crackdown from regulators.

No one embodies the squeeze better than China Evergrande Group’s Hui Ka Yan.

Once China’s second-richest person, Hui’s net worth fell by $17 billion this year as his real estate empire slumped under a crushing debt load.