Davos Report

Billionaire fortunes have grown at a rate three times faster than the previous five years since the election of Donald Trump in November 2024. While US billionaires have seen the sharpest growth in their fortunes, billionaires in the rest of the world have also seen double digit increases. 

Billionaire wealth has risen three times faster in 2024 than 2023. Five trillionaires are now expected within a decade.

Since 2020, the richest five men in the world have doubled their fortunes. During the same period, almost five billion people globally have become poorer. Hardship and hunger are a daily reality for many people worldwide.

We are living through an unprecedented moment of multiple crises. Tens of millions more people are facing hunger. Hundreds of millions more face impossible rises in the cost of basic goods or heating their homes.

Inequality, already extreme before COVID-19, has reached new levels. There is an urgent need for governments to implement highly progressive taxation measures that in turn must be used to invest in powerful and proven measures to reduce inequalities.

Widening inequalities are tearing our world apart. This is not by chance, but choice: “economic violence” is perpetrated when structural policy choices are made for the richest and most powerful people. But we can radically redesign our economies to be centered on equality, in which nobody lives in poverty, nor with unimaginable billionaire wealth—in which inequality no longer kills.

The coronavirus crisis has exposed our collective frailty and the inability of our deeply unequal economy to work for all. Yet it has also shown us the vital importance of government action to protect our health and livelihoods, and to create a more equal and sustainable world. 

Economic inequality is based on a flawed and sexist economic system that values the wealth of the privileged few, mostly men, more than the billions of hours of the most essential work – the unpaid and underpaid care work done primarily by women and girls around the world. This has to change.

We need to transform our economies to deliver universal health, education and other public services. To make this possible, the richest people and corporations should pay their fair share of tax. This will drive a dramatic reduction in the gap between rich and poor and between women and men.

Dangerous, poorly paid work for the many is supporting extreme wealth for the few. Women are in the worst work, and almost all the super-rich are men. Governments must create a more equal society by prioritizing ordinary workers and small-scale food producers instead of the rich and powerful.