Devex 159d ago

As the richest pile up trillions, Oxfam warns their growing fortunes are translating into outsized political power. Billionaire wealth has hit a new peak — and last year, the wealth of the world’s richest grew three times faster than ever before. By November 2025, billionaires had accumulated $2.5 trillion more wealth than at the same time in 2024, enough to eradicate extreme poverty 26 times over, according to an analysis released by Oxfam International on Monday. It’s a surge that coincided with not just wealth, but power — with Oxfam reporting that today, billionaires are 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than the average person. “This is happening in a world where 50% of people live in poverty, and one in four actually sleeps hungry,” Amitabh Behar, Oxfam’s executive director, told Devex during the World Economic Forum. Behar spoke about the United States as a core example of that trend, pointing to President Donald Trump — whose net worth rose from $3.9 billion to $7.3 billion between 2024 and 2025, according to a tally published by Forbes last September — and the billionaires who have backed him throughout his presidency. To calculate the growth rate, Oxfam used data from the Forbes real-time billionaire list, adjusting for November 2025 prices. Between November 2024 and November 2025, Oxfam found that billionaire wealth increased from $15.7 trillion to $18.3 trillion when adjusted for inflation, an increase of $2.5 trillion in a single year. That’s a growth rate of 16.2% annually, compared to an average of 4.8% from 2019 to 2024.