A look at how the super-rich have gained outsized economic power and how wealth ought to be redistributed.
Does it feel like you’re hearing more about billionaires than ever before? You’re not wrong—billionaires are on the rise.
In 2025, there were more than 3,000 billionaires in the world, and Elon Musk is well on his way to becoming the world’s first trillionaire. In the last year alone, the world saw 340 new billionaires. Here in the U.S., billionaires have seen the sharpest growth in their fortunes. The 10 richest U.S. billionaires gained nearly $700 billion dollars in the last year.
Billionaires are gaining political power. When President Trump was sworn into office a second time, billionaire tech CEOs had a front seat at the inauguration. His Cabinet includes multiple billionaires who have been setting policies in favor of the wealthy, and for a time the world’s richest man was empowered to cut essential government programs that people rely on.
“2025 was a banner year for billionaires,” said Rebecca Riddell, senior policy lead for economic justice at Oxfam America. As billionaire fortunes skyrocketed, the rest of us have struggled to keep up with rising costs of groceries, housing, child care, and health care. In 2025, the world’s 12 richest men owned more wealth than half of humanity. This level of inequality is alarming. How did we get here and what can we do to redistribute wealth?
How does corporate power fuel billionaire fortunes?
In 2024, Oxfam released the report “Inequality Inc.: How corporate power divides our world” that broke down how corporations—using tactics such as squeezing workers, dodging taxes, and privatizing the public sector—were driving inequality and delivering ever-greater wealth to their rich owners. We warned then that without government checks in place, we would enter an age of “billionaire supremacy.”
Now, two years later, the world’s super-rich have accumulated more wealth than could ever be spent.
Here’s how corporations are making the ultra-rich even richer:
- Corporations lobby—either directly or through trade associations—for the interests of their wealthy owners and shareholders to maximize profits. In 2024, companies associated with the 10 richest men in the world spent $88 million lobbying in the U.S.
- Instead of investing profits in workers and communities, profits are enjoyed by the super-rich, who own a vastly disproportionate share of the stock market In the U.S., for instance, 95% of the profits made by large health care corporations are transferred to shareholders, rather than going to higher wages for workers or long-term investments in companies.
- Large corporations around the world are using their political and economic influence to try to block progressive tax reforms and profit from privatization.
How do workers pay the price for corporate profits?
When corporations tip the economic scales in favor of billionaire interests, it’s workers who end up suffering. Major corporations often use their influence to oppose labor laws and policies that benefit workers, for example by fighting minimum wage increases, while pushing for restrictions on unionization, and even supporting rollbacks to child labor laws. In analyzing the World Benchmarking Alliance’s data on over 1,600 of the largest and most influential companies, Oxfam found that only 0.4% were publicly committed to paying their workers a living wage.
Consequences of a global economy favoring billionaires:
- Forced labor: In 2022, an estimated 17.3 million people in the private sector were in forced labor.
- Workers’ rights violations: In 2023, the International Trade Union Confederation found a decade-long increase in violations, including widespread violations of collective bargaining, as well as violence against and even the murder of trade unionists and workers.
- Falling wages: 791 million workers saw their wages fail to keep up with inflation between 2021 and 2023, resulting in nearly a month (25 days) of lost wages per worker.
The global inequality divide in numbers
In this era of extreme inequality, billionaires thrive while the rest try to weather multiple global crises. Some have even taken advantage of these crises to increase their wealth. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, while inequality increased globally, pharmaceutical monopolies were raking in profits. Even though much of their research was publicly funded, companies were threatening to withdraw investments from countries if they supported the movement to waive intellectual property protections and make vaccines and treatments more accessible for all.
We continue to see sectors from education and food to health care and housing become privatized and financialized, while public services are cut, all of which have contributed to rising costs. “Our societies feel more toxic today because they demonstrably are, but not always for the reasons we’re being told,” said Oxfam International Executive Director Amitabh Behar. “The outsized influence that the super-rich have over our politicians, economies and media has deepened inequality and led us far off track on tackling poverty.”
Here’s how the numbers break down:
- Since 2020, billionaire wealth has skyrocketed while reduction in poverty has largely ground to a halt.
- If you took the total amount of wealth gained by the world’s billionaires over the last year and gave every person in the world $250, billionaires would still have $500 billion left over.
- Between 1989 and 2022, the increase in wealth of a household at the top 1% in the U.S. was 100 times greater than the increase in wealth for the median household.
Take Action: Demand wealth taxes now
We know that deepening inequality is the direct result of political choices favoring the ultra-wealthy and powerful over workers and ordinary families. We could tip the balance back if governments were willing to tax the ultra-rich.
A small redistribution of wealth would make a huge difference. For instance, if you were to take just 65% of last year’s $2.5 trillion rise in billionaire wealth, that would be enough to end global poverty for a year. And in the U.S. alone, a modest wealth tax on multimillionaires and billionaires—at a rate of 1% for fortunes over $10 million, 3% for fortunes over $100 million, and 5% for fortunes over $100 billion—could raise an estimated $414 billion to invest in social programs and fighting poverty.
Taxing the super-rich is a popular policy proposition. When polled, the majority of Americans are in favor of higher taxes on corporations and ultra-wealthy. Even some millionaires are in favor of greater taxation. A recent poll of nearly 4,000 millionaire respondents from G20 countries found that nearly 65% of them support higher taxes for the super-rich.
Now that you’ve learned how we got here, what can you do to make sure billionaires’ wealth doesn’t go unchecked? One way you can take action is to join the movement for an equal future. Join us as we call on Congress to end Trump’s tax giveaway to mega-corporations and billionaires.
