Global Billionaire Wealth Hits Record $15.1 Trillion as AI Boom Widens the Gap at the Very Top

The world added a record number of billionaires last year, and the AI boom is the biggest reason why.

Altrata's Billionaire Census 2026, released August 27, counted 3,795 billionaires globally in 2025, up 8.2% from the year before. That's the fastest growth rate in five years, according to the report. A net 287 people joined the billionaire class, and the population has grown nearly 60% over the past decade.

Combined billionaire wealth hit $15.1 trillion in 2025, up 12.8% from 2024, Altrata found. InvestmentNews notes that figure equals roughly a quarter of the entire S&P 500's market capitalization. Fortune calculated it's close to half the size of the $32.5 trillion U.S. economy, per the St. Louis Fed, and nearly 30% of the combined GDP of the G7 nations, per the IMF.

AI Is Doing the Heavy Lifting

Altrata's director of research and analytics, Maeen Shaban, told Fortune that AI investment is the single biggest driver behind the numbers. Altrata tracked the 150 publicly listed companies that hold the most billionaire wealth and split them into two groups: those with meaningful AI investment since 2023, and those without. The AI group beat the rest by 23% in market cap growth across 2024 and 2025 combined.

Shaban cautioned against treating that number as a clean measure of "AI wealth," since some billionaires built AI companies from scratch while others just used the technology to cut costs elsewhere.

The Top Is Pulling Away From Everyone Else

The clearest sign of concentration sits at the very top. Altrata counts 29 "superbillionaires," people worth more than $50 billion each, who together hold $4.1 trillion, or 27.2% of all billionaire wealth. In 2017, only 10 people held that status, and they controlled just 7.2% of the total, according to the report. AzerNews and InvestmentNews both flagged that the superbillionaire share has nearly quadrupled in eight years, with most of the jump coming in just the last two.

The report notes that sharp swings in AI-exposed tech stocks are now a structural feature of markets, meaning the paper wealth held by the ultra-rich, much of it tied up in equity stakes in AI-linked companies, can move fast in both directions.

The average billionaire fortune is $4 billion; the median is closer to $2 billion, according to Altrata, a gap that itself shows how lopsided the wealth is even within the billionaire class.

Geography: America Widens Its Lead

The United States added billionaires faster than almost anywhere else, rising 11.5% to 1,265, more than three times China's count, according to Altrata. North America overall grew 11.6% to 1,337 billionaires, a 35% share of the global total. Europe grew nearly 8% to 1,081, and Asia grew 6.5% to 881. Germany posted the fastest growth among the top 15 countries, at 20%.

New York added 12 billionaires to reach 164, and Singapore and San Francisco grew at a similar clip. Hong Kong and London were the only two of the top 15 cities to lose billionaires, according to Fortune's reporting on the census.

Who They Are, and Where the Money Goes Next

One in five billionaires was born outside the country where they now live, per Altrata, though that varies wildly by city: 60% of London's billionaires are foreign-born, compared with 19% in New York and 41% in San Francisco. The average billionaire is 71 years old, only 9% are under 50, and women make up just 13% of the group. Only 8% inherited their entire fortune.

That's about to shift. Altrata projects $6.6 trillion in billionaire wealth will pass to roughly 5,000 heirs over the next decade, including more than 1,235 spouses, with heirs averaging 48 years old.

The Wealth Tax Fight Reignites

The concentration numbers are already fueling a familiar political fight. Florida Senate candidate Angie Nixon has proposed a federal asset registry and a 5% annual wealth tax on billionaires, according to the Daily Wire. Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is pushing a 7–8% annual wealth tax on the rich, and California's Billionaire Tax Act proposes a 5% levy on billionaires' net worth. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have pushed similar ideas for years.

Proponents of these plans point to exactly the kind of data Altrata just published: a small group of 29 people now controls more than a quarter of all billionaire wealth, up from 7.2% less than a decade ago. Their argument is that taxing that concentration funds public priorities without touching middle-class paychecks, since the group targeted is by definition a tiny fraction of the population.

The Daily Wire's opinion desk counters that similar attempts have consistently backfired throughout history. It cites England's 1662 hearth tax, which led homeowners to brick up fireplaces and produced worse indoor smoke and more house fires, and the 1696 window tax, which caused people to board up windows and contributed to poor ventilation and vitamin D deficiencies. It also points to the 1990s federal luxury tax on boats over $100,000, which the piece says cost roughly 19,000 boatbuilding jobs while raising almost no revenue because buyers simply stopped ordering new boats or bought used and foreign models instead.

None of the current wealth tax proposals, federal or state, have passed into law. Whether a modern wealth tax on billionaire net worth, most of which sits in equity rather than cash, would trigger the same kind of avoidance behavior the Daily Wire describes, or whether the scale and mobility of today's billionaire class make comparisons to 17th-century window taxes a stretch, remains untested and unresolved.