2025 Is Shaping up to Be a Banner Year for Global Oligarchs

The ranks of global billionaires has grown by 247 in the past year, bringing up the total worldwide to 3,028, according to Forbes’ annual survey of the wealthy published April 1.

The combined wealth of the nine-figure club is now $16.1 trillion, up $2 trillion from a year ago.

There are 902 billionaires in the United States as of the newest survey, up from 813 in 2024. However, the Forbes data release is dated March 7, 2025, and there has been significant market volatility since then.

There are now three billionaires in America with more than $200 billion in estimated wealth: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos.

And there are 15 billionaires with more than $100 billion each and combined wealth of $2.4 trillion. For comparison, that’s more wealth than the “poorest” 1,500 billionaires combined.

The oligarchy continues to rig the rules of the economy to get more wealth and power, meaning we should anticipate the first trillionaire within a decade.

As Forbes observes about Donald Trump: “He’s giving the billionaire class more control over the government than ever before. His right-hand man is the planet’s richest person. His administration includes at least ten billionaires and billionaire spouses.”

Trump — who Forbes fawningly calls “America’s billionaire-in-chief” — saw his personal fortune more than double over the last year, from $2.3 billion to $5.1 billion. Forbes reports that “before moving back into the White House, [Trump] padded his cash piled with a very lucrative move into crypto. Between that and his Trump Media & Technology Group going public just after Forbes locked in its 2024 rankings, the president’s net worth has more than doubled.”

The top four billionaires are U.S. nationals, and their individual wealth are:

1. Elon Musk of Tesla/X and SpaceX with $342 billion (up from $252.5 billion in September 2024, but down from $428 billion on January 1, 2025). It’s worth noting that prior to the 2020 pandemic, Musk’s wealth was valued just under $25 billion.
2. Mark Zuckerberg of Meta with $216 billion, up from $113 billion from the 2020 survey.
3. Jeff Bezos of Amazon with $215. billion.
4. Larry Ellison of Oracle fame with $192 billion.

This is what oligarchy looks like!