“Last year alone there were 41 new billionaires created in the United States,<br />but 36 also dropped out of billionaire status in the U. S. Our billionaire population is growing but only by a net of five.”<br />In the United States, Mr. Mathews said, most people fall off the billionaire list because they sell the company that created their wealth.<br />Across the billionaire spectrum, the biggest proportion of billionaires’ wealth — about half — is in the business<br />that created the wealth in the first place, according to Wealth-X’s research.<br />Of course, people who sell their $1 billion company<br />and end up with $500 million after taxes — or whose wealth tops out at $800 million — aren’t scraping by.<br />“We know that things are quite different for a billionaire individual or a billionaire family than they are for even a very wealthy<br />ultra-high-net-worth family,” said Belinda Sneddon, national practice executive in the family office group at U. S. Trust.<br />“It is obscene for so much wealth to be held in the hands of so few when one in 10 people survive<br />on less than $2 a day,” Winnie Byanyima, executive director of Oxfam, said in a statement.<br />A recent report from Oxfam International, the antipoverty charity, argued<br />that eight billionaires had as much wealth as half of the world’s population — or 3.6 billion people — and that that was a travesty.<br />“Once a billionaire doesn’t mean you’ll stay a billionaire,” Mr. Mathews of UBS said.<br />The top 10 — nine from the United States, one from Spain — have a combined net worth of $582 billion.
