In Case You Hadn’t Noticed, Billionaires Are Taking Over the World

A new report from a Swiss wealth management company documents the relentless rise of the global billionaire class. Here are some highlights — translated into plain English.

A luxury sports car and a yacht in Cannes, France. Alex.AF / Flickr


Business or financial reports are often written in a deliberately boosterish style that plays up the sexy stuff — annual profits, growth, “sustainability” — while disguising their more dystopian takeaways. Take the new UBS Billionaires Insights report, which offers the company’s investor audience a genuinely chilling vision of our current world, all laid out in bland, colorless finance-speak. Some of the most interesting bits are translated below.

This report tells the story of a group of 2,158 individuals and counting.

The vast majority of the world’s wealth is owned by a group of people the size of a large school.

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