The world’s billionaire club is getting a little less exclusive. A total of 155 men and women broke the billion-dollar threshold this year, according to the 2014 Billionaire Census from Wealth-X, a Singapore-based research firm, and the Swiss bank UBS. The report was released Wednesday. The worldwide population of those with wealth exceeding $1 billion has grown to 2,325, up 7% from last year.
The typical billionaire has about $3.1 billion, is male, about 63 years old, and owns four properties, each worth an average of more than $23.5 million. Their average wealth grew by 4.4% this year. Nearly 90% are married and on average they have two kids. Most did not break the billionaire mark until their late 40s. Just 286 of the world’s billionaires are women.
The combined wealth of these billionaires increased last year by 12% to a staggering $7.3 trillion. To put that in perspective, the figure is higher than the combined market capitalization of all the companies that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI), according to Wealth-X and UBS.
Yahoo Finance Senior Columnist Michael Santoli says the growth of extreme wealth at one end of the global economy is nothing new. He says, “It’s really the result of globalization and bigger and bigger markets for entrepreneurs, for investors, and for people who have assets and are building capital.”
The record-breaking rise of the extremely rich isn’t necessarily the result of global equity markets breaking records of their own. Santoli says this is “not strictly a kind of on-paper effect.” He says many of these men and women are becoming extremely wealthy by ‘’building private empires of businesses.”
According to the UBS and Wealth-X study, most billionaires are self-made. More than half made their fortunes on their own. About 87% have at least partly done so. Santoli points out that this isn’t uncommon because it is “hard to keep up successive generations of billionaires.” He points to the Walton family in the U.S., founders of Wal-Mart (WMT), as a rare exception and says most wealth creation happens “through a sort of one-time bonanza, selling a company for a billion dollars, or basically through slowly building a business.”
The U.S. leads the way with the highest number of billionaires. 57 of the newly-minted billionaires are American. New York is the city with the highest concentration of billionaires—103 billionaires live in the Big Apple. Moscow is second with 85, followed by Hong Kong, London and Beijing.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/world-s-billionaire-population-growing-153248898.html
