Just 0.001% hold three times the wealth of poorest half of humanity, report finds

https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2025/dec/10/just-0001-hold-three-times-the-wealth-of-poorest-half-of-humanity-report-finds

41 Comments

  1. Cynical_Classicist on

    This is why a lot of us feel that billionaires shouldn’t exist. It is utterly ridiculous.

  2. there are two sides to this- one is the grand accumulation of wealth among few, which is deserving of criticism, but the other which isn’t so often mentioned is the endless population growth of people who, on paper, already completely lack the means to support themselves and others. that is a worse generational injustice in my opinion

  3. Of the known wealth nonetheless.
    We don’t even know some of the wealthiest individuals in the world, especially autocrats ore high-level functionaries in countries like China and Russia are extremely wealthy without any public disclosure.

    Besides that I’m pretty sure there’re many ultra-wealthy people out there who just happen to be a heir.

  4. Fromundacheese0 on

    Instead of saying billionaires shouldn’t exist you should be more critical of the nations that allow billionaires to exploit their borderline slave labor

  5. RobespierreLaTerreur on

    But what’s *really* enraging is gender neutral bathrooms.

    Look, an illegal alien behind you!

  6. Whenever I see posts like this where it’s “The top X number of people have more money than the bottom 50%.” I’d love to know what % is the midway point (ie the top X% = the bottom (100-X)%)

  7. I’m honestly just confused by the endgame here. Clearly no amount of money and power is enough so what is the plan? 

  8. Difficult_Bad1064 on

    This is the end game of capitalism. It’s worked well to promote growth up until now but ultimately it funnels wealth to a minority.

  9. OtisDriftwood1978 on

    The wealthy class shouldn’t exist. No one needs, deserves or should have millions and billions of dollars.

  10. DarkIllusionsMasks on

    So ~700,000 people are three times as rich as the rest of the 7 billion or so people on earth combined. Yeah, no problem there.

  11. Income taxes should be progressive, such as lower tax percent for low income and modest tax percent for middle income and high tax percent for high income and take 100% of tax for income over a million per year. And for wealth, if you have more than a billion, the government should take a certain percent of what you own and sell it to the market. And property taxes should be progressive.

    Unfortunately tariffs are regressive tax that most of the middle and low income pay. And for the past 30 years, incomes and wealth have continued to grow at an accelerating rate regardless of political party. It looks like it will continue until we create a new political party to force the two existing parties to change their policy, or maybe there will have to be a revolution.

  12. This is article has bad math. World population is closer to 8 billion not 6. Means 80,000 people not 60,000.

  13. Intelligent_Radish15 on

    So basically 1/100,000 holds 3 times more than the bottom 50,000/100,000 combined. That makes me want to puke.

  14. But this is capitalism working as intended. The big fish eats the smaller fish. At the end of the game, one person will own *everything*.

    And this is what baffles me. Throughout human history, whatever fucking system people came up with, always lead to this shit. Call it pharaoh, ceasar, king, despot, first secretary, president, billionaire, whatever. The masses always chose one asshole to own and rule everything.

    Whyyyyyyy?!

  15. I wanted to know if I was interpreting this headline correctly, so I checked the math and used GPT to help convert it into a visual. We landed on a 100,000-seat football stadium where one person represents the 0.001%. The final image actually explains the scale better than the article did.[Visualizing the headline: 0.001% holding 3× the wealth of the poorest half](https://imgur.com/a/Wvt9TrV)

  16. Hooray for Bill Gates who is in that top 0.001% and has promised to give away the very very large portion of that wealth to help the global poor. Guinea Worm has almost been entirely eradicated thanks to his wealth, and significant other progress has been made against some of the worst parasites affecting the global poor.

  17. Protean_Protein on

    Well, yeah, if you add up the wealth of the richest 10 guys, it’s equivalent to the total GDP of multiple developing nations.

  18. hairyglockenspiel on

    Remember when that journalist uncovered evidence of vast amounts of tax fraud and corruption by the uber rich, then she was legit assassinated and nothing happened?

  19. That would be a reckoning of wealth in accountants’ terms. But what value does the *Grauniad* attach to culture and tradition, family connections, village life, self-sufficiency, art and song and dance, legend?

    Simple people who have these things are richer than American billionaires whose boredom with their lives & wives is evident in every one of their acts.

  20. YurpeeTheHerpee on

    What happens if we take the .001% out? They cheated to get there, broke the law, etc. They get no protection from society. Fuck em.