In 2025, Forbes counted 3,068 billionaires controlling a combined fortune of $17 trillion — more than the total output of the five largest economies in Western Europe and roughly equivalent to China’s annual GDP. That number, staggering in scale, captures the defining dynamic of the past three decades: the rise of winner-takes-all capitalism.
Note: The total wealth of global billionaires rose from 2.1 trillion USD in 1996 to 16.1 trillion USD in 2025 – an increase of 667%, equivalent to 7.3% average annual growth. To put this in perspective, billionaire wealth today is roughly equal to the combined GDP of the five largest economies in Europe. Since 2009, when billionaire wealth stood at 3.9 trillion USD, it has more than quadrupled to 16.1 trillion USD, growing at 8.3% annually. This sustained acceleration highlights how billionaire fortunes have expanded far faster than the global economy.
In 1996, the world’s richest collectively held $2.1 trillion. By 2025, that figure had risen by 667 per cent, an average annual increase of 7.3 per cent — nearly twice the pace of global economic growth. Since the 2008 financial crisis, fortunes have more than quadrupled, expanding at 8.3 per cent a year. The pandemic did not interrupt this trajectory; it accelerated it. Private wealth has become a macroeconomic force in its own right — one that now rivals the economic power of nation-states.
Note: The total wealth of U.S. billionaires increased from 644 billion USD in 1996 to 6,774 billion USD in 2025. This represents a rise of about 952% over the period, with an average annual growth rate of 8.8%. A particularly dramatic surge occurred after the COVID-19 pandemic: between 2015 and 2025, billionaire wealth jumped from 3.69 trillion USD to 6.77 trillion USD – an increase of 84%, equivalent to 6.3% annual growth. This acceleration underscores the resilience and concentration of billionaire wealth in recent years.
No country embodies this transformation more than the United States. In 1996, American billionaires together held $644 billion. By 2025, their collective wealth reached $6.77 trillion — a nine-fold increase, or 8.8 per cent per year. The decade after COVID-19 was particularly explosive. Between 2015 and 2025, U.S. billionaire fortunes swelled by 84 per cent, while the economy as a whole grew at just 2.2 per cent annually. The wealth gap between the richest Americans and the rest of society widened to historic levels.
Corporate profits as a personal pipeline
This pattern is not merely the product of speculative mania or asset inflation. It reflects a deeper shift in the structure of corporate capitalism — a model in which a small group of companies and their founders capture the bulk of global profit growth. Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Jensen Huang exemplify how corporate profits have become the principal conduit for personal enrichment. The firms behind these fortunes — Tesla, Oracle, Meta, Amazon and Nvidia — rank among the most profitable in modern history. Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon alone account for a disproportionate share of global profit growth.
Note: Total after-tax profits of U.S. firms increased from 624 billion USD in 1996 to 1.78 trillion USD in 2024, a growth of 185% over the period (3.9% annually). While the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) could have been expected to boost profits, the COVID-19 shock initially muted this effect. The most dramatic shift came in the immediate rebound: between 2020 and 2021, profits jumped from 1.19 trillion USD to 1.79 trillion USD – a one-year increase of 50%, the sharpest surge in corporate profitability in decades.
Between 1996 and 2024, total after-tax profits of U.S. corporations rose from $624 billion to $1.78 trillion, an increase of 185 per cent. Profit margins in the S&P 500, once cyclical, became structural — averaging around 12 per cent in the post-pandemic years, powered by artificial intelligence, cloud computing and digital advertising. The sharpest jump in modern times came during the COVID rebound, when corporate profits soared from $1.19 trillion in 2020 to $1.79 trillion in 2021, a one-year increase of nearly 50 per cent. No other period since the Second World War has seen such a rapid transfer of income toward capital.
Profit margin captures how much of a company’s revenue is converted into profit — a key indicator of corporate power and value extraction. Across the S&P 500, margins have nearly doubled from 6% in the late 1990s to about 11% in 2025, outpacing both GDP growth and real wage gains. This widening gap signals a structural shift in the political economy of capitalism, where profits increasingly rise faster than productivity or labour income.
The S&P 500 profit margin helps illustrate the pace of this divergence. It reflects how quickly investors and shareholders of the 500 most profitable companies accumulate wealth compared to the broader economy. While profit margins have risen from 6 % in the late 1990s to 11 % in 2025, average GDP growth — a proxy for the pace of wage and income growth — has remained around 2.5 % per year. In other words, corporate profitability has grown roughly twice as fast as the real economy, meaning that capital owners have been accumulating wealth at more than double the rate of workers’ income gains.
The missing link: tax erosion
Much of this profitability reflects market concentration and the rise of the intangible economy. Tech giants enjoy network effects, near-monopoly positions, and light tax burdens on intellectual property. Their soaring share prices have transformed paper profits into immense private wealth. Yet profits alone cannot explain the scale of this accumulation. The missing link is tax policy — or rather, its systematic erosion.
For much of the 20th century, corporate taxation acted as a counterweight to accumulation. The post-war U.S. tax code treated profits as a social resource: firms paid their share, and top marginal rates reached 50 per cent. That era is long gone. Since the mid-1990s, effective corporate tax rates have fallen steadily. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act slashed the statutory federal rate from 35 to 21 per cent, but the deeper effect was to dismantle what little progressivity remained. Before the reform, smaller firms typically paid lower effective rates than the largest multinationals. Afterwards, the hierarchy inverted — in some cases, smaller firms paid more.
Note: This graph shows the evolution of the effective tax rate paid by firms across different profit levels. Until 2017, the tax system was relatively progressive, with smaller firms paying lower effective rates. Following the 2017 US corporate tax reform (Tax Cuts and Jobs Act), differences between groups shrank significantly, with even smaller firms often paying a higher effective tax rate than the largest firms.
Despite record profits, the aggregate corporate tax burden has declined. In 2011, the 500 largest U.S. firms paid a total of $463 billion in corporate taxes; by 2024, that figure had fallen to $362 billion—a drop of more than 20 per cent, even as overall profits soared. This total tax burden combines federal, state, and foreign corporate taxes reported in firms’ financial statements.
Note: This figure shows the total corporate taxes paid by the 500 most profitable U.S. firms, disaggregated by sector. Despite a sharp rise in profitability – particularly within the knowledge sector -the total amount of taxes paid has remained broadly flat since the mid-1990s. In the traditional sector, the trend has even declined slightly over time. This divergence highlights a clear decoupling between profits and taxation: while firms’ earnings after tax have expanded dramatically, their aggregate tax contributions have not kept pace.
Part of the motivation behind the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) was to address the erosion of the U.S. corporate tax base. Through the offshoring of intellectual property and the use of foreign subsidiaries, many corporations had been declaring a growing share of their profits in low-tax jurisdictions, effectively hollowing out domestic corporate tax revenues. The TCJA sought to reverse this trend by lowering the statutory tax rate and encouraging firms to repatriate profits held abroad.
Note: After the dot-com collapse, federal corporate tax revenues surged from 881 billion USD in 2003 to a peak of 2.3 trillion USD in 2006 (≈ 38% annual growth), before collapsing during the 2008 crisis to 897 billion USD. Receipts recovered to 1.8 trillion USD by 2014, but the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) sharply reduced revenues – from 1.6 trillion USD in 2016 to 1.0 trillion USD in 2020. After the recovery of the COVID, following the adoption of the OECD’s Pillar 2 global minimum tax, revenues rebounded to 1.9 trillion USD in 2024, reflecting renewed profit repatriation and improved coordination on corporate taxation.
However, the scale of repatriation proved insufficient to compensate for the revenue losses caused by the rate reduction. Federal corporate tax receipts continued to decline rather than rise, falling short of policy expectations. It was only after 2024, with the beginning of international coordination under the OECD’s global minimum tax (Pillar 2), that revenues began to recover—reaching roughly 1.9 trillion USD (See graphs above) as profit shifting slowed and previously untaxed earnings were brought back into the U.S. tax base.
Multinationals increasingly channel profits through low-tax jurisdictions such as Ireland, the Netherlands and Singapore. The same companies that dominate U.S. stock indices — Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta — have shifted vast profits offshore through inter-company licensing and royalty payments. The result is a global tax regime that enables accumulation at the top while depriving states of revenue.
The relationship between profits, taxation and private wealth is now self-reinforcing. Corporate profits feed the fortunes of the few; falling effective tax rates protect them; and the political influence of those fortunes, in turn, helps entrench the system. After the 2017 U.S. tax reform, repatriation of overseas profits did not lead to higher investment or wages but to record share buybacks. In 2018 alone, American companies spent $806 billion on repurchasing their own stock — a direct transfer of capital to shareholders and executives whose compensation is equity-based. The feedback loop between profit concentration and personal wealth thus intensified.
The collapse of corporate taxation’s redistributive role has profound social consequences. As states lose fiscal capacity, inequality widens and public trust erodes. Ordinary citizens face higher indirect taxes, deteriorating infrastructure and weakened public services, while capital income remains lightly taxed. This imbalance fuels the political backlash against globalisation and elites.
If corporate tax had functioned as a true wealth tax — capturing a share of the extraordinary profits generated by globalised, intangible-rich corporate groups — the trajectory of private accumulation would have looked very different. Instead, the gains of the digital era have compounded atop a shrinking tax base. Fortunes, amplified by equity valuations and low taxation, have become dynastic in scale.
Calls for direct wealth taxes have gained political traction in Europe and among U.S. progressives, but implementation remains elusive. The challenge is both technical and political: wealth is mobile, tax authorities are not. Yet without some form of fiscal counterbalance, the concentration of wealth and power will continue unchecked. The issue is not envy; it is political equilibrium. A system in which a handful of corporations control global profits — and by extension political influence — is one in which democracy itself begins to erode.
The surge in private wealth over the past three decades is not simply the triumph of innovation or market efficiency. It is the outcome of a deliberate political economy — one in which profits have soared, taxes have shrunk, and fortunes have compounded to unprecedented heights. The deeper question is not just the economic sustainability of winner-takes-all capitalism, but the political consequences of allowing so much wealth — and therefore power — to accumulate in so few corporations and individuals.
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