As billions of people around the world struggle with soaring costs for everyday necessities, the richest people on the planet are enjoying unprecedented wealth gains. A new Credit Suisse report found that the number of “ultra high net worth” individuals—those who have assets worth over $50 million—jumped by 46,000 in 2021 to a record total of 218,200. Anthony Shorrocks, an economics professor and author of the report, attributed the leap in good fortune for the already-fortunate to “an explosion of wealth last year.” The richest one percent of the world’s population increased its share of the world’s total wealth for a second year in a row to 46 percent, up from 44 percent in 2020. There are now 62.5 million millionaires—an increase of 5.2 million in 2021. Nearly 40 percent of the planet’s millionaires live in the U.S., which is home to 24.5 million millionaires. There were 2.5 million new millionaires in the U.S. in 2021 alone, which accounted for nearly half of the world’s new millionaires last year. “This is the largest increase in millionaire numbers recorded for any country in any year this century and reinforces the rapid rise in millionaire numbers seen in the U.S. since 2016,” the report said.
