as you can read in this Washington Post story by Ishaan Tharoor. Here's the opening paragraph (without the hotlinks - go to the actual article for those):
The world's 400 richest people added some $92 billion to their collective wealth in 2014, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. As of Dec. 29, they were all worth a combined $4.1 trillion.
Now if you are having trouble with the arithmetic, $4.1 trillion divided by 400 is 10.25 billion each.
Or the 92 billion divided by 400 is 230 million each in additional gains.
Of course, that actually is a very low percentage gain, as I am sure they will point out to you
do the math
it is a bit less than 2.25%
Still a better rate of return in assets than most people, where their primary asset, their home, may not have increased at all, and where the return on savings is usually less than 1%.
Please keep reading.
Remember, if you have savings and get 1%, that will be fully taxable at whatever your marginal income tax rate is.
If you make 230 million in capital gains, it will only be taxed at 15% when you cash it in.
Jack Ma of Alibaba in China added more than $25 billion in networth.
Bill Gates is still the richest 1t $87.6 Billion, having only added $9 billion - oh wait, he got better than a ten percent increase in one year.
Not everyone did so well:
A clutch of influential Russian billionaires suffered as a result of sliding oil prices and Western sanctions on Moscow. Alisher Usmanov, who entered 2014 as Russia’s richest man, lost a third of his wealth.
He was born in Uzbekistan, and in March Forbes had his networth at $18.6 billion, so now he is ONLY worth about $12 billion. So sad.
Read the article. It also has graphs that show clearly that as inequality grows, and many people find their economic conditions worsening, the number of billionaires continues to grow.
Sad, isn't it?