Put a Name to the 80 People Who Own Half of the World’s Wealth

Some of the names on this list of the über rich will seem familiar while others may come as a surprise. What probably isn’t unexpected is the fact that 35 of the world’s 1 percent are American, and that, of the entire group, 50 are “self-made,” whatever that means these days. To read the whole list, click here.

FiveThirtyEight:

Eighty people hold the same amount of wealth as the world’s 3.6 billion poorest people, according to an analysis just released from Oxfam. The report from the global anti-poverty organization finds that since 2009, the wealth of those 80 richest has doubled in nominal terms — while the wealth of the poorest 50 percent of the world’s population has fallen.

To see how much wealth the richest 1 percent and the poorest 50 percent hold, Oxfam used research from Credit Suisse, a Swiss financial services company, and Forbes’s annual billionaires list. Oxfam then looked at how many of the world’s richest people would need to pool their resources to have as much wealth as the poorest 50 percent — and as of March 2014, it was just 80 people.

Four years earlier, 388 billionaires together held as much wealth as the poorest 50 percent of the world.

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—Posted by Natasha Hakimi Zapata