The total number of billionaires around the world reached new heights in 2025. This is largely due to the rising valuations of tech companies and rising stock markets, according to a new study by Swiss banking giant UBS.
About 2,900 billionaires now control $15.8 trillion, compared with about 2,700 billionaires with a cumulative wealth of nearly $14 trillion a year earlier. The number and wealth of billionaires overall were boosted by the second-highest number of new billionaires created in a single year - 287 - since UBS began tracking the figure in 2015, the WSJ reported. Only 2021, with a flood of government stimulus and low interest rates that have boosted asset prices, has seen a higher number of new billionaires created.
“We've seen accelerated billionaire growth coming from all walks of life,“ said John Matthews, head of UBS's U.S. private wealth management division, referring to the creation of new billionaires from both entrepreneurship and inheritance.
The increase in wealth was also driven by a rising stock market in the 12 months ending April 4, 2025, the period covered by the study. The stock market crash surrounding President Trump’s so-called Liberation Day tariff announcement slowed returns for the period, although the market has largely continued to rise since then.
The new billionaires created in 2025 are entrepreneurs in a range of fields, according to UBS. They include Ben Lam, founder of Colossal Biosciences; Michael Dorrell, co-founder of infrastructure investment firm Stonepeak Partners; the Zhang brothers of Mixue Ice Cream and Tea in China; and crypto billionaire Justin Sun.
Ninety-one of the new billionaires inherited their wealth, including 15 members of two pharmaceutical families in Germany. “We’ve been talking about the big wealth transfer for more than a decade, and you’re starting to see it play out,” Matthews said. “I would say we are in the second inning of a nine-inning baseball game.“
He said that much of the wealth would first pass to surviving partners, usually wives, before it would pass to the next generation.
A recent analysis by Altrata, a wealth intelligence firm, similarly showed a surge in the number of billionaires worldwide to record levels. Altrata estimated that 3,508 people had a combined wealth of $13.4 trillion and said about a third were in the United States. China is in second place with 321 billionaires, holding about 10% of the world's wealth.
The UBS report includes information from a database maintained by UBS and PricewaterhouseCoopers that looks at billionaire wealth worldwide.
UBS also interviewed 87 billionaire clients for its 11th annual "Billionaire Ambitions" report and found that the attractiveness of North America as the best place to invest in the short term has fallen to 63% from 81% a year earlier. The attractiveness of investing in other regions - Western Europe, Greater China and Asia-Pacific excluding Greater China - has increased. has increased.
While Asian billionaires' top concern for the coming year was tariffs, the majority of American billionaires were most concerned about inflation or geopolitics, according to the survey.