Russia’s population tailspin
RUSSIAN EXTREMES
An interesting phenomenon from the last few years has been the growth of specialist billionaire watchers – consultancies that scrutinize the population of the Ultra-High-Net-Worth, in the manner of naturalists observing the migration of wildebeest. They’ve not quite got to the point of affixing satellite trackers to billionaires so they can follow them by the second, but the attention to detail is still pretty wild (all in the service of helping their clients sell more stuff to the kind of people who can afford literally anything).
My personal favorite among these consultancies is Wealth-X (for no particular reason, except that its reports are easily accessible), and this time of year is always fun because it’s when we get a new billionaire census. And what news from the wealth creation front?
- “2020 witnessed the largest absolute growth in billionaire individuals since our records began. For the first time, the number of global billionaires surpassed 3,000 (to 3,204), an increase of 13.4 percent. Their combined wealth hit $10 trillion, a rise of 5.7 percent. This is a striking development given the upheaval of the coronavirus pandemic and the deepest contraction in world economic output for a generation,” is the report’s first paragraph.
To summarize: heads they win; tails they also win; if the coin should land on its side in a freakish accident, they’d win that way too.
I admit that I’m a long-term Russia enthusiast, but I’m always particularly interested in the billionaire breakdown from Russia in particular. There’s no huge surprise in the fact the top three countries by billionaire population are America, China and Germany (those are three of the world’s four biggest economies after all), but Russia’s position is anomalous. It isn’t even in the top 10 largest economies, yet it has the fourth largest number of billionaires anywhere: 120 individuals with combined wealth of $397 billion.