Inside The Billionaire Bubble: Why 2025 Was The Best Year In History For Billionaires |
OnOctober 7, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange disclosed it was pumping $2 billion into prediction market startup Polymarket at a $9 billion valuation. The deal marked a big win for the five-year-old firm—and its 27-year-old founder, Shayne Coplan, who instantly became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire. His reign wouldn’t last three weeks.
That’s because, on October 27, AI-powered recruiting startup Mercor announced it had raised funding from a handful of blue chip investors at a $10 billion valuation—enough to make its three cofounders the youngest self-made billionaires of all time, at age 22, besting Coplan by a half-decade each and even breaking the record set by Mark Zuckerberg, who became a billionaire in 2008 at age 23.
A similar battle played out for the title of youngest self-made woman billionaire. Taylor Swift, 36, had held the top spot since 2023. Then came Scale AI cofounder Lucy Guo, then age 30, when Scale revealed a share sale in April. Then came 29-year-old Luana Lopes Lara, a former ballerina from Brazil who took the title when private investors valued her prediction market startup Kalshi at $11 billion earlier this month.
Such is the pace of wealth creation in 2025. Over the past year, the planet has added more than 340 new billionaires—roughly one per day—across the U.S., China, India, Russia and places as far and wide as St. Kitts and Nevis and Albania. There are now more billionaires than ever before: a record 3,148, up nearly 50% over the past five years. In 1987, when Forbes published the first ever international ranking, we found just 140 billionaires around the globe. And the billionaire population is richer than ever before, too—both in total ($18.7 trillion, up by $10 trillion since 2020) and on average ($5.9 billion, versus $4 billion back then). A record 19 people are now centibillionaires, having amassed fortunes of at least $100 billion; only one, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, was that rich six years ago.
All this wealth has translated into plenty of power. Some 135 billionaires pumped money into the 2024 U.S. presidential election, and many of them spent the past year lining up behind America’s billionaire president. They donated millions to his inauguration—where billionaires like Bezos, Zuckerberg, Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai scored prominent seats usually reserved for the likes of the president’s family, past presidents and other top government officials. They donated millions more to his White House ballroom project. Some of them even joined his Cabinet, the richest in U.S. history. Last week, billionaire Jared Isaacman was confirmed as head of NASA, the day after billionaire megadonor Miriam Adelson quipped that she’d give Trump another $250 million to run for a third term. The week prior, agriculture billionaire Andrej Babis was sworn in as prime minister of the Czech Republic—the latest sign that the entire world is, now more than ever, in its billionaire era.
It all starts at the top. Elon Musk began the year already worth $421 billion, then smashed a series of records—first person to $500 billion, in October; first to $600 billion, on December 15; then