Every so often Forbes, the magazine closely associated with America’s corporate elite, compiles its Fictional Fifteen – a chart of the wealthiest characters in film and literature, to complement its well-known annual list of the world’s wealthiest individuals.

After carefully assessing the assets of the likes of Bruce Wayne and Montgomery Burns, its most recent analysis concluded that Scrooge McDuck – mining magnate and uncle of Donald Duck – was top, with an estimated net worth of $65bn, narrowly beating the dragon Smaug.

But perhaps the most remarkable feature of an altogether remarkable list is rarely noted: the degree to which fictional billionaires have lost ground to real-life ones. According to Forbes, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon with an estimated fortune of $98bn, has recently overtaken Bill Gates to become the world’s richest man. It seems we have reached the point where there are people in the world richer than we are capable of imagining.

We have reached the point where there are people in the world richer than we are capable of imagining

Amazon’s share price has risen five-fold in as many years. If it continues at anything like this rate, Bezos, still only 53 years old, can expect to be worth hundreds of billions over the next decade. Indeed, a century since John D Rockefeller became the world’s first recorded billionaire, the prospect of the world’s first-ever trillionaire is now a serious possibility.

A trillion – at least by American reckoning – is a thousand billion dollars, or roughly the GDP of Mexico, and Bezos is leading a pack made up not only of technologists but also energy, finance, mining and retail tycoons from across North America, Europe and Asia. Their rankings and fortunes fluctuate daily in line with stock and commodity prices, but even if Bezos doesn’t get there we can be reasonably certain that the world’s first trillionaire will be male – there are only a dozen women in Forbes’ top hundred list, and none in the top 10.



Not so long ago, a trillionaire would have seemed almost as improbable as a mine-owning duck, and many were unconvinced when Oxfam speculated in January that it could happen within the next 25 years. But the last 12 months alone have seen the German, US and UK stock markets all hit record levels, along with robust economic growth and a resurgence in oil and commodities values. Already, on the basis of its market capitalisation, Apple is close to becoming the world’s first trillion-dollar company, and all this is before Donald Trump’s fiscal reforms take effect, slashing tax rates for the very wealthiest.

Jeff Bezos has recently overtaken Bill Gates to become the world’s richest man. Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images

According to the newly-published World Inequality Report, this increase in wealth accumulation by the most prosperous is part of a longer-term trend: since 1980, the richest 0.1% of the global population increased its combined wealth by as much as the bottom 50%. The pattern is far from consistent: inequality has increased moderately in Europe, but rapidly in China and Russia as the countries have abandoned communism. It has been particularly pronounced in the US, which 30 years ago was comparable to western Europe, but has returned to the same levels of inequality that existed before the second world war, and is now home to four of the five richest men on the planet.

For Gabriel Zucman, economist at University of California and part of the team that produced the report, it is government policy rather than the changing nature of economic production that is mainly responsible. “There has been a number of forces leading to an increase in income and wealth inequality, but the most important ones are changes in policies: reduction in progressive income and wealth taxation; reduction in the power of unions; a fall in the minimum wage and privatisation of public assets.”

The worry with extreme wealth

Scrooge McDuck lives in the hilltop town of Duckburg, where he likes to sit on his pile of gold coins. But while the real super-rich tend to register their financial affairs in similarly obscure locations, they rarely spend much time in them.

Many of them, of course, have become major philanthropists, and it is highly likely that the world’s first trillionaire will do the same. Bill Gates is now almost as famous for his health programmes in the developing world as he is for his business achievements, and the transparency and rigour with which his foundation works has been widely applauded.

According to Jessica Toale, executive director of the Centre for Development Results, an organisation supporting the aid sector: “At their best, major philanthropic donors have not only brought funds, but have also raised the bar in terms of setting strategic objectives, supporting innovation and building an evidence base for what works.”

Indian schoolchildren mark the 60th birthday of Bill Gates in Chennai. Photograph: Reuters

Bezos is yet to establish a charitable foundation on anything like the scale of Gates, but he has donated more than $60m to cancer research. He is also not the only tech billionaire to be fascinated by space travel, and has repeatedly spoken of his vision for humankind to colonise the solar system. As well as founding and investing heavily in Blue Origin, an aerospace manufacturer and spaceflights company, he has a passion for spacecraft reclamation and has spent large sums on salvage missions, recovering rocket parts from the Apollo space programme that had been lost at sea.

According to Dr Will Davies, co-director of the Political Economy Research Centre at Goldsmiths College: “While much philanthropy is entirely virtuous, there are obvious risks. When corporations make donations in areas, often they are pushing their strategic interests. The worry with extreme wealth is that it allows individuals to support potentially more outlandish agendas, and to cultivate pet projects that can grow into whole new academic fields.”

Other billionaires have more grounded interests, giving money to education, the arts and regeneration. In so doing, they have often become influential in shaping national policies and public affairs, not to mention city administration and the urban realm. In the UK, for instance, the Conservative peer Lord Harris has made substantial donations to schools and colleges, becoming a driving force in the government’s Free School programme. In the US, the collective wealth of Donald Trump’s initial cabinet was estimated at $14bn, with many of them having donated to his campaign.

Bezos was a supporter of Hillary Clinton in the US presidential election and has occasionally given money to Democrat candidates. While there is nothing new about businessmen donating to political parties, as their wealth has increased, so has the extent of their activities – including orchestrating campaigns, taking positions in government and standing for office.

While Donald Trump might be the most striking example, he did not set the template. Michael Bloomberg ran New York for a decade, Silvio Berlusconi used his wealth and media assets to dominate Italian politics, while Andrej Babiš, one of the richest men in Eastern Europe, has recently been elected prime minister of the Czech Republic after founding his own political party. According to Davies, these developments should be cause for profound concern: “The problem of corporate money having a damaging effect on democracy through lobbying has been supplemented by vast wealth in the hands of private individuals. This has the seeds of new type of oligarchy, reproduced by families over generations, able to influence policy and democracy with relative ease.”

The first great industrial titans were challenged by lawmakers, who introduced taxes and even broke up Rockefeller’s Standard Oil with anti-trust legislation. This gives Zucman hope that it is still possible to tame global inequality, in the way that it was in the mid-20th century, although he feels that governments and trans-national bodes are not doing nearly enough to address it. Rather, he thinks we will need to “invent new institutions, adapted to the realities and the problems of 21st-century capitalism”.

Davies agrees that “the moment is ripe for a populist reaction against these concentrations of wealth”, which could be channelled against technology monopolies such as Amazon, but fears regulators and governments have lost much of their authority in our current political culture. For Davies, the rise of the super-wealthy has gone hand-in-hand with a “successful conservative ideology which, supported by the right-wing media, has created the sense that the super-rich are less dangerous than government bureaucrats.”

Thus, in the absence of action, contemporary geopolitics is increasingly resembling that of medieval Europe, when power and wealth were synonymous, and the monarch was not only the dominant political figure in society, but also the richest landowner. As public policies and business interests reinforce one another, this trend is almost certain to continue for many years to come.

It may or may not be Jeff Bezos, but when the world does produce its first trillionaire, there is every likelihood that many of us will not simply be admiring, envying or resenting him – we will also be ruled by him.