Twenty-nine people hold 27% of billionaire wealth, and London lost billionaires last year
Altrata's Billionaire Census 2026 counts 3,795 billionaires holding a record $15.1 trillion. It also expects $6.6 trillion to pass to about 5,000 heirs and spouses over the next decade.
Altrata published the thirteenth edition of its Billionaire Census this month. CNBC reported the headline figure on 4 September 2026 and Fortune covered the research on 9 September. The census counts 3,795 billionaires worldwide holding a record $15.1 trillion. The population grew 8.2 per cent over 2025, its fastest pace in five years.
The top of the list is pulling away
Twenty-nine people now hold more than $50 billion each. Altrata calls them superbillionaires. Between them they hold $4.1 trillion, which is 27.2 per cent of all billionaire wealth. In 2017 ten people met that threshold and held 7.2 per cent of the total. As recently as 2023 the share was 16.3 per cent, so most of the movement has come in the last two years.
Maeen Shaban, Altrata’s director of research and analytics and a lead author of the report, told Fortune that artificial intelligence accounts for much of it. Altrata took the 150 listed companies where the most billionaire wealth sits and split them by whether they had made a meaningful investment in AI since 2023. Those that had beat the rest by 23 per cent in market capitalisation growth across 2024 and 2025 combined. Shaban warned against treating that figure as precise, since some billionaires built AI companies outright while others used the technology to cut costs elsewhere.
London and Hong Kong went the other way
New York added 12 billionaires in 2025 and now counts 164. Singapore and San Francisco grew at a similar rate. Of the fifteen largest billionaire cities, London and Hong Kong were the only two to finish the year with fewer than they started. Shaban was reluctant to read much into any single city given how small these populations are.
Roughly a fifth of the world’s billionaires live somewhere other than where they were born, and in Singapore and London the foreign-born share is above half. Shaban also observed that around 60 per cent of the UK’s wealthy are concentrated in London, whereas Germany’s are spread widely enough that no German city reaches the top fifteen despite the size of the economy.
$6.6 trillion, and about 5,000 recipients
Altrata expects billionaires to pass $6.6 trillion to spouses and children over the next decade, shared among roughly 5,000 people, some 2,000 of whom are spouses. Shaban does not expect inheritance to be the main engine of future growth in the billionaire population: he told Fortune that more than 60 to 70 per cent of new billionaires will be self-made, and that entrepreneurship remains the larger contributor.
The wider ultra-wealthy tier, those above $30 million, holds only about half a million people, a group that grew roughly seven times faster than the world’s adult population between 2005 and 2025. Altrata’s internal estimate, which it has not published, is that by 2040 about 70 per cent of the ultra-wealthy will be people who are not in that group today.
What it means for family offices
The $6.6 trillion figure divided by roughly 5,000 recipients is the single family office market stated plainly: a small number of transfers, most of them large enough on their own to justify a dedicated structure, arriving over ten years rather than all at once. The churn estimate is the harder number for advisers. If seven in ten of the ultra-wealthy in 2040 are not on anyone’s client list today, a practice built around the families it already knows will shrink quietly, and origination has to keep pace with wealth creation rather than follow it. London’s position deserves separate attention. A city that loses billionaires in a year when almost every comparable city gains them is losing the structures, trustees and advisers that sit around those families as well.