Almost 1/3 of billionaires in world to be from China
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In 2020 China became the first country to have more than 1,000 billionaires among its citizens. Despite the hardships of 2020, China added over 250 more billionaires, allowing them to reach an important milestone, the Warsaw Business Journal reports.
According to data presented by TradingPlatforms.com, there are now 1,058 billionaires in Greater China, over 32 percent of the world's total billionaire population. This gives China more billionaires than the combined total of the next three countries on the list; the USA (696), India (40), and Germany (19). In the last five years alone, China has added 490 billionaires to the list while the USA added 160.
Notably, 2020 marked the first time, perhaps in hundreds of years, that the continent of Asia had more billionaires than the rest of the world combined, accounting for over 51 percent of the entire planet's known billionaires.
When the pandemic's first wave hit many developed markets at the beginning of 2020, massive amounts of wealth were wiped out in the first two months of the coronavirus outbreak. However, soon after that, an almost V-shaped recovery took place spearheaded by a global economy needing to go digital.
"EVs, e-commerce, blockchain, and biotech have been the fastest growing industries of the past year. We are currently right in the heart of a new industrial revolution, with the ABCDEs – that is AI, blockchain, cloud, data, and e-commerce – creating new opportunities for entrepreneurs and leading to a concentration of wealth and economic power on a scale never seen before. The world's billionaires now have USD 14 trillion of wealth between them, more than the GDP of China last year," the experts explained.
As a result, tech billionaires such as Elon Musk (USD 197 billion) saw an incredible increase in their wealth in 2020, even propelling the enigmatic billionaire to become the richest person in the world, a title that he alternates with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (USD 189 billion).
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