The World Added 412 Billionaires in 2020, Bringing the Total to 3,288

“A stock market boom, driven partly by quantitative easing, and flurry of new listings have minted eight new dollar billionaires a week for the past year,” Rupert Hoogewerf, Hurun Report chairman and chief researcher, said in a statement. “The world has never seen this much wealth created in just one year, much more than perhaps could have been expected for a year so badly disrupted by Covid-19.”

Three individuals added more than $50 billion in a single year, led by Tesla’s Elon Musk who added US$151 billion and climbed to the top spot of the Hurun Global Rich List with a net worth of US$197 billion. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos dropped to the second place, despite his wealth growing US$50 billion last year to a total of US$189 billion.

Colin Zheng Huang of Pinduoduo, China’s e-commerce giant, also saw his net worth grow more than $50 billion to US$69 billion, earning him the title of 19th richest billionaire in the world.

China jumped way ahead of the U.S. with 1,058 billionaires, up 259 from a year ago. The U.S. added 70 billionaires to take the total to 696 billionaires, according to the report, which calculates the billionaires’ wealth based on market data as of Jan. 15.

Other key findings in the report include:

• Five people have more than US$100 billion, including Musk, Bezos, LVMH’s Bernard Arnault (US$114 billion), Bill Gates (US$110 billion), and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg (US$101 billion);
• California-based Austin Russell of car sensor maker Luminar Technologies was the youngest self-made billionaire, at 25 years old, with US$3.5 billion;
• Beijing had the largest number of billionaires, with 145; Shanghai (113) overtook New York (112) as the runner-up. Six of the top 10 cities with the highest concentration of billionaires were in China;
• Healthcare and real estate tied as the main source of wealth for the world’s billionaires, each accounting for 8.7% of total billionaire wealth;
• There were 231 self-made female billionaires, an increase of 51 from a year ago. China dominated with 69% of the world’s self-made women billionaires.

Last year saw a net addition of 17 cryptocurrency billionaires, who derived their wealth from holding currency tokens. Blockchain also had 17 billionaires, whose wealth was predominantly from crypto exchanges, according to the report.

“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,” Hoogewerf said in the report.