{"id":214290,"date":"2026-02-16T14:01:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-16T19:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/16\/planet-earth-has-never-had-so-many-billionaires\/"},"modified":"2026-02-16T19:35:17","modified_gmt":"2026-02-17T00:35:17","slug":"planet-earth-has-never-had-so-many-billionaires","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/16\/planet-earth-has-never-had-so-many-billionaires\/","title":{"rendered":"Planet Earth has never had so many billionaires"},"content":{"rendered":"

Planet Earth has never had so many billionaires<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.aol.com\/articles\/planet-earth-never-had-many-164810141.html<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-02-16 14:01:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: www.aol.com<\/a><\/p>\n

A pedestrian outside the UBS headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland, on September 15, 2011. – Peter Frommenwiler\/Bloomberg\/Getty Images\/FILE<\/p>\n

The number of billionaires worldwide \u2013 and their combined wealth \u2013 reached record highs this year, buoyed in particular by gains in tech stocks, Swiss bank UBS has found.<\/p>\n

The world had 2,919 billionaires on April 4, when UBS completed that part of its research, the largest number since the bank started collecting the data in 1995.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith tech shares and financial asset prices generally rising, despite volatility, billionaires\u2019 total wealth reached a new high,\u201d UBS wrote in its annual report on billionaires published Thursday.<\/p>\n

The MSCI World Index \u2013 which tracks more than 1,300 large and mid-sized public companies in developed markets \u2013 rose around 7% in the year to early April.<\/p>\n

Billionaires\u2019 combined wealth reached $15.8 trillion, an increase of 13% over 12 months, lifted by existing tech billionaires\u2019 appreciating assets and by new billionaires across a range of sectors, the bank said. The number of billionaires jumped by 237 in the 12 months to April 4.<\/p>\n

Tech billionaires\u2019 assets grew by almost a quarter to $3 trillion, bolstered by the increasing value of their shares in artificial intelligence-linked companies such as Meta (META), Oracle (ORCL) and Nvidia (NVDA).<\/p>\n

The six US tech billionaires whose wealth increased the most became $171 billion richer between them, UBS said, meaning that each became $28.5 billion richer on average.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis surge is closely tied to their companies\u2019 AI capabilities, from foundational chipmaking to AI-powered cloud infrastructure,\u201d the bank wrote.<\/p>\n

The total number of US billionaires rose to 924, accounting for almost a third of the global billionaire population. China now has 470 billionaires, second only to the United States.<\/p>\n

UBS surveyed its billionaire clients between July and September 2025 and they identified tariffs, geopolitics and policy uncertainty as the top risks of…<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Planet Earth has never had so many billionaires https:\/\/www.aol.com\/articles\/planet-earth-never-had-many-164810141.html Publish Date: 2026-02-16 14:01:00 Source Domain:…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":214291,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/s.yimg.com\/os\/en\/aol_cnn_business_articles_764\/45b3c355cb0ce70be91c85952cafb330","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[20],"class_list":["post-214290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificial-intelligence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214290"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=214290"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214290\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":214292,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214290\/revisions\/214292"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/214291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=214290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=214290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=214290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}