At the beginning of each year, the world’s corporate and political elite gather in the Swiss ski resort of Davos to pat each other on the back, attend seminars on “the fourth Industrial Revolution” – whatever that might be – and generally mull over the state of the world. Rarely is so much wealth to be found in so few conference rooms. And each year, Oxfam, the global development charity, takes the opportunity to run the numbers on the state of global inequality. Oxfam’s findings are often eye-catching, but this year especially so.

The wealth of the five richest people in the world, they found, has more than doubled, from $405bn (£320bn) in 2020 to $869bn in late 2023. That’s an increase of about $14m an hour, which is not bad going by anyone’s reckoning. Perhaps more strikingly, Oxfam calculates that on current trends the world is due to welcome its first dollar trillionaire within a decade. Elon Musk, the richest person at the time of writing, is worth about a fifth of that, at $210bn.

It may of course take longer than Oxfam predicts, but the global trends are […]