Happy New Year! 

In almost every country, 2025 was an extraordinary year – nowhere more so than the United States. In just 12 months, Donald Trump upended not only American domestic politics but the global rules-based order. As a result, we are even more concerned today than we were a year ago about wars, poverty, climate change and even such fundamental issues as life expectancy.

With all these challenges, it is difficult to know where to focus. The 2016 World Inequality Report helps us to see the root cause: policy in all these areas is increasingly set by, and for the benefit of, the top 0.001% of the world’s population; the 99% hardly get a look in:

• Wealth inequality is far more extreme than we realise;
• It also matters far more than we are aware;
• Our focus in 2026 will be on defending the 99% against these threats.

Wealth inequality is far more extreme than we realise

Back in 2020, we wrote that it is hard to get our minds around wealth inequality because it is so much greater than almost all the forms of inequality we are used to.

We are used to the idea that some people are tall while others are short, some are highly intelligent and others are not, some have big feet, and some have small feet. But all these things are much less unequal than wealth. Even statisticians struggle because for these ‘normal’ kinds of inequality, the three most common kinds of ‘average’ – mode, median and arithmetic mean – are close to each other (within 1-2%). With normal kinds of inequality, you can safely ignore the outliers: they make little difference to the total, and for policy purposes are almost irrelevant.

But not with wealth. As the new report shows, wealth inequality has been getting worse even since 2020. We are now at a point where the world’s richest 0.001% (about 56,000 adults) have three times more wealth than half of the entire world population combined. Policy which ignores these ‘outliers’ is missing the big picture.

And even within that tiny group, the inequality is immense: to be at the bottom of the group, you would need wealth of over £100 million, but to be at the top of it, you would need to be Elon Musk, whose wealth is estimated to be over £500,000 million – 5,000 times greater.

The median household wealth in the UK is around £300,000. And to be in the top 1%, you would need around £3,600,000. So we are (in absolute terms rightly) used to thinking about the top 1% as though they are extraordinarily rich. But in comparison with the wealthiest, they are really not far from the norm.

Take a moment to imagine that you lost 90% of your wealth. What would that mean for you?

For almost all of us, that would be financially crippling. But the table below shows what that would mean for Elon Musk.

If he lost 90% of his wealth. Musk would still have £54 billion; if he lost 99%, he would still have £5.4 billion; if he lost 99.9%, he would still have £540 million and still be one of the richest 56,000 people in the world. Even if he lost 99.999% of his wealth, he would still have £5.4 million – comfortably in the UK’s top 1%, and extremely comfortably-off. He would need to lose 99.9999% of his wealth to be anywhere near the UK median wealth.

In comparison, someone near the bottom of the UK’s top 1% who lost 99.9999% of their wealth would be down to their last £3.60.

Is his extreme wealth a proportionate reward for Musk’s hard work and intelligence? No. Intelligence is normally distributed: Musk is not more than twice as intelligent as a normal person. A normal person in the UK works 1,800 hours in a year, and since there are fewer than 9,000 hours, even if he does not sleep, Musk does not work 5 times as hard. So, even if he were superman, a proportionate reward would at most be 10 times the median level; it would not be anything like 1.8 million times greater.

So, wealth distribution is both unequal and inequitable. But does it matter?

It matters far more than we are aware

This inequity is not just unfair; it is actively harmful. It harms the rest of the population, it harms the planet and it harms democracy.

It harms the rest of us, most obviously because businesses can only ‘see’ demand which is backed by money. They can see the demand for £1 million watches and they invest to meet that demand; but they cannot see the demand for food and shelter for the homeless, so they do not divert their resources in that direction. As wealth inequality grows, economic growth slows (since the rich spend a smaller percentage than the poor) and poverty increases yet further. In the UK today, almost one in three children are growing up in poverty. And this affects their education and subsequent life chances, their health and even their life-expectancy.

It harms the planet because the very rich make a disproportionate contribution to climate change.  As the World Inequality Report says, “The wealthiest 1% alone account for 41% of private capital ownership emissions, almost double the amount of the entire bottom 90% combined.” And it is likely that, as with wealth itself, emissions will also be highly unequally distributed, even within that top 1%. Tackling climate change without addressing the behaviour of the wealthiest may be impossible.

It harms democracy because the wealthiest can buy politicians. Elon Musk gave $250 million to the Trump campaign as well as priceless support on his social media platform X (Twitter); and last year he offered to give $100m to support Farage. Such levels of support are enough to swing elections. And once you have bought the election, you can buy the policies you want.

For example, look at taxes on the wealthiest.

Although the chart above does not include the UK, our analysis last year for the UK showed a very similar shape: taxation is progressive for the bottom 99% but once you get well into the top 1%, the rate of taxation fall sharply. Billionaires can easily pay a lower rate than almost all the rest of us.

And it goes beyond taxes: Trump’s Budget, whose provisions the US Congressional Budget Office says will cost the poorest families around $1,600 per year over the years 20245-29 while boosting those on the highest incomes by around $12,000 has been described as the largest upwards transfer of wealth in US history.

The dynamics of wealth and power illustrated in Chapter 6 of the book 99% are in full play in the US. And Trump is well on the way to establishing an autocracy. The new National Security Strategy of the USA makes it clear that the Trump regime will actively seek to support far-right parties in Europe rather than the existing governments which it, with no apparent sense of irony, calls, “unstable minority governments, many of which trample on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition.”

As Warren Buffett explained, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

Our focus is on defending the 99% against these threats

In 2026, we shall focus of raising awareness of these challenges and the policies needed to address them:

• In Parliament, our three key projects aim to help MPs to understand these issues and to support them in pushing for immediate policy change:
  • Our Defensive Constitutional Reform project highlights the threats to UK democracy and what can be done to defend against them. Our report is almost ready for launch, and we were pleased to see the new Head of MI6 raising many of our concerns just before Christmas. She pointed out the degree to which power is being transferred to tech companies and their owners, commenting that “We are now operating in a space between peace and war;”
  • Our Progressive Economics project aims to help set out what a government determined to deliver economic renewal, for the benefit of the 99% could do; and
  • Our NHS project is setting out what is needed to replicate the success of the previous Labour government in turning around the performance of the NHS;
• More widely, we work to disseminate our messages to the public:
  • Through new media like Byline Times and its sister organisations, Radix Big Tent, and Mint;
  • Through traditional progressive media like Tribune, Public Sector Focus, Left Foot Forward, and occasional broadcast media;
  • Through social media like BlueSky, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack and YouTube;
  • Through public events like the Sands Festival, Resilient Democracy and the People’s Assembly Against Austerity;
  • And simply by word of mouth – our members do a great job in sharing the messages.

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This blog was originally posted by the 99% Organisation.

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