We also know that wherever there is huge market volatility and turmoil, there’s also an opportunity for shareholders to profit.

Following Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, the very richest became dramatically richer and corporate profits hit record highs. Between 2020-2022, food and energy billionaires pocketed $453 billion, with 62 new food billionaires minted. Five of the largest energy companies – BP, Shell, TotalEnergies, Exxon and Chevron – were making a combined profit of $2,600 every second, as energy prices rocketed following Russia’s invasion.

This is highly likely to repeat itself, and we’ll be analysing the impact of the war on inequality in future Bulletins. As the data in this week’s Bulletin, analysing the Forbes 40^th annual billionaires list, shows, the super-rich are starting from an even higher point than ever before.

Make sure to subscribe, as we’ll be looking specifically at war profiteers in future editions.

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The billionaire list…in numbers

Another record-shattering year for the world’s richest people. Both the number and the wealth of the world’s billionaires are at their highest levels. There are now a record 3,428 billionaires worldwide. Their combined wealth is a record $20.5 trillion, equivalent to the size of mainland China’s economy. Their wealth is equivalent to 17.1% of the global GDP, compared to less than 5% in 2010.

The world’s billionaires are $4 trillion richer than 12 months ago. This is $1.5 trillion more than the combined wealth held by the poorest 4.1 billion people in the world. An increase of about a quarter. Their number increased by 400, a 13% jump. At the top, the 10 richest billionaires are 44% richer. All in all, 4 in 5 billionaires are richer than they were last year.

A trillionaire is in sight. The world’s richest person is only $160 billion shy of becoming the first trillionaire, years earlier than projected. Elon Musk has a net wealth of $839 billion, having added around half a trillion in just a year. In fact, he’s $121 billion richer than the next three richest billionaires combined, and richer than the poorest 693 billionaires.

AI boom for billionaires. 390 people entered the billionaire club with a combined net worth of $755 billion. Artificial Intelligence (AI) played a huge role in this. 45 new AI billionaires have been created over the past 12 months, accounting for more than half of the total of 86 AI billionaires.

Technology accounts for nearly a quarter of the total wealth, which has boomed over the past 12 months. The combined wealth of billionaires in the technology industry is up nearly 50%, a $1.6 trillion jump.

The US has the most billionaires and the wealthiest. This year, billionaires span 80 countries, including, for the first time, Afghanistan. Yet most billionaires are concentrated in a few countries. The United States accounts for the most billionaires in the world, with 989, or 30% of the total, and the most wealth, $8.4 trillion, or 42% of all billionaire wealth. US billionaires are 23.4% richer than a year ago, having added $1.6 trillion to their stock of wealth.

Some countries recorded a massive increase in billionaires’ wealth. Irish billionaires are 254% richer, those in the Netherlands 243%, Canada’s 111%, Brazil’s 81%, and those in Sweden 47%.

Billionaire gender divide. It’s well known that, globally and in many countries, women own less than men. And that’s true at the very top. Women account for 14% of the total billionaire class.

More wealth at the top, increasing suffering for many. As billionaires’ wealth hit $20 trillion, much of the world’s population faces immense suffering. Some 2.3 billion people in the world are regularly facing hunger, 2.8 billion people have no adequate housing, and 2 billion are facing catastrophic out-of-pocket health spending.

Not just the wealth that should worry us. It’s not just trillions of wealth in the hands of a few, but also its impact on democratic institutions. Increasingly, we are seeing billionaires concentrate media ownership to serve their selfish interests. They are hijacking our public institutions and democracy, as we showed in this year’s Davos paper.

Something to read and listen to

Listen to K. R. Ghodsee on Equals talking about Capitalism vs Socialism: What’s Better for Women’s Rights?

Listen to Zoe Gardner and Sharon Ekambaram on how How Migrants Are Used as Scapegoats for the Real Crisis

Read Ken Opalo’s analysis of the short and medium term impacts of the U.S./Israel-Iran war.

Read what the IMF have to say about how extreme inequality is fueling a global debt crisis.

Here are some of the main takeaways!

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Inequality in Mexico…in numbers

Today, Mexico is one of the most unequal countries in the world. The richest 1% of the population (just 1.3 million people!) earn 35% of total income, hold 40% of the country’s private wealth, and are responsible for 23% of polluting emissions.

At the same time, 18.8 million people live without access to nutritious and quality food, 38.5 million live in social deprivation or below the poverty line, and 21 million women devote at least a full workday to unpaid care work.

Over the past 30 years, extreme wealth concentration in Mexico has consolidated. Mexico’s ultra-rich have never been as numerous or as rich as they are today. There are 22 billionaires with a combined fortune of 219 billion dollars, roughly equivalent to Qatar’s GDP.

Mexico confirms what Thomas Piketty argued in Capital in the Twenty-First Century: when the fortunes of the richest grow faster than the economy, economic inequality deepens. Between 1996 and 2025, Carlos Slim’s wealth increased more than eightfold, and billionaire wealth grew 4.2 times, while the Mexican economy did not even double in size. This model has been mediocre for the majority, but extraordinarily profitable for billionaires.

Recent experience shows that change is possible. Thanks to strong collective and democratic decisions by the government since 2017, the minimum wage has increased, which has made a big difference, although it is still far too low. Nevertheless, public investment as a share of GDP in 2024 was still less than half of what it was 45 years ago. Despite the growing concentration of wealth, the private sector invests less than $8 for every $100 dollars earned. Restoring public investment and democratically directing it toward the development of social and productive infrastructure are indispensable conditions for fair and redistributive growth. Economic democracy is not decreed: it is built.

The nine proposals included in the report seek to transform, repair, and redistribute so that the benefits of the Mexican economy cease to be controlled and concentrated by a few:

• Mobilize investment flows in a fair and democratic manner.

• Strengthen rights protection mechanisms.

• Expand the mandates of economic policy regulatory bodies.

• Showcase and address billionaire fiscal irresponsibility.

• Promote inclusive care policies through collective participation.

• Advance a new democratic governance of water as a human right.

• Develop social infrastructure for the redistribution of care.

• Reallocate the electricity subsidy so that it is progressive.

• Finance electric mass public transportation in a progressive manner.

In the current international context, Oxfam Mexico says, these policies mean diversifying trade and investment, reducing US dependence, prioritising the domestic market, and building the state capacities necessary to seize new growth opportunities.

Taking measures in response to concentrated economic power in Mexico is not a threat to development: it is the only way to consolidate the social advances achieved in recent years and expand them for the benefit of the majority.

Thank you to the Oxfam Mexico team for their brilliant data-driven analysis and evidence-based policy solutions.

Something to read and listen to

Read the report by Oxfam Mexico (only in Spanish for now, but English translation coming soon!)

Listen to Alexandra Haas, Oxfam Mexico’s executive director.

Chart of the week from KPMG showing how the share of the economy going to profits rather than wages has reached a post-WWII high.

Read this UNU Wider report about how global profit shifting contributes to cross-country inequalities.

Complete complacency on the part of creditors is letting the problem fester, rather than acting now to tackle this crisis. That means more austerity for the populations of low-income countries, more people going hungry, more suffering for the sick, more care work for women, blighted futures for youths… and higher bills for creditor countries’ taxpayers when debt crises eventually flare up.

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Debt in numbers

5.2 billion people live in countries where debt payments are higher than total social spending. The World Bank rates over half of low-income countries as “at high risk of debt distress” or “in debt distress”. The Sustainable Development Goals – UN targets to eradicate extreme poverty and reduce inequality – have become out of reach.

Climate finance hits a wall. While there are efforts underway to reform multilateral development banks in order to expand their lending capacity, too little attention is paid to borrowing capacity. At least 47 out of 66 low-income countries would need to take on too much external debt within five years to meet global climate and development goals. Climate finance should take the form of grants, not loans.

Meanwhile, rich creditors are doing fine, thank you very much. Rich private creditors earn a risk premium when they buy low-income countries’ sovereign debt. It is so high that they tend to make a profit even in the few cases of defaults. Debt Justice-UK estimates that rich bondholders of six countries that recently restructured their debt made an average profit of 38% (over the entire duration of their investment) despite the “haircuts” they conceded.

The G20’s debt relief offer is half-hearted. In the midst of the pandemic, the G20 postponed low-income countries’ debt payments, which was a good thing. It then created a permanent mechanism to forgive their unsustainable sovereign debt: the so-called Common Framework. This is completely failing to deliver.

Only four countries have applied for debt relief under the Common Framework. There are a range of reasons why overindebted governments fail to raise their hands to get relief:

• Too little: The Common Framework is too stingy. After a country falls off the debt cliff, the Common Framework offers just enough relief to put it back right at the edge of the cliff, not at a safe distance. Zambia did get relief… only to remain “at high risk of debt distress”. The current review of the World Bank and IMF’s Debt Sustainability Framework is an opportunity to right that wrong.

• Too slow: It took four years of excruciating negotiations for Zambia to get that relief – and it’s still negotiating with some marginal creditors. The Global Sovereign Debt Roundtable – an informal global governance body advising the G20 – has made progress to streamline and speed up debt restructuring processes. But creditors are responding with ever more complex debt contracts that are likely to complicate future debt restructurings.

• Too risky: There is no equivalent to corporate bankruptcy law for sovereign debt. When a government fails to pay its creditors, the latter can sue in London or New York court (where contracts are usually signed) and almost certainly win. That shuts off debtor governments from global financial markets. The prospect of such lawsuits gives creditors huge leverage in negotiations with governments.

• Too late: Debtor countries’ Finance Ministers tend to kick the can down the road and let their successors bite the bullet of debt restructuring, as they fear the credit rating downgrade (even though their low ratings already price them out of the market anyway) and perceive default as shameful.

Twenty years ago, after a decade of the Jubilee 2000 campaign, creditor countries made a debt relief offer that debtor countries could not refuse: cancelling over $100 billion of debt. It is time to repeat that feat, otherwise the debt problem will continue to fester and stunt the fight against inequality and climate change.

This time, however, it will be important to complement debt cancellation with the creation of a legal framework for sovereign debt in order to stop the cycle of debt crises.

Something to read and listen to

Read this report by Matthew Martin and David Waddock about resolving the debt crisis.

Listen to Matthew on this week’s Equals Podcast

and read his blog

In this week’s Bulletin, we’re diving into Oxfam’s latest inequality report on the political influence of the super-rich.

If you haven’t already, then check out part 1 on how billionaire wealth has reached a historic high.

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Economic inequality becomes political inequality…in numbers

Buying politics. Billionaires have long used their vast wealth to “buy” politicians and political parties. In the US, just 100 billionaire families poured a record-breaking US$2.6bn into federal elections in 2024. Wealth gives the super-rich the power to hijack public policies - one study, using data from 136 countries, found that as income inequality increases, policies increasingly favour the rich.

The World Values Survey found that almost half of all people surveyed say that “the rich often buy elections” in their country. The rich agree - nearly 80 percent of millionaires think super-rich buy political influence

Control of the media. Billionaires dominate media and social media companies. Of the world’s 10 largest media and press companies, 7 have billionaire owners. Every day, people across the world spend 11.8 billion hours (over one million years combined) consuming content on social media platforms founded by billionaires. Buying the media has allowed the super-rich to extend their political power; shape public discourse; and legitimise their accumulation of wealth and power, as well as an economic system that enables the billionaire class.

Taking a seat at the table. The super-rich are also at the forefront of political power. This is happening at local, national and global levels. A 2023 study found that over 11% of the world’s billionaires had held or sought political office. Oxfam estimates that billionaires are at least 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than ordinary people.

With every billionaire president, cabinet member and political appointee, it has become less shocking to see rich people being appointed to political positions.

Driving an anti-rights agenda. A network of far-right and conservative forces, allied with billionaires, is accused of driving a backlash against human rights and progressive policies and ideas. One way they are doing this is through funding far-right groups and political parties. According to Global Philanthropy Project, in 2021 to 2022 the income of just three anti-LGBTQI+ organizations was greater than more than 8,000 LGBTQI+ organizations globally in the same time period.

Political poverty. People living in poverty lack the time and money to participate fully in political life and face bureaucratic hurdles. Women, in particular, experience acute time poverty because of the unequal care responsibilities they face.

In low-income countries 45% of people in the least wealthy quintile lack ID, which is often a prerequisite for voting. In the US during the 2016 presidential elections, voters in Black neighbourhoods waited 29% longer to vote than those in white neighbourhoods.

Protests against inequality. In the last twelve months, over 142 significant anti-government protests have erupted worldwide. One global study of protests between 2006 and 2020 identifies failures of political representation as the largest driver of dissent, and economic justice – including inequality and austerity – as the second.

We’ve covered the youth-led protests that erupted in Kenya against IMF-imposed austerity measures extensively.

The economic and political power of the rich can be cut down to size. And the majority can take back political power, force government action to end economic inequality, and build a fairer and more sustainable future for all.

Read the full Oxfam report here.

Something to listen to

Listen to this week’s Equals episode, where we speak with three activists from Kenya, Nepal, and France who explain what drove them to the streets to fight for their cause and the brutal violence they met from the state.

This year’s Oxfam inequality report sets out how 2025 has been an absolutely bumper year for the super-rich. The number of billionaires has surpassed 3,000 for the first time, and billionaire wealth is now higher than at any time in history. Meanwhile, one in four people globally face hunger.

The core message of the report is about how the super-rich buy political power and erode the rights of the many. We’ll cover that part of the report in next week’s Bulletin, so remember to subscribe if you’re not already.

This week, we’re focusing on section 1 of the paper, the great inequality divide.

A new episode of the Equals Podcast has just gone live

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The great inequality divide…in numbers

A great decade for billionaires. 2025 was another record-breaking year for billionaires. For the first time, their number reached 3,000, and as of November 2025, their wealth reached a new high of $18.3bn. Since Donald Trump came to office, their wealth increased three times faster than the past five-year average. Trump’s agenda of championing deregulation and undermining agreements to increase corporate taxation has benefited the richest everywhere.

Mega time for millionaires. In 2024, more than 680,000 dollar millionaires were created globally, with 5.34 million new millionaires projected over the next five years. The poorest half of humanity holds just 0.52% of the world’s wealth, while the richest 1% own 43.8%

Meanwhile, billions face poverty and hunger. One in four people globally face hunger, increasing by 42.6% between 2015 and 2024. 92 million food-insecure people live in Europe and North America, some of the richest regions in the world.

Since 2020, poverty reduction has largely ground to a halt, with poverty rising again in Africa. In 2022, nearly half of the world population (48%), or 3.83 billion people, lived in poverty. If current trajectories hold, 2.9 billion people, or a third of the global population, will still be living in poverty in 2050.

A small redistribution of wealth would be enough to prevent this injustice; just 65% of billionaires’ wealth gained over the past year would end global poverty (at US$8.30 per day).

Rising debt and aid cuts leave a trail of destruction. Many countries in the Global South are grappling with a profound debt crisis driven by high interest rates and worsening economic conditions. 3.4 billion people live in countries that spend more on interest payments than on education or health. In Africa, spending on debt servicing is 150% greater on average than the combined spending on education, healthcare and social protection. Cuts to aid budgets have directly hit people living in poverty and could lead to more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030.

Vital public services made unaffordable and inaccessible. Currently, 2.8 billion people around the world lack adequate housing, with 1.12 billion living in slums and informal settlements. In low-income countries, 33% of school-age children and young people are out of school, and across low- and lower-middle-income countries, children in the least wealthy 20% are four to five times more likely to be out of school than those in the richest 20%.

Essential public services are not only woefully underfunded – they are being corroded by policies and narratives shaped by super-rich corporate interests that erroneously position the private sector as more efficient.

Economic inequality leads to political inequality. When a billionaire buys a politician, a newspaper or impunity from justice, it gives them tremendous influence over all our futures, undermining political freedom and eroding the rights of the many. Rising inequality leads to a higher risk of democracy being undermined, and that inequality is one of the strongest predictors of democratic backsliding. The most unequal countries are as much as seven times more likely to see this happen than more equal countries.

More on how the rich undermine democracy, and how to build a more equal future in next week’s Bulletin.

Read the full report

Something to read/listen to

Listen to Equals Podcast, with Gary Stevenson, Citibank trader turned wealth tax champion on wealth inequality, economic failure and why we must tax the rich now

Read Oxfam CEO, Amitabh Behar on ‘How to build a future that benefits everyone’.

Watch some of the best Oxfam campaign videos from this week

Our friends at the UK’s High Pay Centre are famous for their annual Fat Cat Day; this year, it took just two days for the average FTSE 100 CEO to make what the average UK worker will make all year.

We shamelessly pinched this idea to create Pollutocrat Day, the moment when the richest 1% use up their carbon budget. This is the amount of CO2 that can be emitted while staying within 1.5 degrees of warming. Just 10 days into the New Year, and we’ve already hit that moment!

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Pollutocrat day…in numbers

The carbon budget. There is very little of it remaining CO2 that can be emitted while staying within 1.5 degrees of warming. At current rates, there’s a good chance that the budget will be used up in just a couple of years.

The richest are blowing through the carbon budget. The 2030 emissions level compatible with 1.5 °C is 17.8 GtCO2. Divide that by 8.5 billion people (the projected global population in 2030), and you get an approximate per-person annual carbon budget of 2.1 tonnes CO2. Given that the richest 1% emit about 200 kg per day, this means their share of the budget is gone in 10 days. The top 0.1% used their budget by the 3^rd January.

In contrast, someone in the bottom 50% emits less than 800kg of CO2 per year, meaning they use the annual carbon budget every 2.6 years.

A fair share? Given that this 2.1 tonnes per person divides emissions equally among all individuals, it would be reasonable to question whether this is a fair way of sharing the budget. A fair share should really incorporate considerations of historical emissions and capacity to act, meaning the budget of the richest should be even lower and the poorest higher.

Climate inequality kills. The emissions generated by the richest 1% in one year alone are estimated to cause 1.3 million heat-related deaths by the end of the century. Decades of overconsumption by the world’s super-rich are also causing significant economic damage to low and lower-middle-income countries, which could add up to $44 trillion by 2050.

Deep cuts needed. To stay within the 1.5 degrees limit, by 2030, the richest 10% would have to slash their emissions by 90%, the 1% by 97%, and the 0.1% by 99%. On the other hand, the poorest 50% could increase their emissions by 63% to reach 2.1 tonnes CO2 per year.

Yet, one of the most shocking findings of our latest research is that the wrong group are cutting emissions. Since 1990, the richest 0.1% have increased their share of total emissions by 32%, whilst the poorest half of humanity has actually seen their share of emissions fall by 3%.

Not just direct emissions. Our Climate Plunder report makes it crystal clear - a powerful few use their economic and political influence to lock the world into disaster. They riddle negotiation spaces like COP with their lobbyists, sue governments for doing the right thing, spread climate disinformation, and finance hate to promote their fossil fuel interests. Their investments are financing the climate breakdown, with almost 60% of the billionaire investments classified as being in high climate-impact sectors, such as mining or oil and gas companies.

“Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”

Something to read and listen to

Listen to the latest Equals Podcast with Thomas Piketty on The Great Global Wealth Transfer

Read that billionaire Jensen Huang Says He’s ‘Perfectly Fine’ With California’s Billionaire Tax.

Listen to Why Economists Should Care About Inequality, with Branko Milanovic.

In the space of a few weeks, we’ve had:

• COP30, where the President of Brazil, Lula da Silva, quoted Oxfam’s research, putting climate inequality on the centre stage. Ultimately, the conference ended in more heartbreak than hope. Read last week’s bulletin on Oxfam’s report if you missed it.

• The G20 hosted by South Africa, where the President of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, put the inequality crisis firmly on the agenda. The final communique was watered down, with countries clearly spooked by the ghost of President Trump. More on this below.

• The World Social Summit (WSSD) in Doha, Qatar, where the Doha Political Declaration was adopted, centring social development on poverty eradication, full and productive employment and decent work for all, and social inclusion.

• The UN tax convention in Nairobi continued negotiations for the first UN tax convention.

What have we missed? Comment below!

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Oxfam’s ‘big heads’ might have been getting quite a lot of use recently, but it does feel like all these negotiations are happening over each other, rather than with each other.

In this week’s Bulletin, we start with a look at what happened at the G20, then put a spotlight on a new Oxfam report on Kenya’s inequality crisis.

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G20

Standing up to bullies. President Ramaphosa and the South African government set an example to the world in ensuring the G20 stood firm and collectively agreed on a leader’s declaration – defending multilateralism – despite U.S. strong-arming.

Rich countries and their allies did water down the communique, clearly spooked by the ghost of President Trump. The communique does not reflect the clear momentum worldwide for taxing the super-rich established during the Brazilian G20 presidency in 2024. Nevertheless, the agreement was a clear victory for South Africa and for multilateralism

History made on inequality. This was the first ever meeting of world leaders where the inequality emergency was put at the centre of the agenda. This too is a testament to South Africa’s leadership – one that put the billions before the billionaires. Arguably, the biggest legacy of the South African G20 could be the beginning of the road for the creation of a new International Panel on Inequality- an Inequality IPCC- with the leaders of Norway, Spain, Brazil and South Africa all signalling their support together with the European Council and the AU.

Kenya’s inequality crisis

Read the report here

Extreme poverty in the face of economic growth. Since 2015, an additional seven million Kenyans have fallen into extreme poverty, an increase of 37%. Severe and moderate food insecurity rose by 17 million between 2014 and 2024, an increase of 71%. The cost of food is 50% higher than it was in 2020.

This has been accompanied, however, by a decade of 5% per year real-term economic growth (excluding 2020).

Growth for the rich. The richest 125 Kenyans hold more wealth than 77% of the population, equivalent to 42.6 million people. The richest 1% own 78% of Kenya’s total financial wealth. This clearly shows that without redistribution, growth alone will continue to enrich the richest while deepening poverty for the majority.

Women are hit hardest. Women earn just KSh 65 for every KSh 100 earned by men, and are five times more likely to engage in unpaid care work, and face significant barriers in land ownership. Only 13% of women hold legal rights to agricultural land, dropping to 4% among women in the poorest households. Asset ownership in male-headed households is three times higher than in female-headed households.

Inequality in public services. Education, health and social protection structures are chronically underfunded.

Children from the poorest 20% of households receive almost five fewer years of schooling than those from the richest 20%. When adjusted for inflation, the amount of money per pupil that the government spends on primary schools is equivalent to just 18% of what it was worth in 2003.

The Social Health Insurance Fund is unaffordable for many and has benefited private healthcare providers the most. In 2022, only 20% of National Health Insurance money went to public health facilities.

Only 9% of Kenyans are covered by at least one form of social protection. Among the poorest, only a fifth receive social assistance.

Debt repayments over social spending. In 2024, out of every 100 shillings collected in taxes, 68 shillings were used to repay debt. This is double the amount in 2017. Debt repayment is twice the education budget and nearly 15 times the national health budget.

Taxing the poor. Kenya’s tax system is over-reliant on regressive VAT/sales taxes, which means that people who spend nearly all their income on basic items are paying more in taxes, as a share of their income, than their wealthier counterparts. In 2023, the government introduced new flat-rate taxes on housing and health, which mainly affected low-income earners, and gave property owners some breathing space by reducing the tax rate on rental income by 2.5 percentage points.

Inequality protests. IMF-imposed austerity measures, such as tax hikes that affect people on lower incomes and government budget cuts, are further widening the gap between the rich and the rest. Inequality was at the heart of the nationwide protests in June 2024.

The colonial legacy. Today, neo-colonial systems of domination reproduce colonial injustices. The dominance of the IMF in shaping the country’s economic policy, exploitative practices, including on trade and tax avoidance by Multinational Corporations, and the dominance of debtor interest in the global financial architecture continue to shape inequality in Kenya.

Something to read/listen to/watch

Read Oxfam’s Rune Møller Stahl’s ‘In Denmark, Social Democracy Is Failing’

Listen to the Equals podcast with Anna Marriott and Dr. Aquina Thulare on healthcare financialization and the fight for universal health.

And in lighter news, ‘How one man accidentally became the richest man of all time, a multi-quadrillionaire!’

It’s easy to slide into despair, but here's what’s giving us hope at COP:

• Bam! The Belém Action Mechanism is a proposal for a just transition that protects workers’ rights and ensures equity and justice are at the heart of the fossil fuel phaseout. It seeks to guarantee that workers and communities—especially in the poorest parts of the world—are not left behind. Countries representing 80% of the world’s population have already signalled their support!

• The power of the people. Indigenous communities from Brazil, Latin America, and across the globe, alongside civil society allies, are marching for justice. They are demanding urgent action to protect our planet’s future and voicing their anger at governments and fossil fuel industries that continue to block progress.

This week’s Bulletin is part 2 of the climate plunder series is about how the super-rich use their political and economic clout to lock the world into climate disaster.

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Climate power inequality…in numbers

Climate inequality on the centre stage. At COP29, António Guterres, UN Secretary-General highlighted Oxfam's climate inequality research to world leaders in his opening address. At COP30, President of Brazil, Lula da Silva, shared Oxfam’s headline stat with a message to tax the wealth of the super-rich.

COP is riddled with lobbyists. You can’t throw a stone without hitting a fossil fuel lobbyist at COP30. They outnumber all delegations except Brazil; 1 in 25 attendees is a fossil fuel lobbyist, research from the Kick Big Polluters Out found last week. An Oxfam investigation with the Guardian found that one in four billionaires at COP28 made their fortunes in highly polluting industries such as oil, gas, mining or chemicals.

Litigation terrorism by the super-rich. It’s not just lobbying. Investor–state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms are being widely used by the rich to hold back climate action. ISDSs are established in many investment treaties and allow corporations to sue countries that harm their profits by introducing new rules. They are typically brought against low- and middle-income countries by rich corporations and individuals. $120bn of public money was won by corporations in ISDS courts, with $84bn going to fossil-fuel corporates and $7.8bn to mining corporates.

Corporate-sponsored misinformation. Fossil fuel corporations have been found to adopt the same tactics as the tobacco industry, spending millions on networks of advocacy organisations spreading climate disinformation. The Koch brothers, who made their fortune in the fossil-fuel industry, gave over $145m to 90 organisations that attack climate science and policy solutions from 1997 to 2018. In France, billionaire Pierre-Édouard Stérin was reported to be investing €150m to bolster the far right, while the CNews network was bought by far-right fossil-fuel billionaire Vincent Bolloré, who rebranded it as the French equivalent of Fox News. The channel was fined €80,000 in 2024 for broadcasting climate misinformation.

Financing hate to promote fossil-fuel interests? In 2018, donations to anti-climate change action groups totalled $808m, with family foundations providing significant amounts of these donations. Wealthy donors are also secretly funding far-right and white supremacist movements, which spread racism, anti-transgender and misogynistic views, and are more likely to support politicians with regressive climate agendas.

Are wealthy individuals, many of whom have fossil-fuel interests, using hatred to build support for poisonous politicians whom they can count on to introduce anti-climate policies?

Financing the climate breakdown. Billionaires dominate every aspect of the global economy, controlling 17 of the 50 largest listed corporates in the world, either as CEO or principal investor. Oxfam’s research uncovered the investment portfolios of 308 billionaires. It found that:

• In 2024, the investment emissions of the 308 billionaires totalled 586 million tonnes of CO2e, more than the combined emissions of 118 countries; if they were personified as a country, then they would rank as the fifteenth-most polluting country in the world, ahead of South Africa.

• On average, a billionaire’s annual per capita investment emissions are 1.9 million tonnes of CO2e, which is 346,000 times more than the average person. These billionaires would have to circumnavigate the world almost 10,000 times in their private jets to emit this much.

• Two-thirds of the corporates they invest in are not aligned with the 1.5°C Paris Agreement target, and one-third have decarbonisation plans aligned to a 4°C world.

• They tend to invest in much more polluting corporates than average. For every $1m invested, billionaire investments produce over two and a half times more emissions than the S&P 1,200. Almost 60% of the billionaire investments are classified as being in high climate-impact sectors, such as mining or oil and gas companies, compared to 49% for the S&P 1,200, and 14% of their wealth is from corporates with fossil-fuel revenue, compared to 9% for the S&P 1,200 – a 55% higher share.

• Billionaires could direct their investments towards less climate-damaging corporations. If they instead chose an investment fund which prioritises good environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance, they could cut their emissions by 23 times.

Read the full report here (available in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and the summary in Arabic)

The workings behind the stats can be found in the methodology note here.

Something to read and listen to

Listen to Marinel Ubaldo on Equals, taking us inside the night Typhoon Haiyan hit, how her community rebuilt, and the extraordinary human-rights case she helped push forward to hold fossil fuel giants to account.

Read the report from the G20 Extraordinary Committee of Independent Experts on Inequality who presented their report to President Ramaphosa in Cape Town last week. They will present their findings at the G20 Leaders’ Summit on 22/23 November. 500 top economists have come out in support of an international panel on inequality.

Read Oxfam’s Rebecca Riddell ‘A ‘Golden Age of America’? More Like Trump’s Gilded Age’

Ahead of the Summit, a statement by the Public Services coalition was endorsed by 111 organisations, calling for social development to be prioritised over the coming month, including at the WSSD, COP, the G20 and the start of the negotiations for the UN Tax Convention. At the same time, GCAP adopted the Peoples’ Declaration for Social Justice, calling for a new global social contract.

Despite the lack of global attention, it was heartening to see thousands of people come to Doha for the World Summit for Social Development and the depth of some of the conversations that happened.

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A mountain to climb. The summit was always going to struggle to be noticed, with the world distracted on so many fronts. But, arguably, it was more evaded than eclipsed. The worst cuts to aid in history, including massive cuts to health, mean that donor countries have lots to hide and little to celebrate. In fact, they should be hanging their heads in shame.

Engines of equality. This is a terrible shame, because health, education, social protection and indeed other social services can be powerful engines of equality - for governments keen to close the gap between the rich and the rest there is not many other thing that can be done that are more successful, or indeed more popular with the public; at a time when addressing the anger of Gen Z is becoming more and more important for survival.

Publicly good. Public services are underfunded. Almost half of humanity lives in countries that spend more on servicing interest on debt than on health or education. In 2024, Oxfam highlighted that 84 percent of countries have cut investment in education, health and social protection. Nine out of ten countries have backtracked in one or more areas.

The services that work are public, universal, and free at the point of use. The evidence is overwhelming, and the stories of success are truly heartening. Take Thailand. They introduced universal health coverage in 2002 for their population of 65 million people, with a per capita income similar to that of the US in 1930. Over 80% of all care is delivered by the state. Funded by progressive taxation, quality health services are available free to everyone and benefit the poorest people most.

Privately bad. Yet the advice of the World Bank and others for decades has been the opposite: to promote the private provision of services, and to get people to pay for them, either up front with fees, or through insurance schemes. There is a clear risk that this trend would only grow as aid shrinks. Indeed, the Social Summit itself alarmingly called for a greater focus on Public-Private Partnerships for healthcare as a solution. As Oxfam and Bloomberg have documented, this has directly fuelled human rights abuses, whether in education or health. Patients are routinely turned into prisoners, held in hospitals until bills can be paid, or the bodies of loved ones are kept in the morgue until money is found to pay. And beyond the headline horror stories, the simple fact of hundreds of millions unable to get education or medicines because they cannot pay. Meanwhile, in the last year, a total of 50 new health and pharmaceutical billionaires were minted, as private health and medicine continue to deliver dividends for those at the top. Such inequality has been shown to drive pandemics in a new report released this week.

Just plain mean. Social protection schemes have also suffered from decades of wrong advice, insisting that governments spend time and money trying to means-test benefits, only giving them to poor people. Maybe it makes sense on paper, but it is virtually impossible in practice and cruelly excludes so many who need help. At the same time, services targeted only at the poor are invariably poor services, as the middle classes go private and see no value in paying taxes to pay for public services they don’t use. This also ignores the history of virtually all Global North countries, where the most successful benefits are those that are universal, grants for all children, or for all mothers, or for all pensioners- their universality making them hugely popular with the whole of society; not just in their own right, but in a broader sense of creating a social contract and holding the state and society together- pretty important aims right now in almost every country.

The summit outcome. Three days and over 200 (!) physical events later, the Summit concluded. The Doha Political Declaration was adopted, which renewed leaders’ commitment to the 1995 Copenhagen Declaration and the SDG agenda, centring social development on the three pillars of poverty eradication, full and productive employment and decent work for all, and social inclusion.

The consensus. That inequality is a critical issue. There is an emerging political agreement that it is time for a more meaningful commitment to action on universal social protection. There is a surprising degree of agreement among UN agencies, political leaders and civil society about the urgency of having a more coordinated strategy on public services.

The tension. The continued tendency to look to the private sector for solutions. There is also a tension between development as usual and responding to the tectonic shifts taking place in the development landscape at the global level.

The Social Summit was the start of a journey, not the end of it. As the global spotlight moves to the COP, states and international actors gathered there must focus on inequality reduction and recognise that comprehensive support for public services is central to the ‘justice’ involved in a ‘just transition’ and must ensure that climate finance also supports the expansion and resilience of publicly delivered essential services.

In other news…

Committee storms the Cape. Meanwhile, Professor Joseph Stiglitz and his Extraordinary Committee have presented their Inequality report to President Cyril Ramaphosa in Cape Town, in a move covered widely around the world. Whilst not wearing capes, the findings of Stiglitz and his brave committee members are indeed extraordinary. Whilst global wealth has more than doubled since 2000, for every dollar of new wealth created, the super-rich got 41 cents, whilst the bottom half of humanity got 1 cent. And core to their recommendations for fighting inequality- public services for all and universal social protection.

An Inequality IPCC?

The committee rightly highlights that the world faces an inequality emergency, on a par with the climate emergency, and that indeed the two emergencies are closely linked. To tackle the Inequality Emergency, they call for the establishment of a new International Panel on Inequality, something President Ramaphosa supported strongly and has committed to championing with his fellow G20 governments- the next few weeks will see whether this recommendation becomes a reality.

Something to read and watch

Read Amitabh Behar, Oxfam’s boss in Al Jazeera- Gen Z are demanding schools and hospitals, not super yachts and helicopters.

Watch Zohran Mamdani’s barnstorming acceptance speech winning the Mayoralty of New York City. ‘Fingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor, palms calloused from delivery bike handlebars, knuckles scarred with kitchen burns-these are not hands that have been allowed to hold power.’

Read Oxfam in Asia’s latest inequality report, “An Unequal Future. Asia’s Struggle for Justice in a Warming, Wired World”

COP 30 comes ten years after world leaders agreed in Paris to take urgent action to limit global warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. Governments have failed to decarbonise their economies rapidly, and it is now almost inevitable that humanity will overshoot the Paris agreement. Hurricane Melissa is the latest devastating weather event intensified by human-caused climate change.

Oxfam’s research, the fifth report in their climate and inequality series, updates the emissions inequality data behind the famous ‘champagne glass’ (below) and explores how the super-rich utilise their economic and political power to lock the world into climate disaster.

This week’s Bulletin looks at the latest emissions inequality data; we’ll release part 2 on the influence of the super-rich during COP in November. If you can’t wait until then, you can read the full report here.

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Climate and inequality, in numbers

Passing terrifying milestones. In 2024, average global temperatures exceeded 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels for the first time. The same year, two-thirds of the earth’s surface experienced record temperatures and fossil-fuel emissions reached their highest-ever levels. The evidence that we are facing imminent and irreversible climate breakdown is now damning.

The carbon budget is almost depleted. The best available climate science shows that at the current rate of emissions, there are just two years of available carbon budget remaining. Exceeding the carbon budget means global warming will rise above 1.5 °C.

This fact shouldn’t stop the world from acting out of despair, even when we do exceed 1.5°C, every subsequent fraction of a degree of heating makes a huge difference.

The super-rich are burning through our climate budget. A person in the top 0.1% emits more in a day than a person in the poorest 50% emits all year. The rich are ripping through the carbon budget – if everyone emitted like the 0.1%, it would be gone in 3 weeks - to stay within safe limits, they’d need to cut their emissions by 99%. The climate crisis is an inequality crisis.

Not just rich countries, rich people everywhere. The report is a powerful reminder that it is not just rich countries but rich people who bear the responsibility for fuelling today’s dangerous levels of global warming. The majority of the super-rich live in the Global North, but ultra-wealthy people in poorer nations are also culpable. For example, someone in the richest 0.1% in Nepal, a country with a very low share of historic emissions, emits eight times more than someone in the poorest 50% in the UK.

The wrong group is cutting emissions. One of the most shocking findings is that the share of emissions is increasing for the rich, who can most easily reduce their emissions, and decreasing amongst the world’s poorest people. Since 1990, the richest 0.1% have increased their share of total emissions by 32%, whilst the poorest half of humanity has actually seen their share of emissions fall by 3%.

What does this mean for climate policy? The climate and inequality crises are inextricably linked. The same ideologies and power dynamics that are fuelling inequality are allowing corporations and their rich owners to avoid regulation and to keep the world hooked on fossil fuels in the name of profit.

Policies to combat the climate crisis must take into account the responsibilities of the richest people.

Subscribe to receive part 2, where we will look at the political and economic power of the super-rich and how their polluting interest are locking the world into a high-carbon economy. We’ll also go through the report’s recommendations.

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Something to read/listen to

Read Oxfam Canada’s new Inequality Scorecard, which assesses federal policies across eight critical areas and exposes the gaps between political promises and meaningful action.

Read Simon Kuper in the FT on Time to guillotine France’s super-rich tax breaks.

Read The World Inequality Lab’s climate and inequality report that focuses on the role of wealth in the climate crisis.

Listen to Ones and Tooze on the winners of the Nobel Prize for Economics.

The idea of a poverty line is pretty well understood. No one should have so little that they can’t afford a roof over their head or go to bed hungry at night. But billions of people around the world can’t afford these basics, despite the wealth increase of billionaires over the last decade being enough to end poverty 22 times over.

Inspired by the work of the fantastic Ingrid Robeyns, this week’s guest on our Equals Podcast, we’re looking at some of the arguments she makes for setting an upper limit to extreme wealth.

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The case against extreme wealth…in numbers

They don’t deserve it in the first place. Billionaires like to portray themselves as the pulling themselves up by the bootstraps sort. Work hard and you too could have your very own rocket ship. According to Oxfam’s research, 60% of billionaire wealth is unearned, either from inheritance, cronyism or monopoly sources. In 2023, more billionaires were created through inheritance than through entrepreneurialism. What’s more, the fortunes of many modern-day family dynasties were built on colonialism, slavery and even through close collaboration with the Nazi party (listen to our episode with David de Jong on this). Today, a rigged financial system means the richest 1% in Global North extracts $30 million an hour from the Global South.

Inequality isn’t just wrong, it’s bad for society. How does stronger social cohesion, healthier and happier people, and less child poverty and deprivation sound? As Max Lawson writes, equality truly is a magic bullet. Not just that, but reducing inequality by just 2% every year would triple the speed of poverty reduction. A global wealth tax on the super-rich of up to 5% could raise almost $2 trillion, enough to lift 2 billion people out of poverty, and fund a global plan to end hunger. It is an immensely popular policy, supported by 90% of the global public and even by the super-rich themselves. 74% of millionaires support higher taxes on wealth.

Subscribe to Equals to get next week’s episode and hear from Patriotic Millionaire Joao Paulo Pacifico about why he supports the policy.

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The rich are destroying the environment. Last year, we tracked the private jets, super yachts and investments of 50 of the world’s richest people and found that they emit more on average in 90 minutes than the average person does in a lifetime. Cutting inequality could massively reduce global emissions while also ending poverty. If global income was redistributed to ensure that everyone earned above $25 a day, then global emissions would be reduced by 10% (equivalent to the European Union’s total emissions).

You can find all our publications on the topic at our Climate Inequality hub.

Sound a bit red under the bed? As Ingrid points out in the interview, the argument she is making is a moral rather than political one. It’s about ensuring the needs of people and planet are met so everyone can flourish. You don’t have to be a communist to agree with a wealth cap, nor does it necessarily mean rejecting a market-based economy.

OK, I’m sold, but how much is too much? Ah, the million-dollar question (ba dum tsh). Ingrid suggests it could be set at around ten million euros. Research by NEF and Patriotic Millionaires found that one-third of millionaires thought the wealth line should be set at $10 million, while politicians and policy experts preferred a relative measure, for instance, a ratio between individual wealth and the size of the national economy.

It’s fair to say that more work is needed to determine the level, but interest is gathering pace. At the World Bank annual meetings next week, the Patriotic Millionaires have organised an event ‘Extreme Wealth – How Much is Too Much? A New Measure for Better Economies, Democracies, and Societies, with some great speakers, including Abigail Disney, grandniece of Walt Disney. If you are at the Annual Meetings go along, and if you are not, then watch the livestream here.

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Something to read and watch

Read Oxfam’s new report on Europe’s inequality crisis and an agenda to tax the super-rich.

Watch this masterclass in speechwriting at the UK’s Green Party conference, and an inspiring and hopeful campaign video.

Read Grace Blakeley’s blog on why workers are scared for the future, with a killer graph showing how, since the start of 2024, consumer confidence of all those who earn under £50,000 per year has been in decline while those above is trending up.

Read Oscar Barrera-Rodriguez on billionaire wealth and tax erosion.

Read (paywall) about progress in Brazil to tax the rich.

Read Branko Milanovic on how to control AI-induced income inequality

However, few ask, who is benefiting and who is bearing the costs of the energy transition? Fortunately, Oxfam’s latest report, ‘Unjust Transition: Reclaiming the energy future from climate colonialism’, sets out a vivid warning of an extractive transition and how mistakes of the colonial past can be avoided.

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Climate colonialism in numbers

Oxfam’s calculations and sources for many of these stats can be found in the methodology note and report here.

Energy inequality. Around 666 million people still live without even basic access to electricity, and 2.1 billion lack access to clean cooking fuels. Energy poverty is highly concentrated and unequal. Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 85% of the global population without electricity, and in the last decade, the richest 10% of people have consumed half of all global energy, while the poorest 50% have shared just 8%.

Nowhere is energy inequality more visible than in the lives of women and girls, who bear the brunt of energy poverty. Women in rural South Asian communities collectively spend an estimated 507 million hours each day collecting fuel.

Southern extraction, same story, different minerals. The Global South holds 70% of the world’s transition minerals reserves, but much of the value is taken by foreign investors. Latin America, for example, has over 50% of the world’s lithium reserves, an essential mineral for battery technologies, yet more than 90% of the value is captured outside the region, largely by companies in China, Europe and the United States.

As the economic powerhouses of the Global North race to decarbonise, the Global South will, again, be increasingly relied upon for resource extraction.

Land that should not be up for grabs. Renewable energy projects and transition mineral mining require vast territories, intensifying demand for land. 60% of Indigenous lands covering around 22.7 million km², an area roughly the size of Brazil, the USA and India combined, are currently under threat or face imminent threat from industrial development linked largely to the energy transition.

This is alarming given Indigenous Peoples’ vital role in safeguarding the planet – they manage 40% of all protected land for conservation.

An economy of extraction. In 2024, high-income countries accounted for roughly 50% of global clean energy investment and China for 29%, while Latin America received 3%, and South-East Asia, the Middle East and Africa received just 2% each.

Energy projects in the Global South often benefit foreign investors, hidden in a web of complicated corporate structures. Although Brazilian entities officially own 89% of wind parks, 68% of these organisations are subsidiaries of international companies – mainly from Italy and France – giving foreign investors substantial control, with international stakeholders holding 78% of wind assets and 96% of solar assets.

Rising debt. While rich countries can pour billions into their own clean energy transitions, the Global South is left with rising debt, punishing interest rates and shrinking fiscal space. Current models of climate financing exacerbate the problem, with 70% of international public climate finance reported by high-income countries delivered as loans rather than grants.

The countries that are among the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change are being pushed deeper into debt to respond to a crisis they did not cause. In reality, it’s high-income countries that should be in the red, to the tune of up to $192 trillion, for their overuse of the carbon budget.

Clean energy, dirty prices. Global South countries face interest rates of 9–13.5% for clean energy projects, compared to 3–6% in the Global North. Clean energy for 100,000 people costs $95m in advanced economies, but in countries such as India, it costs around $139m (45% higher), in Nigeria, it costs around $188m (97% higher), due to higher financing costs and perceived risks imposed by the Global North.

Reclaiming the future. It does not have to be this way. The energy transition offers a rare chance to rewrite the script – to move beyond extractive models. Rather than treating the energy future as a race with few winners, we must reimagine it as a shared global project. Energy should not be hoarded, withheld, or used as leverage for geopolitical or corporate power.

There is no single blueprint for a just transition – it will differ across contexts, shaped by diverse histories, knowledge and needs. But all just transitions must share one principle: energy should serve life, not profit.

Something to read and listen to

Listen to the latest Equals episode, hear from three trade union leaders - from Ukraine, South Korea and the UK - about how working people are standing strong against war, exploitation, and political repression

Read Adam Tooze’s latest on MAGA & the moment of hyperscaling.

Chartbook

Chartbook 410: Malign coincidence - MAGA & the moment of hyperscaling.

The engagement of big tech with the Trump Presidency has been one of the big surprises of the second term. To explain the gaggles of fawning tech moguls that gather around Trump in Washington or on his trips to the UK and the Gulf, one could search around for motives at the level of ideology or individual greed. But those motivations are weak compared t…

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7 months ago · 119 likes · 22 comments · Adam Tooze

Read about the ‘Zucman tax’ (or should it be the Bernard Arnault tax?), which is dominating political debate in France at the moment. Huge public support is certainly causing consternation amongst the billionaire class who are organising to counter Zucman’s ‘théories dangereuses’!

In this week’s Bulletin, we’re looking at how unions are fighting inequality and why the largest social movement in the world gives us hope.

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Trade Unions against inequality, in numbers

Stronger trade unions = lower inequality. The decline in trade union membership over the last half-century has been mirrored by a steady rise in inequality, as worker bargaining power reduces compared to shareholders. Research of European countries by the ILO found that when trade union density reaches 39%, it is followed by a decline in income inequality as union density continues to increase. Conversely, an IMF study found that the decline in unionisation explains half of the rise in the Gini measure of income inequality.

Fighting to protect democracy. The latest ITUC Global Rights Index shows a huge decline for workers and unions in 2025, with Europe and the Americas recording their worst scores ever. Attacks on free speech were recorded in 45% of countries, and the right to strike was violated in 87% of countries. Populist and far-right movements are attacking democratic rights, the freedom of the press and introducing policies that benefit the rich. Unions are fighting back.

Politically rich vs politically poor. Being financially wealthy can make someone very politically rich. Being poor can make them politically poor. For example, in the US, when a policy has the support of the rich, it has a 45% chance of becoming law. When the rich oppose it, there’s just an 18% chance of it passing. In Spain, policies popular among “top socioeconomic groups” have nearly a 57% chance of being approved, while those popular among bottom groups have just a 41% chance. Unions are a vital way for ordinary people to fight back against political poverty.

Oligarchs, moving from the shadows to centre stage. Billionaire meddling in politics has traditionally been done in the shadows, funding shady think-tanks, donations to politicians and controlling the media through ownership. During the 2024 US elections, billionaire families donated almost $2 billion to the candidates. This year, billionaires took to the stage, quite literally. What’s especially worrying is that in democracies, politicians can be voted out, but billionaires can’t be.

Resisting the billionaire coup. The ITUC’s excellent campaign ‘Stop the Billionaire Coup!’ is mobilising their 200 million members to resist the takeover of democracy by the super-rich. It recognises that mainstream politics, with an agenda of deregulation, neoliberalism and privatisation, has left many people disillusioned and looking for alternatives, a space being filled by billionaire-backed far-right movements.

As the largest social movement in the world, trade unions are fighting inequality, not just through negotiating better pay and conditions for workers, but by offering a positive alternative where economies and governments serve the people, not the rich and their corporations. Now that’s something we can get behind!

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Something to read/listen to

Read about the new G20 inequality taskforce, set up by South Africa and chaired by Economics Prize laureate Joseph Stiglitz.

Read about how Mexico has more than doubled its minimum wage without the feared job losses or price increases.

Watch millionaires campaigning for lower taxes for the working class, paid for by millionaires.

Read about how investors have drained the global south in pursuit of aggressive profit maximisation.

Read the newsletter from our friends at Inequality.org about why the Labor Day Weekend in the US was very different this year.

Over the years on EQUALS, we’ve sat down with some of the most influential thinkers, activists, academics, and leaders of our time to tackle these very questions. Now, as multiple crises collide in 2025 — spiraling inequality, climate shocks, soaring debt, and fragile leadership — their words feel more relevant than ever.

Some conversations never age. Here’s a set of powerful episodes from the EQUALS archive, just as urgent now as when we recorded them. These aren’t just conversations from the past. They’re roadmaps for today.

1. Gabriel Zucman on Tax, Slavery & Billionaires.

What do billionaires today have in common with slave owners of the past? Economist Gabriel Zucman traces the roots of tax dodging to slavery, exposing why the ultra-rich resist taxes with such ferocity and why a wealth tax is both just and possible. If you’ve ever wondered why billionaires seem untouchable, this one will open your eyes.
Listen here.

2. Gordon Brown on The Global Response to Crisis.

The crises are global, but the response isn’t. Former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown lays out what real leadership should look like when the world is on fire. A masterclass on what it takes to rise above politics and act with global solidarity. Tune in.

3. Helen Clark on Women Leaders, Crises & Preparedness

Would the pandemic response have looked different if more women were in charge? Helen Clark, former Prime Minister of New Zealand, and UNDP chief on how women leaders managed crises differently and what still needs to change to make preparedness a priority. Much needed insights as the world is dealing with climate, health, war, and inequality crisis all together. Listen here.

4. Branko Milanović on Inequality in Every Crisis

Why do the rich always seem to come out richer when the world goes through hell? breaks down the structural reasons inequality deepens during pandemics, financial crashes, and wars. A sobering but essential guide to understanding why shocks is never equal. Listen to the discussion.

5. Kristalina Georgieva on IMF, Climate & Debt Reform

Debt. Climate. Inequality. IMF Chief Kristalina Georgieva discusses what it would take for the global financial system to work for people and planet, not just the powerful. From debt restructuring to climate finance, she unpacks reforms that could change the global economic order. Explore the conversation here.

6. Joseph Stiglitz on Why Inequality is Bad for You

Joseph Stiglitz has spent decades proving that inequality doesn’t just hurt the poor and how it is bad for everyone. In this conversation, Stiglitz breaks down how we got into today’s inequality crisis, what it means for our economies and democracies, and where he still finds hope. A true “godfather” of inequality thinking, his insights remain essential for anyone who wants to understand and change the system. Dive in.

7. The late Hage G. Geingob former President of Namibia on A Legacy of Leadership and Justice

Before he passed away, Namibia’s former President Hifikepunye Pohamba sat down with us to share his reflections on leadership, inequality, and justice. From the fight for independence to governing through turbulence, his words remain a powerful reminder of how dignity and principle can guide leadership in times of crisis. A conversation that resonates even more deeply today. Full episode here.

The crises may be new, but the playbook is the same. As climate shocks, war and conflicts, and inequality converge, the insights of these influential voices provide a blueprint for action, not just analysis. Do not just scroll past: listen and share. The fight against inequality is still on.

EQUALS is back next week with a brand-new season. Stay tuned for powerful new conversations on inequality, power, and justice.

If you have not already, make sure to subscribe so you do not miss a single episode. Do not forget to like, share, and drop us a comment with your thoughts. Follow the conversation on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Bluesky.

This year’s forthcoming research, due to be released ahead of COP 30 in Belém, Brazil, has the latest up-to-date figures on the emissions of the super-rich and will set out how they are squandering the little remaining carbon budget, while using their enormous economic and political influence to lock the world into climate disaster.

In the build-up to COP 30, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Oxfam team have also released our first regional research into climate and inequality, with shocking findings.

You can see all our climate and inequality publications on our new hub page.

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MENA climate and inequality, in numbers

A region already in climate crisis. MENA is already one of the hottest, most water-scarce regions on Earth, with temperatures rising 1.5°C over the past 30 years, more than twice the global average.

Unequal in wealth…MENA is one of the most unequal regions in the world. Half of the countries with the most significant growth in wealth inequality worldwide are in MENA and the region’s billionaires increased their wealth by 65% from US$54.2bn to US$89.5bn in 2024 alone.

Unequal in emissions…The wealthiest in MENA disproportionately contribute to climate change while insulating themselves from its consequences. The richest 1% in MENA emit more than twice as much as the poorest half of the population. On a per capita basis, the richest 0.1%, whose annual emissions are equivalent to driving around the planet about 56 times, emit 465 times more than someone in the poorest 50%.

Five of the region’s billionaires flew in their private jets for 1,300 hours in a single year, the equivalent of circumnavigating the world over 42 times.

More unequal emissions than globally. In 2019, the wealthiest 10% had even higher consumption-based emissions than the same income groups at the global level, with 64% of the region's emissions, compared to 50% globally. The richest 1% in the MENA region were responsible for 25% of the region's carbon emissions in 2019 vs. 16% globally.

Driven by fossil fuel extraction and export. Oil-producing Gulf nations such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar have generated immense wealth for a small elite. In 2022, Saudi Arabia, with a population of 32 million, produced 34% of the region’s total greenhouse emissions, while Sudan, with a population of 50 million people, was responsible for close to zero.

Not all in the same boat. The outsized emissions of the richest are accelerating the climate crisis. 83% of the MENA population already face water scarcity. Water scarcity will likely force girls to drop out of school, as their unpaid work will increase because collecting water takes longer.

Egypt’s 40 golf courses consume up to 1 billion cubic meters of water annually, enough to supply 54 million people with 50 litres of water per day in a country gripped by chronic water shortages.

Funding the finance gap. Decades of austerity policies and sustained public spending cuts have exacerbated both the climate and inequality crises. MENA governments are either unwilling or unable to invest to meaningfully address the climate emergency.

While at least US$570bn is needed for climate adaptation and mitigation, only US$34.5bn of the required amount has been raised for public international climate finance in the region, covering less than 6% of Nationally Determined Contribution requirements. Most funding has been allocated through traditional or concessional loans, as the graph below shows.

Taxing the rich. Those most responsible for climate breakdown should pay. The richest 1% in MENA hold 48% of financial wealth, but tax evasion, exemptions and privileges for the rich drain public funds needed for climate action.

Read the full report ‘Not Everyone is in the same boat’ for all the details behind these numbers.

Something to read and listen to

Read Al Jazeera columnist Tafi Mhaka’s great piece on Africa's billionaire boom based on Oxfam’s Africa inequality report.

Check out The EUs official polling (the EU barometer) which found that 65% of EU citizens support a minimum tax on the wealthiest 0.001%:

Read this article that looks at how rich politicians are in 41 countries compared to ordinary citizens. Legislators in South Africa on average have 200 times more wealth than the citizens they represent.

Read about how only 9 of the 256 billionaires actually followed through on giving away half their wealth

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Taxing Africa’s super-rich, in numbers

The reality of Africa’s tax. On paper, Africa does particularly well on progressive taxation, with lower value added taxes, higher corporate tax and more progressive income tax rates than global average. However, this strong performance on paper is not translating into actual progressive tax collection, which is well below the global average. African countries collect the lowest amount of tax of any region, at 16% of GDP. In reality, the majority of tax collected is from regressive sources as the table below shows.

Leaking tax coffers. African countries lose, on average, 3.5% of their total tax revenue to multinational corporations’ tax avoidance, which is higher than any other region. Underreporting and tax evasion are widespread among the richest. For example, only one in five dollar-millionaires in Rwanda filed a personal income declaration in 2018 and 99% of Nigeria’s super-rich were found to be non-compliant with their tax obligations. Across 31 African countries,15.2% of their GDP is held offshore.

Plugging the holes. African countries, on average, only have one tax auditor for nearly every 13,000 taxpayers, but could increase their domestic revenue by 1% for every 10% increase in the number of comprehensive audits.

Regressive reality. African countries have increased their reliance on taxes on goods and services and payroll taxes, while taxes on corporate income have barely changed, and collection from wealth taxes has plummeted by nearly a quarter, as the figure below shows.

This reliance on regressive consumption taxes falls on all citizens, but especially on women and people living in poverty, while under-taxing those with the most ability to pay.

Outside influence. The changes seen are not only the result of a lack of government commitment to reduce inequality, but are also the result of outside influence on African countries’ tax policies, not least from the IMF, which has also imposed harmful austerity policies leading to deadly protests in countries such as Kenya and Angola.

Taxing the 1%. Africa’s richest 1% – a group consisting of about 14.7 million people – receive a fifth of all income and own a third of all wealth in the region. The income share of the richest 1% is only reduced by 6.85% on average, which means that Africa’s tax systems are nearly three times less effective at redistributing income away from the richest 1% than the global average.

Revenue potential. African countries could raise nearly US$66bn in additional revenue every year by taxing the richest 1% by an additional percentage point on their wealth and an additional 10 percentage points on their income. This would cover the funding gaps to achieve free quality education and connect all homes and businesses to electricity, with $2 billion to spare.

Widespread public support. 69% of people polled across 34 African countries agreed that it ‘is fair to tax rich people at a higher rate than ordinary people in order to fund government programs to benefit the poor’. A recent poll from 2024 shows that 70% of Kenyans and 68% of South African citizens support a net wealth tax on the rich.

Still hope for a breakthrough on tax. Although the G20 Finance ministers failed to come to an agreement on taxing the rich, despite breakthrough progress in Brazil last year, there is still hope. In a historic breakthrough delivered by African countries, negotiations for a UN Tax Convention, with a terms of reference that recognises the need to tax the rich, began in February 2025. At the International Conference on Financing for Development, a new collaboration to tax the super-rich was launched, involving countries from both the Global South and North, the UN and civil society.

Read Oxfam’s Africa inequality report here for all the details behind these numbers.

Something to read/watch

The Oxfam inequality group chat has been ablaze recently, with loads of interesting articles being shared - so here is some summer/winter holiday reading for you.

Branko Milanovic’s three-part substack series on how in modern capitalist societies, an increasing share of the rich are rich in two dimensions: they are among the best-paid workers, and among the richest capitalists.

Aidan Regan on How the Top 1% of Firms Capture the Profits - a deep, data-driven, dive into how a few US companies capture most profit and market power.

Bhaskar Mitra on Why I am leaving big tech… (because big tech bosses want to drive us towards a techno-fascist future).

Rafael Quintero on The G7’s Corporate Tax Escape Hatch with a wonderful comparison of G7’s global minimum tax reforms as “a new speed-limit rule that applies universally, except for BMWs driven by Americans.”

Ha-Joon Chang on how Economics teaching has become the Aeroflot of ideas (FT paywall)

Kate Pickett on How Equality Will Define Europe’s Next Chapter

Garry Economics puts it succinctly on why billionaires are funding the far right.

Africa and its countries are among the world’s most unequal and its governments the least committed to reducing inequality, but they are also hamstrung by a debt crisis and unfair international financial and trade rules. Never was there a more important time for South Africa’s G20 themes of “Solidarity, Equality and Sustainability”.

In this week’s Bulletin, we look at Oxfam’s latest research into the rise of inequality in Africa which touched a nerve and led to widespread media coverage across the continent. Next week we will look at how Africa’s super-rich should be taxed.

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Africa’s inequality crisis, in numbers

The rich get richer...The four richest men in Africa have more wealth than the poorest half of the region, about 750 million people. The income share of the richest 1% and 10% has increased since 2019 while the incomes of the poorest 50% have decreased.

…while the majority are driven deeper into poverty. Hunger is rising in Africa, with 846.6 million people facing food insecurity in 2023, an increase of 20 million from 2022. High food prices are disproportionately hitting low earners, as they spend most of their incomes on food. Seven in 10 people living in extreme poverty in the world live in Africa, rising by 41.3 million since 2020. At the current rate, it will take more than 600 years to end extreme poverty in Africa.

Soaring inequality. Almost half of the world’s fifty most unequal countries are in Africa and 44% of the countries defined by the World Bank as having ‘high inequality’ are there. Income inequality has increased or stagnated in 41% of African countries, representing half of the region’s population.

Billionaire bonanza. At the start of the millennium, Africa had no US dollar billionaires. Today it has 23, with a combined net wealth of $112.6 billion. Over the past five years, African billionaires have increased their wealth by 56%, the five richest African billionaires have increased their wealth by 88%.

Billionaire state support. Three-fifths of the world’s billionaires’ wealth comes from cronyism, corruption, abuse of monopoly power, and inheritance. This is particularly true in Africa. For example, Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man, was a beneficiary of the privatisation of publicly owned enterprises in the early 2000s, especially in the cement industry, and has subsequently benefited from tax waivers and tariffs. Dangote Cement paid an effective tax rate of 2% in 2016 despite net profits of 86%. Tax deductions for 6 Nigerian companies reached N5 trillion, accounting for 18.5% of Nigeria’s 2024 Federal budget.

This type of state support to billionaires and the super-rich while enforcing austerity has devastating consequences on the welfare systems which people living in poverty rely on.

Mind the gender gap. In Africa, men own three times more wealth than women; this is the highest gender wealth gap of all regions and is double the world ratio. The average length of paid parental leave is about 89 days (86 days of fully paid maternal leave and less than four days of paid paternal leave), which is low compared to other regions. A majority of the labour force is in informal employment, meaning existing laws do not benefit most working women in the region.

The debt crisis. The economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation, and tightening monetary policy in the Global North have exacerbated the debt burden in Africa. Over half of African countries are at high risk of debt distress. Public debt as a share of GDP in Africa has more than doubled over the last decade to 67% in 2023.

Wave of austerity. The debt burden erodes governments’ capacity for social spending. Servicing the interest on debt alone is gobbling up 17% of revenue on average, double the amount a decade ago.

The poorest people are feeling the impacts of this; the richest people in Africa do not use public social facilities such as education or healthcare.

Case for inequality-busting policies. The African Union has recognised the problem of inequality. In 2024, it set its first target, to reduce inequality by 15% over the coming decade. If this target were met, Oxfam estimates that the rate of poverty reduction would be 2.4 times faster. Every African country has a Gini above 0.27, which IMF research shows slows economic growth. High inequality can lead to the rise of populism and the erosion of democracy. 60% of respondents surveyed across eight African countries thought that rich people buy elections ‘often’ or ‘fairly often’, which is significantly higher than in the rest of the world.

The lack of commitment to reduce inequality in Africa. The 2024 Commitment to Reducing Inequality (CRI) Index for Africa, which covers 48 African countries, shows governments are failing to introduce policies to fight inequality. The research found that all countries have cut the share of budgets going to either education, health and/or social protection, 79% have backtracked on measures of progressive taxation; and 89% have regressed on labour rights, minimum wage and the provision of quality jobs.

A few countries are implementing anti-inequality policies. Eswatini increased its spending on education and health, boosting social spending by 21% since the 2022 CRI. Benin is improving its social protection coverage, targeting 150,000 households with cash transfers and income-generating activities costing 0.2% of GDP per year.

Read Oxfam’s Africa inequality report here for all the details behind these numbers and subscribe now to receive next week’s Bulletin, where we’ll be setting out why Africa’s tax regime might look good on paper but in reality, is failing to fight inequality, and what can be done about it.

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Something to read/listen to

Read President Lula’s oped in the Guardian about why we need true multilateralism.

Listen to the wrap-up of Season 7 of Equals, where Grazielle and Max reflect on their favourite and most impactful and powerful conversations from the season.

Read Mother Earth’s piece on how World Bank funded hospitals are detaining patients and leaving them with crushing debt. If you missed it, read our Sick Development report and listen to the podcast series on Oxfam’s investigation into the issue.

Launched ahead of the conference, Oxfam’s latest report sets out how private finance has taken over development, amidst an astronomical rise in private wealth. It comes as over 40 former and current world leaders warn of extreme inequality, calling for “a new economic coalition of the willing” to tackle inequality.

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Financing for development, in numbers

A world in crisis. More than 3.7 billion people (nearly half the world) live in poverty (PPP$8.30 line), over 700 million face hunger, and gender equality will not be achieved for another 123 years. Only 16% of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets were on track to be met by 2030. Global development is desperately failing while the interests of a very wealthy few are put first.

Soaring inequality. Since 2015, the richest 1%, who own more than the bottom 95% of the world combined, have gained at least $33.9 trillion, enough to end annual global poverty 22 times over. Billionaires have gained $6.5 trillion, more than the $4 trillion estimated annual cost of achieving the SDGs. The failures of the last decade are in no small part the result of the failure to tackle extreme inequality.

Development for profit, not people. While the world has gotten much richer, governments have not. Between 1995 and 2023, global private wealth grew by $342 trillion—eight times more than global public wealth (the net wealth of governments), which grew by just $44 trillion (Figure 1). Global public wealth, as a share of total wealth, actually fell between 1995 and 2023.

A shareholder first development agenda. Development has become an investment opportunity, without generating enough. Even the World Bank chief economist has called “billions to trillions” a “fantasy.” According to the The Multilateral Development Banks (MDB) Task Force on Mobilization, MDBs and development finance institutions (DFIs) mobilised just $87.9 billion of private finance in 2023 in low- and middle-income countries—a meagre sum considering the financing gap estimate of $4 trillion every year.

The Fiscal Fantasy. Public-private partnerships (PPPs) and concepts like “blended finance” and “de-risking” have become ubiquitous. The countries and projects most in need of development funding received an especially small share of private financing due to concerns about the profitability and risk of the projects.

You can read our bulletin about the challenges of privatisation in education and listen to our shocking Sick Development podcast series about the harms of for-profit healthcare by Development Finance Institutions.

Failing to mobilise. In 2023, just $10.2 billion in mobilised private finance went to low-income countries. For each dollar of public finance, just $0.75 of private finance on average, and only $0.37 in low-income countries was mobilised – a long way from the $2-$5 from the private sector that was claimed.

Debt is swallowing national budgets. Low-income countries are spending, on average, more than 50% of their revenue on debt service to rich creditors. Half of low and middle income country debt is owed to private creditors who apply punitive terms. Debt repayments crowd out other priorities, with some countries spending 60% more on debt servicing than on health, education, and social protection combined, and 12.5 times more than on climate adaptation. 60% of low-income countries are on the edge of a debt crisis.

Wall Street in the driving seat. Private finance has taken over the evidence-backed ways to tackle poverty through public investments and fair taxation. Governments must reject private finances as a development silver bullet and band together in new coalitions to oppose extreme inequality.

Trillions of dollars exist to meet the global goals, but they’re locked away in private accounts of the ultra-wealthy. 9 out of 10 people support paying for public services and climate action through taxing the super-rich. Governments take note.

Something to read/listen to

Read Oxfam’s full report here.

Read the letter from 40 former Heads of State and Government calling for “a new economic coalition of the willing” to urgently tackle inequality and “remake our world in response” to “era-defining disruption”.

Watch Greenpeace take over Venice’s Piazza San Marco with a 20-meter banner of billionaire Jeff Bezos ahead of his wedding.

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In this week’s Bulletin, we look at Oxfam’s reactions to these globally significant events with the latest analysis of aid cuts and the consequences for the world’s poorest, alongside new findings into the revenue-generating potential of a polluter profit tax, which are overwhelmingly supported by the public.

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Killer aid cuts and rich polluter profits, in numbers

Biggest cut in aid since the G7 was established. The G7 countries, which together account for around three-quarters of all Official Development Assistance, are set to slash their aid spending by 28% in 2026, compared to 2024 levels. It will be the biggest cut in aid since the G7 was established in 1975.

Next year will mark the third consecutive year of decline in G7 aid spending – a trend not seen since the 1990s. If these cuts go ahead, G7 aid levels in 2026 will drop by $44 billion to $112 billion. The cuts are being driven primarily by the US (down $33 billion), the UK (down $5 billion), Germany (down $3.5 billion) and France (down $3 billion).

Increasing poverty. Economic projections show that aid cuts will mean 5.7 million more people across Africa will fall below extreme poverty levels in the coming year, a number expected to rocket to 19 million by 2030. See Max Lawson’s article about how extreme poverty is declining more slowly than thought.

Killer Cuts. Cuts to aid are putting vital public services at risk in some of the world’s poorest countries. Just one example- the end of just $128 million worth of US-funded child nutrition programs for a million children will result in an extra 163,500 child deaths a year. At the same time, 2.3 million children suffering from severe acute malnutrition – the most lethal form of undernutrition – are now at risk of losing their life-saving treatments.

Billionaire gains match aid fall. Since the beginning of 2025, the G7 ultra-rich have made $126 billion, almost the same amount as the group's 2025 aid commitment of $132 billion.

Rich polluter profits. Billionaires aren’t the only ones making a fortune. 585 of the world’s largest and most polluting fossil fuel companies made $583 billion in profits in 2024, a 68% increase since 2019.

Rich polluters kill. Emissions data was available for 340 of these corporations who are collectively responsible for over half of global greenhouse gas emissions caused by humans. Their emissions in just one year are enough to cause 2.7 million heat-related deaths over the next century.

Rich polluters must pay. Oxfam’s analysis found that a polluter profits tax on 590 oil, gas and coal companies could raise up to $400 billion in its first year. This is equivalent to the estimated annual costs of climate damage in the Global South.

The public agree. An Oxfam and Greenpeace survey found that 81% of people surveyed support new taxes on the oil, coal and gas industry to pay for damages caused by fossil-fuel driven climate disasters.

Politicians take note. 77% say they would be more willing to support a political candidate who prioritises taxing the super-rich and the fossil fuel industry. 68% felt that the fossil fuel industry and the super-rich had a negative influence on politics in their country.

Something to read/listen to

Read Ashfaq Khalfan’s blog, spelling out how a polluter profit tax could work.

Read NY Times (paywall), on how South Africa Built a Medical Research Powerhouse. Trump Cuts Have Demolished It

Read Tax Justice Network’s analysis that the millionaire exodus from the UK widely reported in 2024 did not, in fact, occur. Who owns the media again?

Read: Powerful anti-Fascist manifesto issued by Nobel Laureates, Scientists, Academics and Artists covered widely by worlds media.

Read the World Inequality Lab’s new paper on how colonial extraction and unequal exchange have shaped two centuries of North-South inequality.

Read the Economist’s (paywall) piece on inequality in LAC.

Drawing on insights from Nobel Prize-winning economist Simon Johnson (listen to our Equals podcast), we unpack how AI could widen divides unless governments act to steer it toward the public good.

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AI, in numbers

Getting priorities straight. As inequality skyrockets, with billionaires $3.3 trillion richer since the pandemic, the promise of AI as a tool for humanity feels hollow. A mere $35 billion—less than 7% of 2025’s AI spending—could end world hunger and ease the debt crisis strangling Global South communities. Yet, the AI race is led by a handful of powerful players, mostly men in Silicon Valley, shaping a technology that risks deepening inequality and accelerating the climate crisis.

AI’s unequal blueprint. AI’s development is concentrated in the hands of a few. Silicon Valley attracts 65% of global AI-native funding, double its share of overall tech investment. Over 80% of AI and IT leaders are white men, embedding their priorities into the technology’s design. The top 100 companies, mostly in the US and China, account for 40% of global corporate AI research and development (R&D), with market values rivalling entire continents’ GDPs (Africa’s). This elite control means AI is built for profit, not people, serving markets that cater to the richest rather than addressing pressing societal needs like poverty or hunger.

Bias baked in. AI isn’t neutral—it mirrors the biases of its creators. The Gender Shades study revealed facial recognition systems had error rates as low as 1% for light-skinned men but up to 34.7% for darker-skinned women, due to unrepresentative training data. These biases, rooted in datasets and algorithms shaped by a narrow demographic, perpetuate discrimination based on gender, race, and ethnicity. Without diverse voices in AI’s design, it risks entrenching systemic inequities, from hiring algorithms that favour men to surveillance tools that disproportionately target marginalised groups.

Job displacement. AI’s threat to labour is real. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) reported that AI is likely to affect 40% of jobs globally. In advanced economies, this figure rises to 60%, with about half of those jobs potentially experiencing negative impacts through lower salaries, reduced hiring, or outright disappearance. Workers in repetitive tasks are particularly vulnerable to displacement.

The Global South left behind. The gap between the Global North and Global South risks widening further. AI requires robust digital infrastructure, including high-speed internet, reliable electricity, and data storage. Many regions in the Global South lack these foundational enablers. For example, Sub-Saharan Africa had an internet penetration rate of only about 37% in 2023. Compounding this, over 600 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa still lack access to electricity. Without such basic access, developing countries cannot effectively adopt or leverage AI solutions. If AI's promised benefits in health and education are to materialise, access and control must become far more equitable. Otherwise, AI will exacerbate global divides, with richer countries monopolising benefits like precision medicine or climate modelling.

Fuelling the climate crisis: AI’s environmental toll is staggering. Training large models and running data centres guzzle energy, often powered by fossil fuels. A single hyperscale data centre can consume 876,000 MWh annually, equivalent to the electricity use of 4.8 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa. Cooling these facilities demands vast water resources. For instance, a single hyperscale data centre can average around 2 million litres of water per day. Google's data centres, which power a significant portion of global AI, used approximately 21.2 billion litres in 2022. To put this in perspective, this amount is roughly equivalent to the annual water needs of about 2 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa at a basic daily consumption rate, highlighting the significant environmental footprint of these operations. Even with renewable energy, the breakneck pace of AI expansion outstrips sustainable limits, contributing to greenhouse gas emissions and straining water-scarce communities.

Political and economic capture: AI isn’t just a technology—it’s a political and economic force. Tech moguls like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman wield growing influence, lobbying governments to prioritise profit over regulation. The “AI race” is framed as a matter of national security and prosperity, dampening political will to enforce accountability. This concentration of power risks “political capture,” where a handful of billionaires shape AI’s future to serve their interests, not society’s. The result? A world where the richest 1%, who already own 43% of global financial assets, tighten their grip. The problem is not the robots, but who owns the robots.

A force for good? In the right hands, with strong regulation and broad-based ownership, AI offers real hope. It could support new scientific and medical breakthroughs, improve our understanding of climate change and the natural world, improve health and safety for workers and drive efficiency.

The bottom line: The hype around AI is deafening, but its current trajectory so far serves the super-rich, not the 99%. We’re racing toward a future where a handful of tech titans dictate the rules, leaving the planet and its people to pay the price. Governments, activists, and communities must act now to wrest control of AI from the billionaires and design it for the common good.

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Something to read/listen to

Listen to Nobel Prize winner and MIT professor Simon Johnson dive deep into the world of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on the Equals podcast.

Read these articles in the International Journal of Communication and the London School of Economics about how inequality research misses the talking about “inequality as spectacle”. It’s not just about stats and theory but stories that shift mindsets.

Read about the International Trade Union Confederation’s 2025 Global Rights Index, on how workers’ rights across the world are in decline. Covered well by the Guardian.

Read about the launch of the Global Alliance Against Inequality at the Hamburg Sustainability Conference.