2026 will be a year for the inequality history books. It marks the moment the world crossed the threshold of the first trillionaire, but also, hopefully, the moment the tides turned towards fairly taxing the rich.
In this week’s Bulletin we review inequality numbers for 2026 so far.
2026 inequality… in numbers
Pollutocrat day. Unless you’ve been hiding under an air-conditioned rock, you’ll have noticed the planet is on fire. The world’s richest people can take a bow for their disproportionate contribution to that. Just 10 days into 2026 and the richest 1% had burned up their annual carbon budget. The top 0.1% used theirs up in 3 days.
Davos week. As sure as a setting sun will rise again or that the rich will dodge tax, January brings Oxfam’s blistering analysis of global inequality. Timed as world leaders and oligarchs meet at the Swiss ski resort to celebrate their winnings (which Oxfam kindly counts for them), it always captures l’essence of a divided world.
2025, was a record-breaking year for billionaires. Since Donald Trump came to office, billionaire 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.
Resisting the rule of the rich. The events of 2025 made one thing painfully clear: the world’s super-rich have not only accumulated more wealth than could ever be spent – they have used this wealth to secure the political power to shape the rules that define our economies and govern countries and the world.
Oxfam estimates that billionaires are at least 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than ordinary people.
Thank God the UK has a bin to take on the billionaires buying their way into politics.
Defaulting on development. After all those tax cuts for the rich, there was clearly nothing left for investments into health, education, and fighting climate change. The Global South faces a mounting debt crisis while aid spending is been slashed.
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”. Debt holders are doing nicely, rich bondholders of six countries that recently restructured their debt made an average profit of 38%.
Aid budgets plummet. Aid has fallen by 28% between 2023 and 2025. The United States is the biggest scrooge, but many other countries including France, Germany and the United Kingdom are to blame as well. They have announced further cuts through 2030. Projected aid cuts will kill about 9 million people by 2030.
A celebration for CEOs or the working class? International Workers’ Day is a time to celebrate victories for worker organisations. This year, however, Oxfam and the ITUC revealed that CEO pay soared 20 times faster than workers’ pay in 2025.
But hey, when we win the fight to tax the rich, those fat cats will be nice and plump.
Who wants to be a trillionaire? The moment we’d been waiting for. The Oxfam statistical rage-bait team were refreshing the Forbes billionaire list like they were tickets for Glastonbury. Rocket man, Elon Musk, saw this wealth officially reach the stratosphere (if only he’d go there and not come back), becoming the world’s first (temporary) trillionaire.
For a while there, Musk was wealthier than the combined wealth of 3.8 billion people.
Spoils of war. Big Oil have been making Big Bucks, an exclusive Equals investigation found. The second quarter combined profits of the Big 6 increased to $50.6 billion - a 220% increase on Q1.
But how to spend all that war money? Perhaps ramping up investments in renewables (after all, the world is on fire)? Of course not, time to Drill Baby, Drill! By 2030, the six corporations plan to increase oil and gas production by 14% compared to 2024 levels. Big Oil’s emissions were sufficient to cause around 1 in 4 heatwaves reported globally between 2000 and 2023 – heatwaves that would have been virtually impossible without human-made climate change.
Of course, we’re the ones feeling the heat, not rich polluters.
Scope for hope? While members of the Equals team specialise as prophets of doom, we are becoming increasingly up-beat about the momentum behind taxing the rich. Wealth tax economists are becoming household names, and people are marching in the street calling for taxes named after them! Just in the last few years, wealth taxes on the super-rich have been introduced or strengthened in Norway, Spain, Tunisia, Argentina and Bolivia. And new proposals are popping up everywhere.
