‘The 0.001%’: a quick visual breakdown of the world’s wealthiest people

Cruising around on private jets, the ultra-rich are the world’s financial elite – but how many people actually occupy this exclusive wealth club? Could they all fit into a floating mega-yacht, or is the group much bigger, possibly the size of a dazzling mega-rich city?

Thanks to an inequality report out on Wednesday, we now have a snapshot of the size of the topmost layer floating above everyone else – the 0.001%.

The report estimates there are 56,000 of these zero-point-zero-zero-one-ers, and if they gathered for a party, the group would fit into the seats of a medium-sized football stadium, such as Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium or the Stadio Olimpico in Rome.

These wealth hoarders are mostly centi-millionaires (meaning they own hundreds of millions of euros), and the average person in the group has close to €1bn.

But why is it important to visualise this? The report’s authors say the comparisons “will help illustrate just how concentrated the very top” is and serve as a reference to allow people to “grasp the magnitude of global inequality”.

To do that, it is helpful to compare their wealth with everyone else’s. Global inequality is well known, and the report shows how the top 10% own 75% of all global wealth.

But one of the starkest findings of the report is that the ultra-rich 0.001% control three times the wealth of the poorest half of humanity. Not only that, their wealth is growing at a faster rate – close to 5%, compared with 3.4%.

It is very hard to compare these two sections of society, since the 0.001% is a relatively tiny number of 56,000, when compared with the 2.8 billion people in the bottom 50%. It would take 50,000 stadiums to fit them.

But to give an idea of the disparity, the image below shows how big the bottom half is. Each dot represents one stadium of 56,000 people.

These people collectively own just a third of the wealth of the super-rich who would fit in the stadium above.

Read the full report on how just 56,000 people control three times as much wealth as the entire poorest half of humanity.