This period coincided with the AI-powered stock market boom in the US. At least five of the US ‘Magnificent Seven’ giants – Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet and Amazon – invested more than $400 billion when building an AI infrastructure. This translated into a gain of 27.5% for ‘Magnificent Seven’ shares last year.
| Company | Mkt Cap added in 2025 | Promoter commitment |
| Nvidia | $1.25 trillion | ~3.5% ($150 billion) |
| Microsoft | $446 billion | ~1.13% ($40 billion) |
| Meta | $190 billion | ~13-14% ($215-230 billion) |
| Alphabet | $1.45 trillion | Brin & Page: 87.4% of all Class B shares ($500 billion+ combined) |
| Amazon | $140 billion | ~8-9% (~$230 billion) |
| $3.47 trillion (combined) |
The AI-led boom has also led to the rise of AI billionaires. According to Crunch baseBy 2025, AI startups received $100 billion in venture capital funding, leading to the creation of at least 50 new billionaires. Surge AI founder Edwin Chen became the latest “AI billionaire,” with a net worth of $18 billion.
Of the top 10 richest people on the Forbes Billionaires List, at least four actively run “Big Tech” companies. Mark Zuckerberg of Meta was the second richest man in 2025, with a net worth of $216 billion. However, the biggest AI-led winners were the founders of Alphabet – Larry Page and Sergey Brin. When Alphabet (Google) surpassed $3 trillion last year, its founders saw their wealth increase by at least $100 billion.
While the net worth of the ten richest billionaires topped $2.4 trillion last year, Oxfam noted that their wealth was greater than that of the poorest half, about 4 billion people, of humanity. “Corporate empires add trillions to the wealth of their owners. Extreme accumulation of wealth is taking place mainly in the technology sector, where vast amounts of natural resources are exploited,” said the Oxfam report, published on the eve of the World Economic Forum in Davos.
The report added that the widening wealth gap could drive political inequality around the world, arguing that more unequal countries are more likely to experience democratic erosion than more equal countries. In 2025, Gen Z erupted in protests over rising economic inequality and political repression, exposing the fragile political economies of countries such as Iran, Nepal, Bangladesh and Indonesia.
In the long run, however, the specter of political inequality will increase. According to Oxfam, billionaires are over four thousand times more likely to hold political office than ordinary people. US President Donald Trump’s economic policies led to the sharpest growth in the fortunes of US billionaires last year, according to the report. Moreover, Trump’s wealth tripled According to a Nasdaq report, there will be $7.3 billion by September 2025.
“Data from 136 countries confirm that as economic resources become more unequally distributed, so too does political power, leading to policy outcomes that reflect the preferences of higher income groups more than those of lower income groups,” the report said.
Amid the widening gap between rich and poor, the middle class is shrinking around the world. This is evident from the World Inequality Report 2026the incomes of the global middle class have grown slowly over the past forty years.
While the bottom half has experienced relatively robust growth since 1980, the middle 40% have experienced stagnation, with some groups growing less than 1% per year. However, the report notes that the top 1% gained the most over the same period.
The weakening of the middle class is more visible in India than anywhere else. According to the report, in 1980, a larger share of India’s population belonged to the middle 40%, but today almost everyone belongs to the bottom 50%.
(Edited by: Priyanka Deshpande)
