“More and more billionaires derive their wealth not from accidents of birth or from gaming the system, but by providing useful goods and services and by employing thousands of people…

The Economist has quantified the better (Ms Winfrey, Mr Yanai) and worse (Mr Burns) sorts of billionaire wealth. Drawing on data from Forbes, a magazine, Hurun, a research firm, and Gapminder, a Swedish foundation, we have assembled a list of about 7,000 billionaires from the past 25 years. We call a billionaire’s wealth ‘uncompetitive’ when it mainly comes from industries such as gambling, construction, defence and raw materials. These sectors often depend on political access. It is hard to open a mine or a casino, for instance, without friends in the government.

We count inheritors in the ‘uncompetitive’ category. Heirs are usually not oligarchs. They have usually not bent or broken any laws, or screwed over customers; they were simply born into the right family or married well. Yet they plausibly represent policy failures too, on the grounds that their immense riches are undeserved.

From 2001, when our data begin, to 2014, the uncompetitive share of billionaire wealth rose slightly. Yet over the past decade the share derived from self-made entrepreneurs in competitive sectors has surged to an all-time high (see chart 2). For the first time, half the wealth of the world’s billionaires is reasonably fairly earned. And since 2021 the total wealth derived from uncompetitive sectors has declined.”

From The Economist.