New prime minister urged to introduce 2% minimum charge on households with more than £100m in wealth

A wealth tax on the UK’s super-rich households could raise £10bn a year, according to academics who urged Andy Burnham to include the measure in his plans to “make tax fairer” and pay for better public services.

The sum could be raised through a 2% minimum charge on households with more than £100m in wealth and would affect fewer than 1,000 of the richest UK households, according to the study by Gabriel Zucman, a professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics, and Ben Tippet, a lecturer in economics and wealth inequality at King’s College London.

Crack flutet mittlerweile die deutschen Städte, die ausgemergelten Abhängigen ziehen sich auf offener Straße das Zeug rein. In Konsumräumen wie in Dortmund sollen Süchtige von den Straßen geholt werden. Vorbild: Zürich.

Spruiking your billionaire-coded masculinity is now an invitation to feminine mockery. Real social power doesn’t come from trinkets or trophies

Consider yourself forewarned, lads; while Reuters has catalogued the toys in the “luxury playbook” being marketed to new squillionaires, social media suggests there’s a new status symbol for the aspirational “alpha male”. And it’s not a Birkin-for-boys – even if Erling Haaland is wearing one.

We are in a moment where traditional status symbols have been upended by a reluctance to imbue objects – or relationships – with their heritage prestige. As a feminist, I propose, with pride, that women are to blame.

Newly minted rich and those anticipating huge IPOs are fueling buying and charter spree in the private jet sector

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Aviation lawyer Amanda Applegate skipped her annual vacation last month as a surge of wealth from AI startups and SpaceX sent a wave of tech investors shopping for private jets, ⁠burying her in paperwork for aircraft-purchase agreements.

The ⁠attorney, based in Cleveland, Ohio, attributed the rush to a handful ​of major “liquidity events” in the tech industry. The initial public offering (IPO) of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, whose holdings include artificial-intelligence firm xAI, raised a record $85.7bn for the company and generated unprecedented employee and founder wealth.

Billionaires’ wealth grew by 25% on average in the year ended in April, research from Swiss bank UBS finds

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The number of billionaires in the world has jumped by 13% to a record 3,302 people, new figures show, as the super-rich accumulate wealth at an accelerating rate.

Billionaires’ wealth grew by 25% on average in the year ended in April, compared with a 10.8% rise in average personal wealth around the world, the Swiss bank UBS found.

A pair of debenture tickets changed hands this week for a sum far beyond the means of ordinary tennis fans

Like many of us, Marcos Ortega enters the Wimbledon public ticket ballot every year in the hope of seeing some championship tennis. In seven straight years of trying, however, he has never got lucky. So he was delighted – initially, at least – to learn there was a way to secure a ticket for every game played on Centre Court.

But Ortega’s hopeful delight quickly turned to anger when he discovered that it would cost him £293,000.

Sellers of luxury villas have wiped tens of millions of pounds off asking prices, with sales down 19% in May from the previous month

Property sales in Dubai have fallen “off a cliff”, a leading market watcher has said, after war in the Middle East forced a dramatic slowdown in one of the world’s most expensive real estate markets.

Sales in the city dropped 19% in May compared with the previous month, accelerating from a 4% drop in April, the researcher ValuStrat found.

Just as the ‘poverty line’ determines what’s required for basic living, we need a ‘wealth line’ to show when extreme wealth becomes harmful

It was bound to happen eventually: Elon Musk has become the planet’s first trillionaire. Until recently, economists who spoke about “trillions” were describing the GDP of the largest economies or the accumulated value of bequests on their way to the heirs of today’s billionaires. The term is not often used in daily conversation, let alone to describe the wealth of an individual.

But now we have entered a new phase of the oligarchic era. Previously, when we described the wealth of the world’s richest billionaires, it was understood as a few hundred billions. Three years ago, the value of Musk’s total assets was estimated to be about $250bn. The pace at which it has increased is mind-boggling – and so is what it represents.

A 2% levy on fortunes above £100m – with no exemptions – could begin to reverse decades of rising inequality

Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting have sought to blunt the Green leader Zack Polanski’s popularity with a hint that a government run by either of them, should they win a Labour leadership race, would favour a tax of some kind on the wealthy.

With SpaceX’s stock market launch on Friday sending Elon Musk’s fortune to the stars, it is clear to most people that the world’s super-rich are running away with the lion’s share of the spoils and there is not much left for anyone else.

He’s now the world’s first trillionaire, after his rocket and AI company broke IPO records on its way to a $2.1tn valuation

Elon Musk is now the world’s first trillionaire. SpaceX’s historic debut on the stock market on Friday launched the CEO to unprecedented levels of wealth; his personal fortune now amounts to $1.1tn, an increase of more than $62bn since the previous day, according to Forbes.

The rocket, satellite and AI company raised $75bn from its record-breaking initial public offering (IPO), and is now valued at $2.1tn after its first day of public trading.

Greenpeace calculates that wealthiest contribute nearly $1tn of damage a year with ownership-based emissions

Ultra-wealthy people zooming across the world on their private jets, lounging on yachts and conspicuous by their Instagrammable consumption are among the most easily identified individual culprits when it comes to the climate crisis – but new research argues that it is not just their heady lifestyles to blame, but also their bank accounts.

Through their ownership of companies and private financial and physical assets, from oil producers to property developments, the super-rich are responsible for an outsized slice of the greenhouse gases that are overheating the planet. The top 1% of people by wealth, through their shareholdings and investments, control about a quarter of global annual emissions in total.

The magazine writes: ‘Resisting Gen-Z socialism is therefore an urgent task.’ That urgency must outweigh any urgency of feeding hungry people

A spectre is haunting Europe and America – the spectre of gen Z socialism.

That’s the urgent warning from the Economist in a new cover-story editorial, How to fight back against Gen-Z socialism. Alarmed by a youthful threat to the established order, the magazine is calling for heightened vigilance from defenders of private enterprise.

Norman Solomon is the director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy

Becoming the world’s first trillionaire is only going to supercharge this sense of impunity and bring us one step closer to full-blown oligarchy

“Whoever said ‘money can’t buy happiness’ really knew what they were talking about,” Elon Musk wrote in February on Twitter/X, the social network he bought for $44bn. He capped the statement with a sad face emoji.

Alas, Musk’s information is outdated. A 2024 study found a substantial difference in happiness between the wealthy and people who are low income. “A greater feeling of control over life can explain about 75% of the association between money and happiness,” the study’s author noted.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist and the author of Strong Female Lead

Attempt to turn a stretch of the English-Scottish border into a commercial forest exposes threat to habitats from wealthy investors

On the English-Scottish border a small species of butterfly, the northern brown argus, has fended off one of the biggest investors in the UK.

Todrig, with its heath moorlands and hundreds of species of flora and fauna, represents an investment that could save Britain’s wealthiest families millions of pounds in inheritance tax.

New PM Péter Magyar calls policy a sign of ‘social justice’ after years of political loyalty being rewarded with economic opportunity

In a dimly lit television studio, one of Hungary’s richest men is on the verge of tears. It is early May, weeks after the general election that ended Viktor Orbán’s 16-year grip on power, and the advertising mogul Gyula Balásy has an announcement to make.

Balásy tells the interviewer that he has just surrendered his businesses to the state, along with a chunk of his private savings. He has even brought along a notarised deed – a legal document setting out the change of ownership.

This ‘ghost GDP’ shows how headline economic growth is increasingly disconnected from reality for most, says report

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The wealth of Britain’s 157 billionaires is now equivalent to more than a fifth of the country’s entire GDP, according to analysis by the Equality Trust – a fivefold increase since 1990.

The charity describes the trend, based on data in this year’s Sunday Times rich list, as Britain’s “ghost GDP”: headline economic growth increasingly disconnected from everyday life.