At the beginning of each year, the world’s corporate and political elite gather in the Swiss ski resort of Davos to pat each other on the back, attend seminars on “the fourth Industrial Revolution” – whatever that might be – and generally mull over the state of the world. Rarely is so much wealth to be found in so few conference rooms. And each year, Oxfam, the global development charity, takes the opportunity to run the numbers on the state of global inequality. Oxfam’s findings are often eye-catching, but this year especially so.

每年年初，全球企业和政治精英都会聚集在瑞士滑雪胜地达沃斯，彼此赞扬，参加关于“第四次工业革命”，（我们暂且不讨论什么是第四次工业革命）的研讨会，并且通常思考着世界的现状。很少有如此少数会议室里聚集如此巨额财富的情况。每年，全球发展慈善组织乐施会都会利用这个机会对全球不平等状况进行数据统计，乐施会的调查结果通常引人注目，但今年尤为引人瞩目。

The wealth of the five richest people in the world, they found, has more than doubled, from $405bn (£320bn) in 2020 to $869bn in late 2023. That’s an increase of about $14m an hour, which is not bad going by anyone’s reckoning. Perhaps more strikingly, Oxfam calculates that on current trends the world is due to welcome its first dollar trillionaire within a decade. Elon Musk, the richest person at the time of writing, is worth about a fifth of that, at $210bn.

他们发现，全球五位最富有的人的财富已经超过了2020年的4050亿美元，增长到了2023年底的8690亿美元。按照目前的趋势，乐施会计算得出，世界将在未来十年内迎来首位美元万亿富翁。埃隆·马斯克，目前是全球最富有的人，身价约为2100亿美元，仅相当于未来万亿富豪的五分之一。

It may of course take longer than Oxfam predicts, but the global trends are reasonably clear. Go back a decade or so, and the world’s then richest man, Carlos Slim – a Mexican telecoms magnate – was worth about $70bn, or one-third of Musk’s current estimated value. It does seem likely that, without a radical change, we’ll have our first trillionaire by the 2040s.

当然，乐施会的预测可能需要更长的时间实现，但全球趋势是相当明确的。回到十年前左右，世界上当时最富有的人卡洛斯·斯利姆——一位墨西哥的电信大亨——身价约为700亿美元，大约是马斯克当前估计价值的三分之一。很可能，如果没有根本性的变化，到2040年代我们将迎来第一位万亿富豪。