This U.S. metropolis has the very best share of superrich residents on the earth — and it’s not San Francisco, New York or Seattle
If you want to mingle with multimillionaires this summer, you can skip the Hamptons and Lake Como.
According to the latest Wealth-X World Ultra Wealth Report, you are most likely to come across a person with a high fortune worth more than $ 30 million.
San Jose, about 90 minutes south of San Francisco by subway, tops the list of cities in the world with the highest concentration of ultra-rich people. One of 727 residents in San Jose, the de facto capital of Silicon Valley, is a member of this elite club.
Cities with the highest density of ultra-rich people tend to be medium-sized cities where technology or financial services dominate, according to Wealth-X. San Jose is home to such well-known companies as Cisco Systems CSCO, + 0.89%,
Hewlett-Packard HPE, + 0.07%,
Adobe ADBE, +1.43% and PayPal-PYPL, +0.43%.
The population was just over 1 million in 2020, making it the third largest city in California after Los Angeles and San Diego.
The 10 cities with the highest raw number of ultra-rich residents in 2020 were New York with 11,475 ultra-rich residents; Hong Kong; Tokyo; Los Angeles; Chicago; San Francisco; Paris, Washington, DC; Osaka, Japan; and Dallas.
The number of the financially wealthy grew unevenly around the world in 2020, with North America and Asia seeing the strongest increases, while Europe, the Pacific and the Middle East recorded declines. Africa “fared relatively better than some of its larger competitors, with the ultra-rich dropping ‘only’ 1.5% and total net worth unchanged at $ 312 billion, representing a global share of 0.9%”, so the Wealth-X report.
How the pandemic affected the ultra-rich
The very rich get richer, even during a pandemic. In the midst of the global health crisis and the associated economic upheaval, the global population of ultra-high-net-worth people grew by 1.7% in 2020 from 2019 to a total of 295,450 people, according to Wealth-X.
These super-rich people made up 1.2% of the world’s wealthy population – including anyone with at least $ 1 million – but they own 34% of that group’s net worth, which is $ 35.5 trillion.
The Wealth-X report found that the growing numbers of ultra-rich people during “intense economic turmoil, widespread unemployment and falling incomes for many non-wealthy people underscored the polarizing impact of the pandemic on society as a whole”.
The authors added, “The extent to which the ultra-rich were able to weather the storm (and, in some cases, increase their wealth significantly) speaks in some ways well of future prospects for wealth creation. However, it will also raise more questions about widening wealth inequality and could stimulate more concerted redistributive efforts in areas such as taxation and regulation. “
