Every year the Sunday Times Newspaper issues it’s Rich List . Every year (nearly) I post about it .

It is not that fabulously rich people fascinate me. They don’t . Or rather the famous ones don’t but the ones I have never heard of, are rather more interesting. Check out https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/ This gives some background and detail of people you may never have heard of. I am also interested in where is this money and what happens with it.

According to the report , there has been a decline in the number of UK Billionaires. As the measure of wealth invariably involves stock values , the UK market was pretty flat in 2023 thereby decreasing the wealth of the few. However, the picture is not always that clear as Forbes , who measure in dollars as opposed to sterling show no such decrease.

Apparently there has also been an exit due to the changes in the Non Dom Status ,as well as their children being mugged for their watches. An oversimplification but if you walk the streets with a twenty grand watch on your wrist you are making yourself a huge target , and saying ‘look what I have got and you will never have‘. Some would say this would never happen in Dubai. Which is probably true but not a realistic or desirable comparison.

What I do not understand is why , if you have assets of £1 Billion sterling or just a mere several hundred million do you need to up sticks and move to some distant region to save even more. What is the point of this excess wealth? Much of it will never be spent. The combined wealth of the 350 in the list exceeds £795 billion. That is a massive amount of money . To what avail?

An example, an Entrepreneur called Alfie Best (not a Billionaire , mere £947 million- here’s another odd thing they don’t say how his valuation has nearly quadrupled within the last 12 months ) ,just ordered a £500,000 Rolls Royce is moving to Monaco (for those who don’t know he owns and runs numerous caravan parks, many are not especially happy campers- most are actually the homes of the owners-as he has a reputation of being quite ruthless in his management style. ) They will be either earning a very average wage, or pensioners and do not have the same opportunity of moving elsewhere.

“Britain needs to wake up — we are losing wealth creators,” he grumbles. “Our tax system and business regulations are sterilising the few strong people who build economies. We need these people to start businesses and create jobs. Brexit was a golden opportunity to create a fast-growing pro-entrepreneur environment. That chance has been completely squandered.”

So if that were the case why were the other (lets assume some might ) 325 other multi millionaires not moving elsewhere and managing to eek out an acceptable lifestyle despite paying the same percentage tax as do millions of employees within middle management.

“London is really the problem. A lot of houses in places such as Belgravia and Chelsea now look very, very expensive. You won’t get back what you pay for them. It takes an age to get anywhere in such a congested capital city, especially with 20mph speed limits. If [the government] hike taxes the departures will become a stampede.” Anonymous Billionaire quoted in the Rich List.

Now I live in London, and yes the prices of properties in Belgravia and Chelsea are eye watering.

However, these are the World’s expensive cities to live according to www.forbes.com

And according to www.moneyinc.com the most expensive cities for property were Monaco, followed by Basel (Switzerland) and Palm Beach Florida. London does not feature in the top 10.

For the most part these are wealth creators, so along the way they enable many jobs, some very well paid and some not so’ but whatever the case they create money that is in some way spent in various economies. It is the vast wealth that they accumulate that can never be spent .

If you have several billion in your bank account how does that make any difference to your first billion.

Most billionaires suffer from a singular fatal trait: they simply don’t know when to call it quits. The sharkish desire for ever-increasing levels of success gobbles up everything in its wake. Reviewing the life stories of Richie Riches such as Bernard Arnault, the LVMH boss, and the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is a lesson in how the magnetic pull of money warps normal life. Marriage becomes a contractual nightmare — look at Bezos paying out nearly £30 billion to his ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott, in their divorce —

Zing Tsjeng Saturday June 01 2024, 6.00pm, The Sunday Times

So where do the big bucks go? Property, planes, cars, yachts, divorces, jewellery , and lets not forget in some cases philanthropy. to put it in perspective Zing Tseing in her article calculated ….

If someone gave you £10,000 (approx $12,500 or €11,600 )every day, you’d still need 274 years to become a billionaire.

The accumulation of vast wealth is exactly that an accumulation for, as far as I can see , just for the sake of it. It brings power and plus a whole load of baggage.

Elon Musk is apparently the wealthiest man in the world . His wealth equates or exceeds (by an enormous margin) to that of the GDP of over 140 of the World’s nations . Or put another way he could feed cloth, house every body in Zambia for each year , for 10 years and still have enough for his planes, trains(don’t know if he has any but makes the comment slightly amusing?) and automobiles .

I am not condemning extreme wealth, wealth creation, or the accumulation of wealth. But I am questioning it. If you stuck your first £1billion in the bank it would earn you £50 million p.a. That is nearly £137,00 per day. Why do you need more ?

I am also aware that as the valuations use stock values the super rich can loose the super bit very quickly. Phillip Green is a great example of no longer being a Billionaire , much in part due to the value of his stock. This is also true of many Chinese Billionaires whose wealth is tied up in property and the collapse of the Chinese Property market. The Forbes list of Billionaires runs to 2600+. That number in terms of world population is not huge but the combined wealth is $14 trillion. That is greater than the combined GDPs of India, Japan, Germany & the U.K . 2600 people have more wealth than 4 of the world’s largest economies put together, leaving only the USA and China has having larger GDPs.

So that might be were the big bucks are , but where do they go ….?