The world’s richest people saw their wealth increase more than ever in 2025, but a funny thing happened along the way. Many of them seemed to decide that their best prospects for the future don’t lie on the western side of the Atlantic, even though the exceptional performance of U.S. equity markets is driving much of these gains. A growing share of the ultra-elite are quietly voting with their feet against the idea that the American Dream is still worth pursuing in America.
The 500 richest individuals on the planet added a record $2.2 trillion to their fortunes this year, Bloomberg’s Dylan Sloan reported, lifting their combined net worth to about $11.9 trillion. Big Tech led the charge, with a euphoria over the prospects of artificial intelligence growing so large that the Magnificent Seven decoupled in many respects from the other 493 companies in the S&P 500. Indeed, Sloan reported that roughly a quarter of all the gains recorded by Bloomberg’s wealth index came from just eight individuals.
The year also saw a surge in what UBS Global Wealth Management calls “everyday millionaires,” or the millionaire next door with wealth in the low seven digits. At the dawn of the millennium, there were just over 13 million of these folks worldwide, but that number has “skyrocketed” to nearly 52 million through the end of 2024—a more than fourfold increase. Even after adjusting for inflation, this population has more than doubled in real terms since the start of the century. New York Times bestselling author Nick Maggiulli, the COO of Ritholtz Wealth Management, told Fortune in August that “something weird’s going on” with wealth trends, as many affluent Americans are asset-rich but feeling poor, with six new economic classes taking shape and nobody seemingly very happy about it.
Another look at UBS wealth analysis, the latest Billionaire Ambitions Report, offers a partial explanation. Global billionaire wealth overall climbed to an all‑time high of roughly $15.8 trillion in 2025, powered both by self‑made founders and the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in the report’s history. Nearly 3,000 billionaires now sit atop that mountain of capital, as 196 new self‑made billionaires added about $386.5 billion and heirs inherited a record $297.8 billion this year alone.
To be sure, North America remains the top investment destination for billionaires surveyed by UBS, but the proportion of ultrawealthy who believe it’s the greatest short-term opportunity for returns dropped from 80% to 63% year over year. And where North America is dipping, other destinations are climbing, with four in 10 billionaires rating Western Europe as the greatest space for opportunity over the next 12 months.
When success means leaving
Some high-profile anecdotes show ultrawealthy Americans voting with their feet. Even as the U.S. remains the top investment destination for billionaires’ capital, many of the people who have “made it” are increasingly deciding they do not want to live out their success inside America’s borders.
The same forces that have inflated asset prices—hyper‑financialization, permanent online visibility and polarized politics—are pushing some high-earners to seek safety, anonymity, and a slower pace of life overseas. France’s decision this month to grant citizenship to George Clooney, his wife, Amal, and their twins, reflects deep tensions.
The two‑time Oscar winner, long a Hollywood fixture, has effectively shifted his family’s center of gravity to a former wine estate in Provence that he describes as a farm, turning the hills of southern France into home base instead of Los Angeles. And he’s been unusually blunt about why he no longer wants to raise his children in Los Angeles, telling Esquire recently that he feared they would “never … get a fair shake at life” in the culture of Hollywood. France, on the other hand, can offer his children a “much better life” centered on chores, family, and relative obscurity rather than red carpets and paparazzi.
By choosing a jurisdiction with strict privacy laws and tougher limits on photographing children, Clooney is effectively arbitraging legal regimes the way multinational corporations arbitrage tax codes—only here the protected asset is family life, not corporate profit. His move amounts to a personal hedge against U.S. celebrity culture and, more broadly, a critique of an American Dream that offers visibility as a reward but often delivers surveillance as the cost.
A broader elite exit
Clooney is far from alone among the prominent and wealthy reassessing their relationship with the United States. Recent years have seen Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi decamp to the U.K. after Trump’s reelection, Rosie O’Donnell relocate to Ireland, and figures like Richard Gere, Tom Ford, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt shift homes or primary bases to Europe.
Behind the headlines, data points to a wider, less visible wave of departures. The IRS “Expatriation List,” which tracks mostly high‑net‑worth individuals giving up U.S. citizenship, recorded roughly 4,820 renunciations in 2024—up about 48% from 2023 and the third‑highest annual total on record, with about 21,000 high‑net‑worth Americans renouncing between 2020 and 2024 alone. The only years with higher prominent expat departures were 2016 and 2020, for rather obvious reasons—the first election of Trump and the onset of the COVID pandemic.
A fractured dream at the top
UBS finds that billionaire families are becoming more mobile and international, with over a third saying they have relocated at least once and a similar share considering moves, citing a better quality of life, geopolitical concerns, and tax planning. It shows how ultrawealthy families are “becoming increasingly extended and international,” wrote Benjamin Cavalli, head of strategic clients and global connectivity at UBS. “This means they now face an unprecedented set of challenges that span continents, generations, and cultures.”
That mobility underscores a paradox: North America remains the preferred destination for capital, yet for some of the people who own it, the “dream” increasingly seems to require an offshore upgrade in order to protect their children and their peace of mind.
Another aspect of the UBS report suggests the tensions pushing some people to leave are the same thing creating so much wealth in the first place. The U.S. created so much wealth in 2025 that it minted 92 new self-made billionaires, leading the way globally as $179.9 billion of fortunes were created out of the churn of American innovation. Asia-Pacific saw 61 people become billionaires, representing $124.4 billion, and Europe came in last place, with 43 new billionaires and $82.2 billion of wealth.
And regarding long-term investment destinations, billionaires surveyed by UBS found that North America is still the best place for them to generate a return, with 65% seeing it as the top spot, almost unchanged from 2024’s finding of 68%. It suggests that only one region is innovative enough to see the most wealth produced the most quickly, as the wildly popular Irish economics podcaster David McWilliams told Fortune in November.
“This innovative spirit is rooted in American history,” McWilliams said, going all the way back to Alexander Hamilton, as discussed in his 2025 book, The History of Money. In Europe, he said, “the whole idea is you mitigate risk all the time, right? You go to public health, you go to public schools, you get a job, can’t get fired, all that sort of stuff.” Risk, on the other hand, is “the defining psychological state of the American.” The American Dream, in other words, is alive and well, when you look at just how much wealth is being created in the engine room of risk and innovation. It just comes with a big handful of risk.
Politics8 years ago