Manufacturing, technology and finance created the most billionaires in the past decade

From media and entertainment to fashion, thousands of business people have joined the billionaire club in the past decade, but some industries have been much wealthier than others, according to an analysis by visualcapitalist.com. It highlights the industries that created the most billionaires globally from 2014 to 2024, according to figures from Knight Frank's Wealth Report 2025.

Manufacturing is known as the "billionaire factory," producing 509 new billionaires between 2014 and 2024. Last year, 46 new billionaires came from the sector, including Anil Gupta, chairman of Indian power company KEI Industries, the source said. Countries such as India and China have seen rapid industrialization and a surge in manufacturing exports in recent years. Entrepreneurs in these countries' manufacturing industries have benefited from government incentives, growing consumer bases, and global market access, leading to wealth creation.

The technology sector ranks second, with 443 new billionaires created in the past decade. Many of the world's richest people come from this industry, including Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), and other top tech CEOs. A recent addition to the billionaire ranks is OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who reached a net worth of $1 billion in April 2024. His fortune was fueled by the massive success of ChatGPT, which launched in 2021 and rapidly accelerated the integration of AI across industries, reshaping the way companies and individuals interact with artificial intelligence.

This is followed by finance and investment (353 new billionaires in the last decade), fashion and retail (318), healthcare (284), food and beverage (277), real estate (228), diversified companies, which include several unrelated businesses or products (206), media and entertainment (110), and automobiles (101).

Forbes data shows that, as of April 2024, there were over 2,700 billionaires worldwide, with a combined net worth of $14.2 trillion, but this is not evenly distributed, with significant concentration in just a few countries and a small group of people.

According to the Knight Frank report, American billionaires hold the largest share of this global wealth, together controlling $5.7 trillion - more than the combined wealth of their counterparts in the next ten countries ($5.5 trillion). The top countries hosting the world's richest people are, after the US: China ($1.34 trillion), India ($950 billion), France ($670 billion), Germany ($640 billion), Russia ($540 billion), Hong Kong ($330 billion), Canada ($300 billion), Italy ($300 billion), Brazil ($230 billion), and the UK ($230 billion).

It is worth mentioning that, since 2020, the year of the Covid pandemic, 176 ultra-rich people with a total fortune of over $400 billion have moved to a new country, which is the equivalent of about 1 in 15 billionaires in the world, according to data from UBS bank, which mentions that among the top destinations of billionaires who emigrated are China, Switzerland and the US, while Eastern Europe has recorded the largest outflows of billionaires in the last decade.