Germany’s billionaire class is not only growing in number but also in influence.
In 2025 alone, the total wealth of German billionaires soared by 30 percent to $840.2 billion, adjusted for inflation, or approximately €723.7 billion.
To put this in perspective, a German billionaire now earns the average annual income in Germany in less than an hour and a half.
The total number of billionaires in Germany has also increased by a third in the past year, to 172, making the country home to the fourth highest number of billionaires in the world.
This is according to figures from Oxfam, which published its Social Inequality Report 2026 ahead of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, which began Monday.
It's not only Germany's billionaires who are getting richer. The median salaries of CEOs in Germany rose 30 times faster than the real wages of employees between 2019 and 2024.
At the same time, about 20 percent of people in Germany live in poverty and social mobility is declining, according to Oxfam.
The report warns that this entrenched inequality creates “an ideal breeding ground for anti-democratic forces,” as more people lose faith in democratic institutions.
It also calls for decisive government action: taxing extreme wealth, investing in social justice and closing gaps in the tax system.
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“While average earners pay their fair share, billionaires often contribute too little to the common good. This is poison for democracy,” said Oxfam advisor Manuel Schmitt in a press release.
What does the report say about wealth inequality globally?
Globally, the picture is even more dramatic. The world’s roughly 3,000 billionaires now control a record $18.3 trillion – an increase of $2.5 trillion in just one year (equivalent to the total wealth of the poorer half of humanity).
Since 2020, global billionaire wealth has surged by over 80 percent. The twelve richest people now have more money than the poorest four billion combined.
READ ALSO: Will Germany's inheritance tax law see a serious shake-up this year?
The report contains a number of startling illustrations of what this actually means in practice. For example, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, earns as much in four seconds as the average person earns in a year and would have to give away more than $4,500 per second before his fortune would begin to shrink.
In addition, billionaires are now 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than ordinary people, and their economic power is increasingly translating into political influence, according to the report.
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