Biography & Early Wealth Journey

One might even argue that a decline of some kind may have been inevitable given the recent trends in wealth concentration and worldwide billionaires. Those aforementioned 2017 figures were a record high for the global number of billionaires, and various economic factors of the last two years contributed to the "what goes up must come down" reality of 2018. Even with last year's decline, the number of billionaires as well as their collective wealth, is still much higher than it was only a few years ago.

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In more local news, North and South America were together the only region (officially designated as The Americas) to actually see its billionaire population go up, according to the survey. It was a very small increase though – just a nominal spike of less than one percent – 0.9 percent, to be more precise. Meanwhile, the Asian-Pacific region saw the biggest drop with a 13.4 percent decline (which can likely be traced to the building trade war between the United States and China), and the region known as EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa) saw a decline of 4.6 percent.