Callum Williams

speaker

79 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 23 Jul

Callum Williams’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Economist Podcasts · For bucks’ sake: the rise of self-made billionaires · 23 Jul 2026 podcast

There is clearly a very big surge in anti-billionaire sentiment.

But what we have found is that there's a growing number of billionaires that are deriving their wealth mainly by providing genuinely useful goods and services or employing millions of people rather than by taking advantage of the system.

Okay, so the first thing to say is this bit of research was not about whether billionaires are good or bad.

We're just looking at whether they're getting better or getting worse over time.

And to do that, we look at where billionaire's wealth comes from.

And broadly speaking, we divide the source of their wealth into the worst kind and the better kind.

Now, the worst kind is when someone's made a lot of money from, say, for example, being in the mining industry or being in natural resources, being in casinos, that kind of thing.

The kind of industry where you need political favors to get stuff done.

And we also in that bucket include people who've inherited most of their wealth.

Then in the other bucket, we have the good or the better billionaires.

And now these are the billionaires who have made their money by creating goods and services and companies that people genuinely like and do deliver some good to the world.

You can think of it as, on the one hand, uncompetitive wealth, the oligarchs, the heirs.

And on the other hand, the competitive billionaire wealth, so people like Taylor Swift, Lionel Messi, the founder of Uniqlo.

And basically what we find is that the competitive sector is becoming more and more important over time, and the uncompetitive sector is becoming less and less important over time.

So it's a bunch of different sectors.

You might think it was all to do with tech.

And yes, there are a lot of people in tech who've made billions of dollars.

I mean, Elon Musk being the most obvious example, but there's loads of them.

But what I found quite surprising is that actually the tech share of billionaire wealth is not at an all-time high.

It's actually slightly lower today than it was in the early 2000s.

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