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USA | Jul 7, 2021

San Jose, California has the highest share of super-rich residents in the world

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One in every 727 people in San Jose is a member of this elite club. (Photo: Wikipedia.com)

San Jose, California has been rated as the city possessing the highest number of super-rich people in the world.

The latest Wealth-X World Ultra Wealth Report indicates that the place where someone is most likely to bump into an “ultra-high-net-worth” person, someone who’s worth more than US$30 million, is San Jose, California. Therefore is someone is intended to mingle with multimillionaires this summer, they can skip the Hamptons and Lake Como and come to San Jose.

San Jose, some 90 minutes by commuter rail south of San Francisco, tops the list of cities around the globe with the highest concentrations of ultra-wealthy residents. According to Wealth-X World Ultra Wealth Report, one in every 727 people in San Jose, the de facto capital of Silicon Valley, is a member of this elite club.

The report indicates that cities with the highest density of ultra-wealthy people tend to be moderately-sized towns, where technology or financial services dominate. San Jose is home to such well-known companies as Cisco Systems Hewlett-Packard Adobe and PayPal. Its population was just over one million in 2020, making it California’s third biggest city after Los Angeles and San Diego.

Wealth-X World Ultra Wealth report findings

Based on the findings of the report, the 10 cities with the highest raw number of ultra-wealthy residents in 2020 were New York, with 11,475 ultra-wealthy people, Hong Kong, Tokyo; Los Angeles; Chicago; San Francisco; Paris, Washington, D.C.; Osaka, Japan; and Dallas.

The ranks of monied folks swelled unevenly around the world in 2020, with North America and Asia clocking the strongest gains, while Europe, the Pacific region and the Middle East saw declines. Wealth-X World Ultra Wealth Report found that Africa “fared relatively better than some of its larger peers, with the number of ultra-wealthy individuals declining by ‘only’ 1.5 per cent and total net worth holding steady at US$312 billion, equivalent to a 0.9 per cent global share,” according to the Wealth-X report.

Ultra-wealthy unscathed by pandemic 

The report underlined that the very rich are getting richer, even during a pandemic. Amid the global health crisis and its attendant economic upheaval, the worldwide population of ultra-high-net-worth people grew by 1.7 per cent in 2020 from 2019 to a total of 295,450 people, according to Wealth-X.

These super-affluent folks made up 1.2 per cent of the world’s high-net-worth population — comprising anyone with at least $1 million but they hold 34 per cent of that group’s wealth, amounting to $35.5 trillion, the report found.

Wealth-X’s report noted that the expanding numbers of ultra-wealthy people during “intense economic turmoil, widespread unemployment and falling incomes for many non-wealthy individuals underlined the polarising effects of the pandemic across society.”

The authors concluded that, “the extent to which the ultra-wealthy were able to weather the storm (and, in some cases, significantly expand their fortunes) in one sense augers well for future wealth-creation prospects. However, it will also raise more questions over widening wealth inequality and could spur more concerted redistributive policy efforts in areas such as tax and regulation.”

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