“The day is already approaching when the world will no longer be divided by faiths and beliefs, but when the entire earth will be divided into two camps: the poor and the rich, and that will be the final hour of this great disgrace called wealth, for there are so many of us poor that, if each of us were to raise our right hand, we would overshadow not only the shine of your wealth but even the sun itself.”
Judging by the wealth of three thousand billionaires and the poverty of four billion people in the world in 2025, this prophecy of our Nobel Prize winner, Ivo Andrić, spoken several decades ago, has almost come true. The richest people in the world possess 18.3 trillion dollars, the highest level in history. In just the past five years, from 2020 to 2025, their wealth has increased by 81 per cent.
At least this is the situation according to the report “Resisting the Rule of the Rich: Protecting Freedom from Billionaire Power” by the organisation Oxfam, published ahead of this year’s summit in Davos. The report does not contain data on Serbian billionaires or whether their number has increased, but it does state that the collective wealth of the world’s billionaires rose by 2.5 trillion dollars last year, which is almost equivalent to the total wealth, or rather poverty, possessed by the bottom half of humanity – 4.1 billion people. That amount of 2.5 trillion dollars, by which billionaire wealth increased, would be enough to eradicate extreme poverty on the planet as many as 26 times.
If those four billion people were to raise their hands, Andrić’s wisdom would probably prove true: they would overshadow not only the brilliance of billionaires but even the sun itself. But hands are not being raised, and the world has silently divided into two camps, the poor and the rich. Because of the thunderous silence of the poor and the greed of the others, wealth in the world is not a disgrace, as our Nobel laureate claimed, but a source of pride. In this respect his prophecy has not come true, which has led to the absurd situation that, for example, the twelve richest people in the world hold more wealth than the value of the economies of 85 poor countries combined. It is almost unbelievable, especially at a time when one in four people on the planet does not have enough food and nearly half of the world’s population lives in poverty.
The report “Resisting the Rule of the Rich: Protecting Freedom from Billionaire Power” also identifies the causes of such a situation. One of them is that the super-rich secure political power in order to shape the rules of economies and societies for their own benefit, to the detriment of the rights and freedoms of people around the world. It also states that the extreme wealth of billionaires is undeserved and that the situation will not change significantly in the future because more than a thousand billionaires will transfer a total of 5.2 trillion dollars to their heirs over the next two to three decades.
“The growth of billionaire wealth coincides with the American Trump administration, which is implementing a pro-billionaire agenda. It has cut taxes for the super-rich, undermined global efforts to tax large corporations, rolled back attempts to curb monopoly power and contributed to the rise of shares linked to artificial intelligence, which has benefited super-rich investors around the world,” the Oxfam report states.
The greatest benefit among the 3,000 billionaires was enjoyed by Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet, as his wealth exceeded half a trillion dollars. Data show that from 421 billion dollars at the beginning of 2025, by December it had reached 754 billion. This makes him richer than the “poorest” 620 billionaires on the planet combined.
On the other hand, according to World Bank data from 2023, 8.5 per cent of the world’s population, almost 700 million people, now live on less than 2.15 dollars a day, which is the threshold of extreme poverty. It would take 230 years to eradicate it, while a trillionaire, someone who possesses one thousand billion dollars, could appear within a decade.
The reason for such an anomaly lies in the strengthening of the political power of billionaires who use their money to buy political offices or leaders whom they will control. Amitabh Behar, the executive director of this organisation, therefore warned that research conducted in 66 countries showed that almost half of respondents say that the rich often buy elections in their country.
“Governments make wrong decisions to please the elite and protect its wealth, while simultaneously suppressing the rights of their citizen-voters. Meanwhile, billions of people face the hardships of poverty. One in four people around the world faces food insecurity because they do not have enough meals a day. The rate of poverty reduction has stagnated at the level recorded in 2019. Extreme poverty is rising again in Africa. Political decisions made last year by governments around the world to cut aid budgets have directly affected people living in poverty. Because of these aid cuts, around 14 million additional deaths could occur by 2030. Economic poverty creates hunger. Political poverty creates anger,” Behar said.
Radojka Nikolić, editor of the magazine Biznis and a respected economic journalist, is not surprised by that anger.
“The report measuring poverty and wealth is important, and Oxfam presents it ahead of the forum in Davos, yet that gathering itself serves precisely to strengthen power, influence and wealth. Oxfam always comes out with the assessment that the rich have become even richer and the poor even poorer. Does such a report move the influential people at the forum in Davos, to whom the appeal is directed to help the poorer part of the world by paying higher taxes? No, because the influential and the wealthy do not react to such appeals at all. On the contrary, they are in Davos precisely to protect their positions and increase their wealth,” Nikolić told NIN.
She adds that this year’s Oxfam report contained at least two interesting assessments.
“The first is that the wealth of billionaires grew three times faster in 2025 and reached the highest level ever. The second is that billionaires own more than half of the world’s largest media companies and all the major social media companies. When it comes to billionaires as media owners, Oxfam mentions the purchase of the Washington Post by Jeff Bezos, Twitter/X by Elon Musk, the Los Angeles Times by Patrick Soon-Shiong and the acquisition of major shares in The Economist magazine. In France, the far-right billionaire Vincent Bolloré now controls CNews, rebranding it as the French equivalent of Fox News. In the United Kingdom, three-quarters of newspaper circulation are controlled by four super-rich families. This indicates that the super-rich possess political power which they reinforce through media dominance,” Nikolić explains for NIN.
Her assessment at the global level could also be applied to the situation in Serbia, where the divide between the enormously wealthy and the poor is becoming increasingly evident. It began in the 1990s, when the first tycoons emerged, and it continues to this day. The only thing that has changed is that the new wealthy are no longer called tycoons but respected businessmen. The names have changed, but what remains the same is that their wealth has grown under the umbrella of politics. That umbrella partly shields them from the public, so unlike global figures the exact number of Serbian billionaires is unknown and estimates vary.
Radojka Nikolić says she cannot answer that question precisely.
“The answers differ and are relatively unreliable because they are conducted by unofficial institutions. The number has never been officially determined or published, but there are estimates that there are far more billionaires than two decades ago. Ten years ago, the report World Ultra Wealth 2012–2013 stated that in 2012, Serbia had 120 multimillionaires with an estimated wealth of 15 billion dollars. If some of those multimillionaires have become billionaires over the past decade, and if their total wealth has more than doubled, it is clear that global trends of rapidly increasing wealth also apply to Serbian billionaires. Especially considering that in 2000, for example, not a single billionaire was registered in Serbia. From none 25 years ago to 48 billionaires today – that is a pace of wealth accumulation that Serbian billionaires’ ‘colleagues’ around the world, from America and China to the Arabian Gulf, might envy,” Nikolić explains for NIN.
In Serbia, millionaires are recorded by the Tax Administration. Since data for 2025 are not yet available, those from 2024 show that 29,533 people filed a return for the calculation of annual personal income tax, an obligation incurred if one earns an annual income higher than 4,874,508 dinars, that is, more than three average annual salaries. Judging by the number of people subject to this levy, it is a small group that has for years amounted to around one per cent. This is not a large number, which may indicate that some incomes remain outside the radar.
Experts also point to this, including academician Pavle Petrović, who spoke about it at this year’s KBF.
“A narrow elite in Serbia has enormous political power, which leads to inefficient economic institutions, that is, distorted rules of the game. There is also a source of economic inefficiency arising from potential economic losers, namely privileged firms connected to the powerful political elite, as well as a large number of smaller enterprises operating within a clientelist party network. In the construction sector in Serbia about ten privileged companies belonging to the ruling elite have emerged and practically obtain all contracts connected, directly or indirectly, with the state, either through direct agreements or through non-transparent tenders, which creates social stratification,” Petrović said.
Zoran Drakulić, owner of the Point Group, is even more radical when it comes to inequality and Serbian wealthy individuals.
“You have heard of the term circular economy. Well, we have circular corruption. I will not reveal how it works, but one day I would like to talk about it in the presence of people from the government. What is happening today with real estate is the result of black money. I know that in 2023 property worth 6.5 billion euros was bought in Serbia. In a time of crisis, and 87 per cent in cash. It is not only cash from people’s pockets but also money from bank accounts. At the same time, savings did not fall, which means that this is new money or money circulating from previous transactions and now multiplying. That is how billionaires are created,” Drakulić previously told NIN.
The facts nevertheless show, including this Oxfam report, that this is not merely a “speciality” of Serbia but a global phenomenon that has only changed its form over the years. This is illustrated by the American sociologist C. Wright Mills and his famous work The Power Elite, which analyses precisely the behaviour and connections between political, military and economic elites with the support of the intelligentsia. He also revealed that members of the “power elite” are not geniuses but incompetent individuals whose ignorance produced catastrophic consequences for ordinary and powerless people, while they themselves remained protected from responsibility. His analysis has not lost its relevance as we now face increasingly degenerated power among ruling elites and billionaires. Examples of this are not found only in New York, Berlin or other global centres but also in Serbia.
It therefore seems that the day foretold in Andrić’s prophecy at the beginning of this text has drawn near everywhere, and that the world is no longer divided by faiths and beliefs but by the poor and the rich. It is even clearer that in the near future economic and political elites will not feel ashamed of enormous wealth but will take pride in it, even though it has been built on the hardship of half of the poor people on the planet.
(NIN, 11.03.2026)
Photo credits: flickr/incendiarymind
