A new snapshot of the global billionaire class shows women carving out more economic power than ever before. UBS’s 11th Billionaire Ambitions Report highlights a striking trend: women with extreme wealth aren’t just keeping pace with men, they’re surpassing them in growth for the fourth year in a row.
The report, which surveys billionaire clients around the world, paints a portrait of a global elite shifting under the weight of new fortunes, new industries, and the largest generational wealth transfer in human history. Benjamin Cavalli, who oversees strategic clients for UBS Global Wealth Management, described the billionaire landscape as more diverse and forward-looking than at any point in the past. The numbers back him up.
Women’s average wealth jumped 8.4 percent in 2025, rising to $5.2 billion. That growth rate more than doubles the 3.2 percent gain posted by men, whose average wealth now sits at $5.4 billion. The imbalance in raw numbers remains staggering — 2,545 male billionaires compared to 374 women — but the trajectory is clear. Women are building wealth faster, and they have been for years.
Some of the newest entrants embody that momentum. Earlier this year, Luana Lopes Lara, the 29-year-old co-founder of prediction market Kalshi, became the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire. She joins a cohort of more than 300 women worldwide who have crossed the ten-figure threshold. At the top sits Alice Walton, heir to the Walmart fortune, whose estimated $117 billion makes her the wealthiest woman alive and the 15th richest person on the planet.
Still, even the highest-ranking women remain far from the stratospheric levels occupied by the world’s richest men. Elon Musk’s estimated $500 billion fortune stands in a category of its own, and Larry Ellison’s roughly $268 billion places him firmly in the upper tier of global wealth.
The billionaire class as a whole continues to expand. UBS reports 287 newly minted billionaires this year, bringing the worldwide total to 2,900 — the second-largest single-year increase since 2021’s pandemic-era boom. Nearly 200 of those newcomers earned their fortunes through businesses or investments they built themselves, while 91 joined the club through inheritance.
Altogether, the world’s billionaires now control $15.8 trillion, up from $14 trillion the year before. And while the group remains overwhelmingly male, the fastest-growing corner of the billionaire world belongs to women — a shift that is beginning to reshape the global wealth map, even if the distance to parity remains vast.
