Gabriel Zucman's proposal for a 2% annual tax on the wealth of the world's roughly 3,000 billionaires is finally getting the coverage it deserves — most recently on a series of UK podcasts where he made the case with characteristic clarity. The numbers are striking: the families on the Sunday Times Rich List now control around 25% of UK GDP, up from just 5% in 1989. Something has to give.
But there's a much bigger fish to fry.
The world's 10,838 publicly listed companies currently hold $51.8 trillion in net assets — roughly 3.5 times the combined wealth of all the world's billionaires. A simple dual tax on that wealth — 1% annually on the stock, plus 30% on the year-on-year increase — would raise approximately $1.9 trillion this year alone. Had the same tax been in place since 2002, it would have generated $20.8 trillion cumulatively — enough to fund the global climate transition several times over, or to make a serious dent in any number of the world's most pressing problems.
These are not hypothetical figures. They come from real, verifiable balance sheet filings of every major listed company on Earth. The data is available to anyone with a browser. Let me show you what it reveals.
The data, and how I got it
If you visit Companies Market Cap and click on the "Net Assets" ranking, you'll find 10,838 publicly traded companies with their current net assets, totalling $51.8 trillion. Click on any individual company — Apple, Berkshire Hathaway, ICBC, Saudi Aramco — and you'll see a historical table showing their net assets year by year, in most cases going back to 2001.
Exploring this by hand would be hopeless. So with the help of Anthropic's Claude, I wrote a Python script that scrapes the historical table from every company page, builds a database, and computes the aggregate annual figures. The full dataset — 173,441 (company, year) data points covering 10,350 companies and 25 years — took less than an hour to assemble. Both the scraping script and the dataset are available for anyone who wants to verify the numbers or extend the analysis.
In 2001, the world's listed companies held $6.1 trillion in net assets across 2,696 companies. By the end of 2024, that figure had reached $47.4 trillion across 9,761 companies. The current 2025 estimate — based on three independent methods that converge remarkably tightly — sits at around $52 trillion. Corporate wealth has grown roughly eight-fold in 24 years.
The corporate wealth machine doesn't pause
The most striking finding from the dataset is just how unstoppable corporate wealth accumulation has been.
Twenty-two of the last twenty-three years have seen positive growth in the global corporate net wealth base. The only contraction was a modest -3.2% in 2008, during the worst financial crisis in living memory. The COVID year of 2020? Up 8.3%. The 2022 inflation shock? A pause at +1.3%, but still positive. The "stagnation" years of 2014-2015? Still inching upward.
The average annual growth across the period has been 9.6%.
This is the empirical foundation of the case for a corporate wealth tax. Whatever else one might say about it, the base is reliable. A 1% wealth tax against an asset class that grows at nearly 10% a year takes off roughly one-tenth of the annual increase. The companies still get richer, just slightly less quickly. This isn't a confiscatory tax — it's a small participation share in growth that's happening anyway.
A dual tax with two complementary components
I propose a simple two-part tax:
- 1% annually on net assets — applied to whatever a company holds on its balance sheet at year-end
- 30% on the year-on-year increase in net assets — a tax on wealth gains, parallel to (and replacing) the tax that already exists on individual capital gains
The 1% leg provides steady, predictable revenue regardless of how a given year performs. The 30% leg captures the windfalls in boom years and correctly collects nothing in contraction years. Combined, they form a robust revenue stream that's resilient to volatility.
Applying this dual tax retrospectively to the period 2002-2024 would have raised $18.9 trillion in total. Adding the 2025 estimate brings the cumulative figure to $20.8 trillion. In 2025 alone, the tax would raise approximately $1.9 trillion — $520 billion from the 1% stock tax and around $1.4 trillion from the 30% on the year's roughly $4.5 trillion increase in corporate net wealth.
To put $1.9 trillion in perspective:
- It's roughly 40% of the $5 trillion per year that climate economists estimate is needed for the global energy transition
- It's about three times the entire United Nations system budget
- It's roughly six times what the OECD's much-celebrated global minimum corporate tax is expected to raise
- It comes from a tax base that requires no new international treaties, no complex transfer pricing rules, no minimum thresholds — just a straightforward calculation on balance sheet data that companies already publish
"But companies will find ways to avoid it"
This is the standard objection to any corporate tax, and it deserves a serious answer.
Yes, companies will try to avoid it. But the avoidance routes are structurally limited, and most of them are economically beneficial.
A company's net assets consist primarily of productive capital: factories, equipment, intellectual property, working capital, cash reserves. These can't be reduced without harming the business itself. A multinational manufacturer cannot simply make its factories disappear for tax reasons; a bank cannot pretend it doesn't have customer deposits to lend against.
What can be reduced is idle capital — accumulated retained earnings beyond what the business actually needs. Companies sitting on mountains of unused cash (Apple's $160bn cash pile, Berkshire's $300bn-plus, the trillion-dollar reserves of the major Chinese banks) can return this wealth to shareholders through dividends or buybacks, give it to staff as bonuses, donate it to charitable causes, or reinvest it productively. Every one of these outcomes is an economically useful redistribution of stagnant capital.
But here's the structural point: when corporate net assets are returned to shareholders, the wealth doesn't disappear — it lands on individual balance sheets. If individuals are also subject to a wealth tax (Zucman's territory), the same revenue gets captured at the next level. The architecture is unavoidable by design. The only "avoidance" route that actually escapes the tax entirely is productive reinvestment — which is exactly what a healthy economy needs.
So the dual tax creates a structural incentive against wealth hoarding and toward either productive deployment or fair distribution. Whether companies pay the tax, or pre-empt it by spending, returning, or reinvesting their idle capital, the outcome is positive. As I've argued before: sitting on huge mountains of unused assets is really pointless.
The wealth is not just at the top
One unexpected finding from the dataset is worth highlighting because it cuts against a common assumption.
| Year | Top 10 share | Top 100 share | Top 1000 share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2001 | 14.0% | 50.5% | 95.6% |
| 2010 | 9.2% | 36.7% | 81.3% |
| 2024 | 8.8% | 30.7% | 73.0% |
The share of global corporate wealth held by the largest companies has fallen dramatically since 2001. The top 100's share dropped from 50.5% to 30.7% — a 20-point decline. The top 1000's share fell from 95.6% to 73.0%.
This is contrary to most popular narratives about wealth concentration. It happened because the universe of large companies has expanded enormously — from 2,696 companies in 2001 to nearly 10,000 today. The "long tail" has fattened. Many more companies now hold large net asset positions.
The political implication is important. A wealth tax that only targets the very largest companies — or only the very wealthiest individuals — would miss most of the wealth. The case for a universal 1% on all entities holding net wealth is structural, not punitive. It's the only way to capture the actual distribution of accumulated wealth in the global economy.
What this means
Zucman's proposal is excellent, and I support it. But it taxes only one slice of where the wealth sits. Most of the world's wealth doesn't live in named individuals' personal accounts; it lives in the corporate entities those individuals own, control, or invest in. Tax the corporates directly and you catch the wealth where it actually accumulates — without any of the valuation headaches that plague individual wealth taxes (how do you value an unlisted business? a private art collection? a foreign trust?).
Corporate net assets, by contrast, are already calculated, audited, and published. The numbers exist. The methodology exists. The aggregation can be done with a Python script and a few hours of compute time.
$1.9 trillion per year. From a tax base that already exists. Measured by data that's already public. Calculable by a methodology anyone can audit.
The wealth is sitting there in plain sight, year after year, growing at 9.6% on average. The data is now public, the calculation transparent, the policy straightforward.
The only remaining question is why we haven't done it yet.
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