The world’s wealthiest billionaires have a common secret hiding in plain sight: they are monopolists. Much of their wealth and income was taken, not earned.

This report by the Balanced Economy Project, SOMO, Global Justice Now and LobbyControl focuses on how a handful of individuals and their companies have built positions of market and strategic dominance where they’ve become too big to fail, too big to trust, and ‘too big to care’. They have accumulated so much monopoly power that they make decisions that deeply affect the lives of all of us.

Our new data reveals how some of the world’s richest billionaires have accumulated wealth through industries so dominant and influential that they can leverage their power to suck wealth out of our societies. We look at the serious damage this power inflicts on the public and the planet and examine the 20 richest firms in the world – many of which are owned or controlled by the top 20 billionaires.