If there is one thing we want the world leaders at Davos this week to know, it’s this: it’s time to win back our democracies and shared futures by taxing the super rich before it’s too late.
On Monday, global leaders convened for the 56th Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Nearly 3,000 elites from the worlds of business, government, and civil society—including a record number of heads of state and the largest American delegation in history—have flocked to the Alpine resort town for five days of high-level discussions and deal-making. President Trump arrived late, but has still managed to dominate the conference’s discourse due to his pronouncements regarding Greenland.
Every year for Davos, we use the gathering to draw attention to the critical need for international elites to tackle the crisis that is extreme wealth concentration. This year, we organized an open letter among millionaires and billionaires to the world leaders at Davos, sponsored a poll among G20 millionaires to assess their attitudes towards extreme wealth, and also released some exciting social media content. In light of all the mayhem that Trump has caused over the last year, particularly with regard to how his policies and practices continue to benefit wealthy people like us, the public call for a tax on the super rich could not have come at a more pressing time.
We worked with Millionaires for Humanity and Oxfam International to organize our letter campaign, Time to Win. In the end, the letter attracted nearly 400 millionaire and billionaire signers from 24 countries. Signers come from a variety of backgrounds and include investors, inheritors, business owners and executives, authors, actors, and more. Notable signers include Mark Ruffalo (award-winning actor known for roles in movies like The Avengers, 13 Going on 30, and Spotlight); Brian Cox (award-winning actor known for roles in movies and series like Succession and The Bourne Identity); Abigail Disney (Patriotic Millionaire member and Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker); and Brian Eno (musician).
The letter states: “When even millionaires, like us, recognise that extreme wealth has cost everyone else everything else, there can be no doubt that society is dangerously teetering off the edge of a precipice. We are worn out watching this happen. We want our democracies back. We want our communities back. We want our future back.” Read the letter and see the full list of signers HERE.
We also commissioned a poll of 3,900 people from G20 countries with more than $1 million in assets, excluding their homes, to assess their attitudes towards extreme wealth. It was conducted by Survation between December 2025 and January 2026. Key findings from the poll include:
- 62 percent think that extreme wealth is a threat to democracy
- 81 percent think extremely wealthy individuals can access politicians via their wealth
- 77 percent think that extremely wealthy individuals buy political influence
- 82 percent think there should be a limit to how much money politicians and political parties can receive from individuals
- 61 percent think our political leaders should do more to tackle extreme wealth
- 63 percent think extreme wealth is harmful to factual media
- 62 percent think extreme wealth is harmful to social trust
- 60 percent think extreme wealth prevents ordinary people from living a decent life
- 65 percent support higher taxes on the very richest to invest in public services and tackle the cost of living crisis, while only 17 percent oppose
- 71 percent think that extremely wealthy individuals can use their wealth to significantly influence election outcomes
- 69 percent think the influence of the super rich over politicians is preventing action on tackling inequality
- 59 percent think that Donald Trump’s presidency has had a negative impact on global economic stability
- 58 percent think that Donald Trump’s presidency has had a negative impact on affordability for everyday people
Our letter and poll have made quite a splash in the media. So far, they have been featured in high-profile outlets like Forbes, Fortune, The Independent, The Guardian, Business Insider, Fast Company, Le Monde, Channel 4 News, POLITICO, and La Presse.
We’ve also released some exciting social media content for Davos, including videos from Abigail Disney, Brian Eno, and Julia Davies. You can view and share these videos and the rest of our Davos content on X, Threads, Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and TikTok.
Our Davos products come on the heels of the publication of new research findings on top-level global wealth from our friends at Oxfam International. Oxfam has found that the richest 1% now own three times more wealth than the world’s total public wealth. (Public wealth includes assets owned by society, like public land and parks, hospitals, schools, road networks, housing, and courts.) Further, if the gap between public and private wealth continues to grow at the same pace it has over the last 50 years, by 2075, private wealth will have surged ahead of public wealth by almost $900 trillion.
In a new report, Resisting the Rule of the Rich: Protecting Freedom from Billionaire Power, Oxfam has also found:
- In 2025, the collective wealth of the world’s billionaires jumped to $18.3 trillion, a record-level high. It surged by $2.5 trillion, which is roughly equal to the total wealth held by the 4.1 billion people that comprise the bottom half of humanity. It would also be enough to eradicate extreme poverty 26 times.
- Since 2020, billionaire wealth has increased an eye-popping 81 percent. Meanwhile, roughly half of the world’s population lives in poverty and one in four people suffer from food insecurity.
- Billionaires are 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than working people.
It’s not every day that world leaders are all together in one place for an extended period of time. It is essential that they seize the opportunity at this critical juncture in history, and work together to put us all on a path to win back our economies, democracies, planet, and shared future from the hands of billionaires and authoritarians like Trump.
We’ll close by sharing the stirring thoughts that Mark Ruffalo shared about our Davos campaign to tax the super rich: “Americans are confronted with the challenge of a lawless president who believes that the only limit to his power is his own morality and mind. But Donald Trump and the unique threat that he poses to American democracy did not come about overnight. Extreme wealth inequality enabled his every step, and is the root cause of the trend towards authoritarianism we’re witnessing in the U.S. and around the world. If leaders at Davos are serious about the threat to democracy and the rule of law, they must get serious about combatting extreme wealth concentration. That includes taxing wealthy people like me too. If we are to have democracy, not oligarchy, taxing the rich is essential to giving power back to the people.”