BALTIMORE/BOGOTA – For most people, the word “oligarch” conjures images of Russian elites who amassed huge fortunes in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse or, more recently, the tech billionaires who filled the front row at U.S. President Donald Trump’s second inauguration. But oligarchs are global, systemic and increasingly entrenched. They are a defining feature of the emerging world order.
We define oligarchs as actors who accumulate and fuse substantial wealth and consequential power (a criterion that, unlike Aristotle’s, does not require rule for the rich as a class). Today, some oligarchs, like Trump, start with wealth, which they use to acquire power (and yet more wealth). Others use power to accumulate immense wealth, as Russian President Vladimir Putin has done over the last quarter-century. Still others, like Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) and Morocco’s King Mohammed VI, possess both from the start.
One need not be a billionaire to be an oligarch. We believe a net worth of $20 million, alongside evidence of wealth-power fusion, provides enough financial independence for an actor to build and exercise power without relying on others for the resources to do so. Applying this wealth threshold together with our wealth-power fusion criterion, we estimate that 59 heads of state or government today are oligarchs. Among them are leaders of eight of the world’s 20 largest economies (at purchasing-power parity, according to International Monetary Fund estimates for 2026).
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