If you want to improve your chances of becoming a billionaire, you might consider moving to one of the 25 richest cities in the world with most billionaires per capita. You might think I am joking wondering how moving to a city with more billionaires can possibly have any impact on your life, and you might wonder whether I am confusing correlation with causation. But here’s the thing: the billionaires in these cities didn’t reach the pinnacle of success based simply on their intellect and hard work, though of course that played a huge part as well.
The common theme you will notice in this list is that each of the cities mentioned here actually have facilities that boost your chances of success by providing the means such as infrastructure, tax breaks and support. This is why there are many cities common in our list and the list of 20 richest cities in the world by GDP per capita. There is a reason why India only has 111 billionaires, which may allow it to have the 3rd most billionaires in general, but when you calculate its billionaire per capita ratio that stands at a miserly 0.088 billionaires per 1,000,000 people. This is because of the lack of resources in the country combined with the fact that the already meager resources are spread unevenly. That means a brilliant, hardworking person in rural India may struggle to earn a basic living, let alone become a billionaire. On the other hand, the uneven spread of resources means that they are more widely available in some of the country’s metropolises which has allowed a couple of Indian cities to make this list.
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You might rightly wonder if the oil-rich countries have cities featured on our list considering the number of billionaires created due to the oil reserves present. However, surprisingly, the billionaires per capita in these countries is pretty low, and only Dubai features on our list. Furthermore, the cities with the most billionaires generally also tend to be the cities with the most millionaires.
The comparison between millionaires and billionaires shows a stark contrast. While you can find hundreds of thousands of millionaires in just New York or Tokyo or London, you won’t find more than 79 billionaires in any city, with New York City currently hosting this number. We used this statistic as the basis for our ranking of the 25 richest cities in the world with the most billionaires per capita. However, simply defining the total billionaires seemed to be inaccurate, as a city with 1 billionaire in a population of 100 will have a higher density of billionaires when compared to a city that has 10 billionaires in 10,000,000. Therefore, we divided the total billionaires in each city by the population of each city, determined through each city’s most recent census, to arrive at the figure for billionaire per capita. While Singapore, with 21 billionaires and a per capita ratio of 3.89 billionaires per million people would have made the list, we excluded it since it is not strictly a city. Let’s take a look at the other richest cities in the world with most billionaires per capita where the top 1 percent live, starting with number 25:
