Six tips for budding centibillionaires (No 1: come from a very wealthy family) | Caroline Knowles

The world's richest people are mostly American, big in fintech, and started near the top. Where does that leave the rest of us?

There is a tiny new elite at the frontier of money-making and they are known as the centibillionaires. These titans of the universe have personal assets of at least $100bn, and there are now 14 of them in the world - up from six last year. You will find them listed, compared and celebrated by the Bloomberg billionaires index and the Forbes world's billionaires list, which has just been published.

Thanks to these annual tallies of the superwealthy, we know that 2,781 people worldwide - 141 more than last year - have personal wealth of $1bn or more. And that Taylor Swift is now one of them. And that their collective wealth - about $14.2tn - is more than the GDP of any country except the US and China. But centibillionaires are this group's porous top tier, described by Forbes as those who have done much better than the average billionaire", and their wealth is unimaginable to most of us.

Caroline Knowles is global professorial fellow at Queen Mary University of London, and the author of Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.