The oligarchs’ world order

In 1985, as Mikhail Gorbachev began the reforms that would help end the Soviet Union six years later, another consequential process was beginning elsewhere. In three countries of the Global South, oligarchs were coming to power: José Sarney, scion of an old sugarcane family, was elected president of Brazil and eventually accumulated wealth we estimate at $  1.5-2.5   billion. General Ibrahim ­Babangida took power in Nigeria in a palace coup, then proceeded to gather wealth we estimate at $  15-30  billion. And Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge regimental commander, was appointed as Cambodia’s prime minister, beginning the journey that led to a family net worth we estimate at $ 1 billion today. 

According to our research at The Center for the Study of Oligarchs, 1985 was the first year since the end of World War II that the number of oligarchs running countries began to increase, both in the Global South and North. Since 1985, those numbers have been steadily climbing. Unlike other definitions, which define oligarchs as members of an oligarchy – a form of government in which power is held by a small group of people – we are not referring to a specific form of government here. We define oligarchs more broadly as economic and political actors who gain either wealth or power – and then use one to acquire the other. These wealthy and powerful elites are to be found around the globe and throughout history. 

Oligarchs run some of the world’s top economies

So far in 2025, 33 oligarchs either have served or are currently serving as heads of state or government. This is one ready measure of how much oligarchs matter. 82 % of them are from the Global South, and all but one are male. Six of the world’s top 20 economies are run by oligarchs. They include China’s Xi Jinping, whose net worth we estimate at $ 1.6 billion; Donald Trump in the US, whose most recent net worth estimate is $ 7.5 billion; Vladimir Putin of Russia, whom we estimate controls $ 6 billion; Prabowo Subianto, Indonesia’s president, with a family net worth of approximately $ 135 million; Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who controls $  100  million; and the richest of the six, Mohammed bin ­Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, who is estimated to be worth at least $  100  billion. Another measure, even more striking, is this: 48  % of today’s global GDP (purchasing power parity) is generated by oligarch-run countries. 

During their rise over the past 40 years, oligarchs have profit­ed from a world that has become more uncertain, unequal, and institutionally unstable. Since 2017, when Donald Trump’s first term as President of the United States began and Mohammed bin Salman became de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, the liberal international order has been perishing. A new oligarchs’ world order has been emerging. The years from 1985 to 2017 laid the ground by gradually normalising oligarchs as a feature of the global economy and international order, not a bug.

Oligarchs benefit from an increasingly unstable world 

Oligarchs can be classified as business or political in nature, depending on whether they gain wealth or power first, and their wealth and power can be of different sorts. Wealth can be self-made, inherited, gained through connections or a combination of the three. Power comes in three types: decision-making (ruling as head of state or government, for example); agenda-setting (through media ownership or financial contributions to political activities); or, as the so-called “tech bros” in the US have shown, by shaping the ways in which we think and act through technologies such as search engines or Artificial Intelligence. Despite their differences and even though they act largely independent of one another, they have common strategies that are leading them in a general direction. We call this direction the “oligarch’s world order”. 

The oligarchs’ world order is shaped by six major characteristics. First, it is powered by three structural drivers: inequality, uncertainty and institutional change. Rising wealth and income inequality have helped increase the number of oligarchs and their average wealth, enabling them to acquire various types of power. Increasing uncertainty generates opportunities, both economic and political, that oligarchs are particularly well-suited to exploit. And institutional change, particularly declines in formal institutions such as the rule of law, have given oligarchs fewer guardrails and allowed them to accumulate more wealth and power. 

One oligarch who has built on all of these drivers is Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Following the collapse of communism, wealth and income inequality in Russia increased rapidly, creating the first generation of oligarchs. Putin gained considerable public support by bringing these oligarchs under control and becoming himself the most powerful of them. The rising uncertainty during this period created multiple opportunities for wealth creation and power accumulation — without this instability, Putin’s sudden rise to power in the late 1990s could not have occurred. And declining rule of law created opportunities for Putin to both accumulate wealth and, paradoxically, emerge as a strongman providing stability. 

Second, the oligarchs’ world order is becoming more authoritarian. If we consider the six oligarchs currently running one of the world’s top 20 economies, every one of them is authoritarian. 47  % of oligarchs ruling as heads of state or government in 2025 are located in countries categorised by Freedom House as not free, up from 42 % five years ago.

Third, the world order that these oligarchs are constructing for themselves forces the rest of the world to make stark choices. Oxford historian Margaret Macmillan recently spoke about three emerging spheres of influence: Xi in East Asia, Trump in the Western Hemisphere and Putin in Eurasia. The rest of the world is rapidly making choices about which sphere of influence to join or oppose. Those choices are likely to cause conflict and at the same time generate massive new wealth for the actors who get it right. Thus, the oligarchs’ world order will most probably make the world a great deal more unstable than what it is already.

Fourth, the oligarchs’ world order is as much about wealth creation for the oligarchs as it is about accumulating and exercising power. Today, seven of the world’s ten wealthiest people are oligarchs: Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Bernard Arnault and Jensen Huang. Most of them are US-based “tech bros.” Not so long ago, this was not the case. For example, Oracle’s Larry Ellison went from being a non-oligarch last year to the de facto controller of powerful media assets such as CBS, TikTok and, perhaps, CNN, should his son’s company merge with Warner Brothers Discovery. He is now the second wealthiest person in the world and one of the most powerful.

Fifth, the oligarchs’ world order is hard to understand because it doesn’t fit into our pre-established categories. Some oligarchs run states, but they run them differently than states have been run before. For example, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele combines oligarchic methods such as control, personal branding and selective law enforcement with savvy digital populism and crypto-capital. Many oligarchs, though, exercise their power in non-state ways: by controlling the media, making financial contributions, or by dominating the media or technologies – think of Larry Ellison again. 

Sixth, oligarchs employ different strategies to create their world order. Those strategies focus on increasing and exploiting inequality, uncertainty and institutional change, no matter what the consequences may be for the other aspects of the international order and the global economy, such as stability and predictability.

Where the world might be heading

What are the prospects for and implications, if this oligarchs’ world order prevails? We will hazard four guesses:

1. We see a steady shift away from oligarchs needing to capture states in order to generate wealth and power. Instead, the new oligarchs’ model will increasingly hold power outside the state in technology-enabled forms that will be essentially unregulated. Aside from media and tech oligarchs, we envision more oligarchs like Mexico’s businessman ­Ricardo Salinas Pliego and El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele, who holds political power yet weakens political institutions and diminishes the independence of the judicia­ry. Both promote non-state forms of money such as cryptocurrency and employ aggressive social media techniques to shape their followers’ preferences and actions.
2. Will the oligarchs’ world order be a more peaceful or a more conflict-prone one? It’s difficult to say, but the authori­tarian nature of this order suggests that violence, whether in the form of wars or civil disorder, is likely to increase.
3. The oligarchs’ sphere will continue to be male-­dominated. While the occasional Cleopatra-like figure may emerge, path dependence and gatekeeping will likely keep women at the margins of the oligarchs’ club.
4. The oligarchs’ world order is not a rule-based liberal international order focused on multilateralism and cooperation. Rather, it will be an age of opposing power spheres, in which every actor will have to choose which sphere to join or oppose.

How this world order may be stopped

Can the oligarchs’ world order be stopped, disrupted, reversed or at least contained? Permanent reversals of previous oligarchic orders have usually required structural breaks such as wars or revolutions. For example, the ­Japanese zaibatsu, which were powerful business conglomerates, were eliminated because of Japan’s defeat in World War II and the subsequent American occupation. This broke the oligarchs, and the zaibatsu were replaced with the keiretsu system, which is still in place today and is intended to prevent the concentration of huge financial power. Revolutions, like those in Cuba in 1959 and Bolivia in 1952, reduced oligarchs’ wealth and power through nationalisation. These are rare events, so it’s best to not be too optimistic that recent trends can be easily stopped or reversed once they have fully evolved.

Containment may be a more realistic strategy. As we have written elsewhere, containment could consist of: 

• better understanding oligarchs, the factors that enable their rise, and how they think and act;
• discussing and agreeing within each society on what restrictions should be placed on oligarchs’ activity, including limits on their wealth and power and the extent to which they can use one to acquire the other;
• mounting a broad and largely non-governmental containment effort, and
• fighting fire with fire by using oligarchs’ tactics against them to reduce their wealth and power – these could include financial trading strategies or the exploitation of AI and blockchain technologies.
   

David Lingelbach and Valentina Rodríguez Guerra are the founders of The Center for the Study of Oligarchs (www.oligarchcenter.org), where they serve as chair and vice chair. David is a professor of entrepreneurship at The University of Baltimore, and Valentina is pursuing a PhD in management at Universidad de los Andes. Together they published the book “The oligarchs’ grip: fusing wealth and power” in 2023. Their upcoming books, “Games without thrones: 8 leadership lessons from oligarchs” and “The oligarchs of the Americas: from the Conquistadores to Silicon Valley”, will be published in 2026.
dlingelbach@oligarchcenter.org and vrodriguez@oligarchcenter.org