In my previous column (‘The ecosystem of ambition’ May 9), I argued that America’s unmatched record of technological innovation is the product of a system – not genius, not geography, but a carefully compounded architecture of universities, capital, culture and law.
Today I want to examine what that system has produced in purely economic terms, because the numbers are so extraordinary that stating them plainly is, by itself, an argument. And then I want to examine the paradox of a country that has accumulated this wealth and power, and is now, with remarkable consistency, undermining the very credibility that sustains it.
Start with the wealth rankings, because they tell the whole story in miniature. In May 2026, for the first time in recorded history, every single one of the ten wealthiest people on earth is American. All ten. Elon Musk – born in Pretoria (South Africa) – leads with a fortune of approximately $800 billion, a figure with no historical precedent, larger than the GDP of most countries and twice the size of Pakistan’s GDP. Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Jensen Huang, Rob Walton and Jim Walton.
French luxury titan Bernard Arnault, who had been in this group for years on the strength of Dior and Louis Vuitton, has dropped off the list. Luxury goods, it turns out, cannot compete with AI and cloud computing as wealth-creation machines. This is not a market fluctuation or a lucky quarter. It is a structural verdict on which economic system has understood how to convert human ambition into extraordinary value.
The macroeconomic picture is equally vertiginous. The US’s GDP stands at $32.4 trillion. China, the supposed peer competitor, produces $20.8 trillion. Germany $5.45 trillion. Japan – which in 1990 economists predicted would overtake America – is at $4.4 trillion. The UK is $4.3 trillion. India, the world’s most populous nation, is approximately at $4 trillion. America’s economy is larger than that of China, Germany and Japan combined.
But GDP understates the advantage, because what America has built is not merely a large economy but a ferociously productive one, concentrated in the highest-value sectors of the modern world. The NYSE and Nasdaq together held a combined market capitalisation of roughly $67 trillion at the close of 2025 – nearly 45 per cent of all listed equity on earth. The S&P 500 alone surpassed 50 per cent of global equity market capitalisation.
China’s markets, the world’s second-largest, are valued at $11 to $15 trillion – less than a quarter of America’s. Nvidia alone, a company that a decade ago made graphics cards for video gamers, carries a market cap of $5.2 trillion – larger than the entire stock markets of Germany, France and India. Eight of the ten most valuable companies globally are American. This concentration of financial value in a single country, at this scale and across this breadth, is without precedent in modern economic history.
The capital flowing towards the next generation of dominance is equally striking. In 2025, American companies attracted $274 billion in startup investment – 64 per cent of all global venture funding, up from 47 per cent five years earlier. In AI, American companies drew 75 per cent of all global AI venture deal value. The EU27, with 450 million people and centuries of scientific tradition, attracted 6.0 per cent. China attracted five. The companies being built today – those that will define the global economy of the 2030s – are being built overwhelmingly in one country. Capital begets talent, talent begets innovation, innovation begets capital. The cycle compounds and the rest of the world is falling further behind.
What makes this concentration particularly remarkable is who is doing the building. Musk was born in South Africa. Jensen Huang in Taiwan. Sergey Brin in the Soviet Union. The founding team of OpenAI – arguably the most consequential company of this decade – was assembled from a South African, a Russian-born researcher and a Pole. In 2025, nearly half of all Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children, generating $8.6 trillion in combined annual revenue – the world’s third-largest economy, if it were a country. America’s capacity to attract the world’s most ambitious people and give them the system to achieve the impossible is its least replicable advantage.
All of which makes the current moment so bewildering. The Trump administration has spent two years methodically damaging precisely the assets that underpin this dominance. Tariffs raised American trade barriers to their highest level since 1947 – the largest tax increase as a share of GDP since 1993, costing the average household $1,500 in 2026 alone – without eliminating the trade deficit they were designed to fix, which fell by a negligible $2.1 billion. Manufacturing jobs declined. The Supreme Court struck down 70 per cent of the tariffs as unconstitutional.
Then there is Iran – a war launched while negotiations were still active, without congressional authorisation, that closed the Strait of Hormuz, drew Iranian missiles onto Gulf Arab states, and pushed oil above $100 a barrel. A 24-country Pew study found 67 per cent of global respondents had little or no confidence in American leadership. In Western Europe, only 16 per cent of citizens now regard the US as an ally. Soft power – the capacity to lead by attraction rather than coercion – is being dismantled, deliberately, by American hands.
And yet the economic foundations have held. The S&P 500 surged 9.0 per cent in April 2026 alone, the Nasdaq 15 per cent in a single month, even as the Iran war raged and oil prices spiked. Nvidia crossed $5 trillion. OpenAI and Anthropic continued to attract the largest venture rounds in history. The reason is not mysterious: the world does not need America’s tariffs or its wars. But it does need American AI, American cloud infrastructure, American financial markets and American technology platforms.
Resentment and dependence are not mutually exclusive and, for now, the dependence is structural. No comparable alternative exists. The world’s most ambitious people still want to study at American universities, list their companies on American exchanges and price their most important assets in American dollars.
The ten names at the top of the global wealth rankings represent a verdict of compound institutional advantage. That verdict stands even amid the tariff chaos, the Hormuz blockade and the diplomatic wreckage of an America First foreign policy that has left America less admired and, paradoxically, no less needed. The turbulence of a bad presidency will pass. Institutions outlast the people who strain them.
What America must protect is not its military dominance or its trade surplus, but rule of law, openness to talent, and a university culture that tells a young person from anywhere in the world that their dangerous idea is worth pursuing. Those things are, despite everything, still intact. The question is whether they will remain so and whether America will recognise what it is risking before it is gone.
For Pakistan, the lesson is not to admire or to resent. It is to sit with an uncomfortable fact: Pakistan’s combined venture capital since 2015 is less than $1 billion. India’s, in the same period, is $160 billion. That is a systems gap. We have engineers who compete globally. We have entrepreneurs who build companies abroad. What we do not have is the institutional architecture that can receive a difficult idea, protect it, finance it and allow it to compound into something that creates durable wealth at home.
The wealth comes last. The system comes first. And that system – what it requires, why we have not built it and whether we still can – is the subject of the next column.
The writer is a former managing partner of a leading professional services firm and has done extensive work on governance in the public and private sectors. He tweets/posts @Asad_Ashah
