A Russian billionaire has been ordered by a court in London to hand over a £350 million pound (US$500 million) superyacht to his wife as part of Britain’s biggest-ever divorce battle. Justice Charles Haddon-Cave at the High Court ruled that Farkad Akhmedov, 62, had used evasive and underhanded tactics to keep the yacht beyond the reach of the English courts and avoid paying his wife, Tatiana Akhmedova, 41.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has become the first person to amass a fortune surpassing $100 billion in Forbes magazine’s annual ranking of the world’s moguls. The milestone announced Tuesday underscores the growing clout of Bezos and the company he founded in 1994 as an online bookstore. These days, Amazon sells almost everything imaginable online. It’s now trying help people manage their lives with its digital assistant Alexa, which is implanted in its Echo line of internet-connected speakers.

A Silicon Valley billionaire who was ordered by California courts to restore public access to a popular surfing beach is seeking to take his case to the US supreme court. The case could entirely upend public access to beaches in a state with more than 1,000 miles of shoreline.

Bill Gates says he has paid more than $10 billion in taxes over a lifetime but billionaires like him should pay "significantly" more because they benefit more from the system. The Microsoft co-founder, the world's second richest man after Amazon's Jeff Bezos, was critical of a recent US tax overhaul that slashed corporate taxes and lowered the top bracket for individual income.

Not in our backyard. That's what dozens of people said at a packed meeting Thursday night about the city's plan to put a homeless shelter smack in the middle of their wealthy neighborhood.

Americans reflexively link hard work with reward, but what happens as the two become ever more disconnected?

The development charity Oxfam has called for action to tackle the growing gap between rich and poor as it launched a new report showing that 42 people hold as much wealth as the 3.7 billion who make up the poorest half of the world’s population.

Four out of every five dollars of wealth generated in 2017 ended up in the pockets of the richest one percent, while the poorest half of humanity got nothing, a report published by Oxfam found on Monday. As global political and business leaders gather for this week’s World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, the charity’s report highlights a global system that rewards the super-rich and neglects the poor. It found that 3.7 billion people who make up the poorest half of the world saw no increase in their wealth in 2017, while 82 percent of the wealth generated last year went to the richest one percent of the global population.

The richest 10% of people produce half of Earth’s climate-harming fossil-fuel emissions, while the poorest half contribute a mere 10%, British charity Oxfam said in a report released Wednesday. Oxfam published the numbers as negotiators from 195 countries met in Paris to wrangle over a climate rescue pact.

Bitcoin was a whisker away from hitting $20,000 over the weekend, hitting a high of $19,771 yesterday, according to the CoinDesk price index. At that price, bitcoin’s anonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, would have been worth $19.4 billion, or the 44th richest person in the world, according to the Forbes rich list.

The richest 0.1% of the world’s population have increased their combined wealth by as much as the poorest 50% – or 3.8 billion people – since 1980, according to a report detailing the widening gap between the very rich and poor. The World Inequality Report, published on Thursday by French economist Thomas Piketty, warned that inequality had ballooned to “extreme levels” in some countries and said the problem would only get worse unless governments took coordinated action to increase taxes and prevent tax avoidance.

On one of the busiest online shopping days of the year, Black Friday, thousands of Amazon employees decided it was also a good day to walk off the job. Warehouse workers in several distribution centers in Germany and Italy took the day off to demand higher wages and better treatment. In sharp contrast, on the same day, the net worth of Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos hovered around $100 billion, easily making him the wealthiest person on the planet.

In the classic Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged, the rich go “on strike” – withdrawing their services and disappearing from society in protest against taxes and regulation. Weary of carrying an ungrateful world on their shoulders, business leaders and other top income earners finally shrug, and leave the world without them. The book’s metaphor inspires political rhetoric to this day: if you tax the rich, they will leave.

A provision in the tax plan Republicans are championing in Congress has a peculiar benefit that would help out the massively wealthy in America: A tax exemption for owners of private jets. The cut out is just one of many small peculiarities in the tax plan, which includes provisions that would give craft beer producers tax breaks, and some that change how people can buy and sell stocks.

The globe’s richest 1% own half the world’s wealth, according to a new report highlighting the growing gap between the super-rich and everyone else. The world’s richest people have seen their share of the globe’s total wealth increase from 42.5% at the height of the 2008 financial crisis to 50.1% in 2017, or $140tn (£106tn), according to Credit Suisse’s global wealth report published on Tuesday.

I live in Sag Harbor, New York, out on the East End of Long Island in the Hamptons. The village of Sag Harbor was founded in 1707, and the house I rent is a Saltbox built in 1703. Just down the street is the Egyptian Revival Old Whaler’s Church, built in 1844. It’s a beautiful wood-frame clapboard structure. Hell, everything is beautiful out here — East Hampton, Bridgehampton, Southampton, Amagansett, the potato fields and beaches of Sagaponack — driving around here, you can’t go around a bend without seeing something that takes your breath away.

In response to the recent leak of 13.4 million files from two offshore service providers earlier this week, which documents how the world’s wealthiest individuals and corporations avoid paying taxes on their fortunes, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., warned that the world is quickly becoming an “international oligarchy.” “The major issue of our time is the rapid movement toward international oligarchy in which a handful of billionaires own and control a significant part of the global economy...

The three richest people in the US – Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett – own as much wealth as the bottom half of the US population, or 160 million people. Analysis of the wealth of America’s richest people found that Gates, Bezos and Buffett were sitting on a combined $248.5bn (£190bn) fortune. The Institute for Policy Studies said the growing gap between rich and poor had created a “moral crisis”.

Turns out Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross may have greatly exaggerated his wealth, according to a report from Forbes. Just a year ago, Forbes listed Ross' net worth at $2.9 billion and included him in the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans by net worth. The new report says Ross had just under $700 million in assets. It cited financial-disclosure forms filed by Ross after being nominated for his Commerce secretary.

The total number of billionaires and their collective wealth has now reached an all time high — breaking the $6 trillion mark, according to the latest annual billionaires report from UBS and PwC. Despite geopolitical uncertainty, their numbers have swelled by 10 per cent to 1,542 by the end of 2016, with a new member of the global elite UHNW club being minted every two days in Asia.