Why is Oxfam so concerned about the coming possibility of the world’s first trillionaire? The charity has this week released a report with an apocalyptic warning that one is likely within the next decade. Yet surely people only get that rich by making something that people want. That should be celebrated instead of condemned.

In a report published for the start of Davos, the annual event where very rich people gather at an expensive resort in Switzerland to worry about being rich, Oxfam said the world’s first trillionaire could come soon. Apparently, that showed we are entering a ‘decade of division’. ‘We have the top five billionaires, they have doubled their wealth’, said Oxfam’s executive director Amitabh Behar. ‘On the other hand, almost 5 billion people have become poorer.’

In a free market, people only get rich by making products that people want

As it happens, Oxfam’s maths could be a little wonky. For Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, to quadruple his net worth from its current $250 billion to $1 trillion is unlikely. Most of his money is tied up in Tesla stock, and with China’s BYD beating it in the electric car vehicle, he will probably get poorer instead of richer. Sure, he could diversify his portfolio, but the chances that he will generate 400 per cent returns on his other investments over six years seem very low. Likewise, with LMVH’s shares down by 20 per cent over the last six months as China’s luxury bubble bursts, France’s Bernard Arnault, who controls the group, seems unlikely to get five time richer over the next decade. After all, there are only so many people in the world who want to pay €50,000 for a Lady Dior bag, and most of them probably already have one already. Any reading of the history books suggests that most commercial empires peak, and then start to decline. It is unlikely that the current crop will be any different.

But the bigger problem is surely this. What would be wrong with a trillionaire anyway? In a free market, people only get rich by making products that people want. Musk spotted the demand for upscale electric cars quicker than anyone else, while Jeff Bezos spotted the space for a cheap web retailer when the internet was just starting. They created billions for themselves, true, but they created many times that amount of wealth in new products and services for the rest of us. If an entrepreneur has found something for which there is lots and lots of demand, then perhaps that is something to be celebrated instead of condemned. If we had a few more businesses that were that successful, the global economy would be in better shape. And yet that would not suit Oxfam’s ant-business, anti-enterprise agenda – or it seems the Davos crowd who lap up its half-baked reports.