The world’s richest people saw their wealth increase more than ever in 2025, but a funny thing happened along the way. Many of them seemed to decide that their best prospects for the future don’t lie on the western side of the Atlantic, even though the exceptional performance of U.S. equity markets is driving much of these gains. A growing share of the ultra-elite are quietly voting with their feet against the idea that the American Dream is still worth pursuing in America.
To be sure, North America remains the top investment destination for billionaires surveyed by UBS, but the proportion of ultrawealthy who believe it’s the greatest short-term opportunity for returns dropped from 80% to 63% year over year. And where North America is dipping, other destinations are climbing, with four in 10 billionaires rating Western Europe as the greatest space for opportunity over the next 12 months.
Some high-profile anecdotes show ultrawealthy Americans voting with their feet. Even as the U.S. remains the top investment destination for billionaires’ capital, many of the people who have “made it” are increasingly deciding they do not want to live out their success inside America’s borders.
By choosing a jurisdiction with strict privacy laws and tougher limits on photographing children, Clooney is effectively arbitraging legal regimes the way multinational corporations arbitrage tax codes—only here the protected asset is family life, not corporate profit. His move amounts to a personal hedge against U.S. celebrity culture and, more broadly, a critique of an American Dream that offers visibility as a reward but often delivers surveillance as the cost.
Behind the headlines, data points to a wider, less visible wave of departures. The IRS “Expatriation List,” which tracks mostly high‑net‑worth individuals giving up U.S. citizenship, recorded roughly 4,820 renunciations in 2024—up about 48% from 2023 and the third‑highest annual total on record, with about 21,000 high‑net‑worth Americans renouncing between 2020 and 2024 alone. The only years with higher prominent expat departures were 2016 and 2020, for rather obvious reasons—the first election of Trump and the onset of the COVID pandemic.
UBS finds that billionaire families are becoming more mobile and international, with over a third saying they have relocated at least once and a similar share considering moves, citing a better quality of life, geopolitical concerns, and tax planning. It shows how ultrawealthy families are “becoming increasingly extended and international,” wrote Benjamin Cavalli, head of strategic clients and global connectivity at UBS. “This means they now face an unprecedented set of challenges that span continents, generations, and cultures.”
That mobility underscores a paradox: North America remains the preferred destination for capital, yet for some of the people who own it, the “dream” increasingly seems to require an offshore upgrade in order to protect their children and their peace of mind.
Another aspect of the UBS report suggests the tensions pushing some people to leave are the same thing creating so much wealth in the first place. The U.S. created so much wealth in 2025 that it minted 92 new self-made billionaires, leading the way globally as $179.9 billion of fortunes were created out of the churn of American innovation. Asia-Pacific saw 61 people become billionaires, representing $124.4 billion, and Europe came in last place, with 43 new billionaires and $82.2 billion of wealth.
And regarding long-term investment destinations, billionaires surveyed by UBS found that North America is still the best place for them to generate a return, with 65% seeing it as the top spot, almost unchanged from 2024’s finding of 68%. It suggests that only one region is innovative enough to see the most wealth produced the most quickly, as the wildly popular Irish economics podcaster David McWilliams told Fortune in November.
“This innovative spirit is rooted in American history,” McWilliams said, going all the way back to Alexander Hamilton, as discussed in his 2025 book, The History of Money. In Europe, he said, “the whole idea is you mitigate risk all the time, right? You go to public health, you go to public schools, you get a job, can’t get fired, all that sort of stuff.” Risk, on the other hand, is “the defining psychological state of the American.” The American Dream, in other words, is alive and well, when you look at just how much wealth is being created in the engine room of risk and innovation. It just comes with a big handful of risk.
