Billionaires won't save the art business
Art sellers have more to gain from the barely rich than the mega-rich, data shows
Here’s the good news for the battered and bruised art trade as it staggers back to its corner to recuperate until the next round begins in September: the number of wealthy people is still expanding worldwide, including at the very top of the treasure pile. In theory, that means plenty of opportunities for art sellers to entice new people with pockets deep enough to build collections aimed at long-term value.
But there’s a catch, too. Despite how much we hear about “investment-grade” art and “art as an asset class,” it turns out the richest of the rich still tend not to think about paintings, sculptures, or any other art form as having much financial upside. In fact, a huge portion of them seem not to think about buying art much at all.
Both of these conclusions are backed up by recent studies of international wealth published by UBS. The three reports in question focus on different facets of the (extremely) well-off’s finances, and together they should alert dealers, auction houses, and even art-media members to shift more of their focus away from the louche lives of billionaires and back toward what I’ll call the “barely rich.”
Up, up, and away
Let’s start with the positives. The core finding of the 2025 UBS Global Wealth Report is that, after a dip in 2022, personal wealth on the planet grew for the second consecutive year in 2024, by around 4.6%. (All data from the study covers last year unless noted otherwise.) Even better, the surge is poised to continue through the rest of the decade, with UBS projecting that personal wealth across regions will increase by more than 20% over the next five years.
Data and visualization by UBS, from the 2025 Global Wealth Report, showing the projected growth in personal wealth worldwide (last column on the right) and by region
The year-over-year uptick was present in all wealth brackets, even after adjusting for inflation. In fact, the group shrinking the fastest worldwide is made up of folks who control less than $10,000 worth of assets, meaning there’s a larger share of people climbing out of poverty than transitioning up and out of any other wealth band.
Encouraging as that is for humanity, people who sell art for a living care about what’s happening at the other end of the wealth distribution. Here too there’s good reason to get revved up. The number of millionaires increased by +1.2% year over year in 2024, with around 680,000 new people graduating to the seven-figure club.1 UBS expects another 5.3 million or so people to join the millionaire ranks by 2029, at which point the number of global millionaires would be up almost +9% versus the end of last year.
The population is expanding even higher up the pyramid of privilege as well. The report identified 2,891 billionaires worldwide in 2024, “a small increase over the year before.” The number of multigenerational billionaires has also increased almost +40% over the past decade, from 582 in 2014 to 805 last year.
No matter what lines you draw to subdivide the galactically rich into smaller groups, the report shows the art trade has no shortage of potential customers to try to either convert into collectors or spur to even bigger spending on pictures. And yet, other recent studies by UBS reveal that the word “potential” is doing a World’s Strongest Man amount of lifting in that previous sentence.
Billionaire buyer barriers
Part of the problem surfaces in the most recent edition of UBS’s Billionaire Ambitions Report, an annual study of individuals worth 10 figures or more published every December.
For our purposes, the key findings in the 2024 report come from a survey of 82 billionaires based in Europe, the US, Hong Kong, and Singapore between June and September of last year. Around 60% of these respondents said they planned to keep their investment exposure to art and antiques “about the same” in the year ahead as in 2024, while another 28% said they would increase their exposure to the category only “slightly.”2
Neither of these data points should feel like a warm blanket to art and antiques sellers after the pronounced chill that blew through the market last year, especially if some of these family offices choose to up their allocation to art by, say, investing in art-backed debt rather than straight-up buying paintings.
An eerily similar majority opinion emerges from UBS’s latest Global Family Office Report, compiled from responses by 317 private entities managing more than $1bn worth of assets controlled by a single rich person or family. The study found that 60% of the surveyed family offices were planning for the amount they allocate to (meaning, spend on) art and antiques to “stay the same” over the next five years. But the most nausea-inducing figure for the high-end art trade is that, over the half-decade to come, 30% of respondents said they “don’t plan on investing in” art and antiques at all.
This is worth underlining: Within UBS’s survey, almost one-third of billionaires’ investment gurus intend to put absolutely nothing—not one lousy dollar!—into art and antiques between now and 2030. Another 60% intend to spend no more on this stuff (proportionally speaking) than they’ve already been spending over a period when the market for art and antiques has, by all accounts, failed to meaningfully expand in real terms since around 2014.
These revelations are all the more sobering given how little progress art and antiques investment made among family offices before most of them decided to put the clamps on. UBS’s survey respondents in the US, Europe*, Latin America, the Middle East, North Asia, and Southeast Asia each allocated no more than 1% of their assets to the category in 2024.3 Even in the US—still by far the largest market for art and antiques worldwide, as well as the region most inclined to invest in alternative assets generally—the only category family offices favored less was gold and precious metals.
Data and visualization by UBS, from the 2025 Global Family Office Report, showing that US family offices allocated only 1% of their assets to art and antiques last year
Related: the next time someone tells you what an exciting investment opportunity art is, please inform them that American family offices are currently just as excited about it as they are about putting their money into bridges, coal, and soybeans. After all, they’ve allocated the same share of their assets (1%) to infrastructure projects and commodities as to art and antiques!
The bonanza of the barely rich
I should emphasize that there’s nuance to all of these findings. A “slight” increase in art investment among 28% of billionaires could add up to a meaningful boost in the market overall. Most family offices that do invest in art are probably focused on blue-chip art and antiques, meaning their strategies only impact the uppermost segments of those markets anyway. Attracting 1% of billionaires’ investable wealth is still an accomplishment for the art and antiques trade relative to where it stood a generation ago. Both the Billionaire Ambitions Report and the Global Family Office Report rely on relatively small sample sizes for the data points I’ve extracted—and investment plans can always change, anyway.
All that said, the trend lines suggest the art market probably shouldn’t be looking to Jeff Bezos and Ken Griffin, let alone a younger generation of billionaires in any sector, for salvation. In fact, UBS’s Global Wealth Report offers some compelling evidence that the most target-rich environment is substantially lower down the financial food chain.
This leads us to what the study refers to as the Everyday Millionaire—or, if you prefer the bank’s slightly tortured acronym, the EMILLI. The label describes someone who controls between $1m and $5m worth of assets. They are, in the context of the art trade, what I referred to at the top of this post as the barely rich, a designation backed up by one of the few entertaining scenes in the massively overrated third season of Succession.
Yet the barely rich have been proliferating like mad around the globe for a quarter-century. Their population has more than quadrupled since 2000, from around 13.3 million to nearly 52 million last year. Just as important, together they now hold an estimated $107 trillion of wealth, a trove within striking distance of the roughly $119 trillion collectively controlled by everyone worth more than $5 million.
Data and visualization by UBS, from the 2025 Global Wealth Report, showing the growth in so-called Everyday Millionaires (gold line on top) vs adults with assets worth more than $5m (brown line on bottom)
Look, any galleries banking on the richest of the rich to singlehandedly elevate their program to a higher plane of profitability are probably already dead—their owners just haven’t admitted it yet. The others shouldn’t need me or UBS’s numbers to recognize the immediate upside in anyone worth a few million bucks.
But the data clarifies something bigger and more vital in the aggregate. It isn’t just that most billionaires are already about as interested in collecting as they’re probably going to get (at least for the foreseeable future). It’s also that there’s nearly as much financial upside for art sellers in pitching to the barely rich, at scale, as there is in pitching to the mega-rich and the medium-rich combined. If that’s not enough incentive to pull the trade’s attention from the summit of wealth back down to earth a little, then it’s bound to keep walking right into more of the same kinds of trouble we’ve seen lately.
For clarity, all the currency-related figures in the report are denominated in USD. Rather than repeatedly subjecting readers to the phrase “dollar millionaires,” which makes me feel like I’m wearing an old-timey accountant’s uniform with a green plastic visor, I’m trusting that anyone else who cares enough about this level of detail to wonder will just read the footnotes (like this one).
For the true detail hounds, the share who intended to “significantly decrease their exposure” to art and antiques (6%) also significantly outnumbered the share who intended to “significantly increase their exposure” (4%).
The study did find that family offices in Switzerland—the only individual country besides the US to get its own data spotlight, presumably since UBS is headquartered there—allocated an unusual 4% to art and antiques, hence my asterisk on Europe above.