What Power Looks Like

So how does one become a member? As ever, being rich certainly helps. Many superclass members are wealthy, wealthier in relative terms than any elite ever has been. The top 10 percent of all people, for example, now control 85 percent of all wealth on the planet. But wealth is only part of the equation. Power is the other currency of any true elite, and if we want to understand the superclass, we need to look at those who have influence that crosses borders—one of the factors that differentiates them from most of the elites of history, whose influence was predominantly national or even more local in nature. ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson runs operations in 180 countries worldwide, a far cry from the Pennsylvania oil field and U.S. kerosene market roots of the man who founded his company—and set the ball rolling toward the modern multinational—John D. Rockefeller.

That such a group exists is indisputable. It includes the heads of the biggest financial institutions, the 14 families Blankfein joked about, and then some; the top 50 control almost $50 trillion in assets. The heads of the world's biggest corporations are also members; the top 2,000 support perhaps 500 million people, generate almost $30 trillion in sales and have well over $100 trillion in assets. The list also includes top government officials with real cross-border influence: heads of state, of course, leading diplomats and military chiefs, but also central bankers like Geithner and Bernanke, and their counterparts like Chinese Central Bank Gov. Zhou Xiaochuan, reappointed this week, and the other top economic officials responsible for the world's fastest-growing economy and its nearly $1.5 trillion in reserves.

They are joined by media barons like Rupert Murdoch, whose global network of newspapers, Web products, movie studios and TV stations reach hundreds of millions of people every day, or tech entrepreneurs like Facebook wunderkind, 23-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, whose company is redefining what global community means. Alongside them you'll also find those who have different forms of power: religious leaders from the pope to Iran's Ayatollah Khamenei, perhaps the most powerful man in the Middle East today; clerics who have taken to a media pulpit and reach millions around the world daily like Latin America's Luis Palau or the Egyptian "tele-Muslim," former accountant turned religious TV star Amr Khaled. Cultural icons who use their celebrity platforms for activism like Bono and Angelina Jolie would certainly make the list, as would terrorist leaders and others who form a kind of shadow elite, like Osama bin Laden or the recently arrested arms dealer, Russia's Viktor Bout. A growing number of tycoons from emerging markets make the cut: Indian industrialist Ratan Tata, Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, Saudi oil investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, and Chinese real-estate billionaire Yang Huiyan, among others.

One can debate who is in and who is out endlessly. Indeed, given that so much power today is institutional or job related (and thus fleeting), any ranked list is out of date almost as soon as it's finished. Those who would have dropped off the list so far this year include the former heads of big banks who lost their jobs as a result of betting too heavily on subprime loans, including the ex-leaders of Citibank, Merrill Lynch and, as of last week, UBS. This is a very fluid ranking. But for the purposes of trying to understand the nature of today's topmost global elite, working with the above criteria, I have ended up with a core group of somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000 people—meaning that each one is "one in a million."

A glance at this high-powered class illuminates several key trends. Political elites may be the primary powers where national governments remain dominant—in places like China, Russia and much of the Middle East—yet overall, the list reveals a marked shift from public to private power. Globalization and, to a large extent, privatization, has fueled the superclass (and vice versa). In the 1960s, the average international company had 100 subsidiaries; today many number their subsidiaries in the 10,000s. In the 1950s, the big postwar U.S. defense establishment had a budget that was larger than the revenues of all major U.S. companies put together; today, even though the defense budget is larger in real dollar terms, the sales of two major U.S.-based global corporations—Exxon and Wal-Mart—outstrip it by more than 50 percent.

This concentration of wealth and economic influence has translated into a concentration of power, a trend helped by the fact that the power of national governments is on the wane in many parts of the world. The rise of transnational activities (both public and private), a broad move away from state intervention in national markets and the effective reduction in the state's ability to use force due to the awesomely high price of modern warfare, have all contributed to the declining power of the individual nation-state. In turn, those whose organizations are built for global activity, like multinational companies or financial institutions (or terrorist networks or NGOs), have gained a relative advantage over individual governments and governmental organizations. Consider that the Gates Foundation gives about $1.5 billion annually to support global health initiatives—roughly the entire annual budget of the World Health Organization.