Germany’s richest people are indeed very, very rich

Gustav Neustadt

Hi there! I’m Gustav, an interface designer working on design-related issues here at Datawrapper. This week I am taking a look at money and wealth, and the people who have a lot of it.

When I think about the wealth of rich people, I often find it mind-boggling how high some numbers are. I feel the same way when I think about the universe and how big planets, stars, and galaxies are. It’s hard to comprehend the dimensions.

So to get a better understanding of wealth, I created three charts.

In the first one you can see that even the median German citizen with a wealth of around 20k € is barely noticeable compared to the top 0.1%:

Crazy, right? This chart gives us a pretty good picture of the general distribution of wealth in Germany.

But it doesn’t show how ridiculously rich some people are – and thus how big their potential influence on society really is.

To get a feel for the top 20 richest people in Germany, let’s first look at their wealth growth over the past few years. We see that most of the richest people in Germany actually made a profit during the pandemic. This happened all over the world: During the pandemic, a lot of markets went up in value, so rich people who invested in those markets saw a big increase in their wealth.

One example is Klaus-Michael Kühne, who owns a large shipping company. He increased his wealth by 2.9 times in just three years, between 2019 and 2022. The brothers Andreas and Thomas Strüngmann, who are invested in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, each increased their wealth by a factor of 2.7 over the same period.

And even this year, most lines are trending upward, perhaps due to the general rise in the cost of living:

But how rich is that kind of rich?

Even the single-digit billionaires we see at the bottom of the last chart are a far cry from the richest 0.1% of people we met in the first chart. To make this point, let’s combine the numbers from both charts into a third one:

It’s quite impressive for me to see that. It shows how negligible the already quite rich people are compared to the richest of the rich – not to mention how big the difference is compared to a German of average wealth. To put this even more in context: You would have to save €1 every second for the next 1117 years to become as rich as the richest person in Germany.

A path to greater equality

What could reduce such stark inequality? Re-distributing wealth. When I think about the unequal distribution we see in these charts, I’m shocked at how vehemently some politicians these days are agitating against social assistance, like the German “Bürgergeld". The argument for lowering it is to “make savings”, “strengthen work incentives”, and also to prevent exploitation. But many people who live with this financial support have struggled a lot, especially during the pandemic and the inflation of the last few years. The financial support has not been increased enough to compensate for the increased cost of living – and so about 4 million people are still suffering from this situation.

The money needed for welfare could come from taxing the wealthy people more that we’ve met in this article. But by owning this insane amount of wealth, often inherited, they can use their influence to sway public opinion in their favor. There are proposals for a stronger inheritance tax and wealth tax, but many wealthy people frame both as an unfair burden that could fall on ordinary citizens. They fund think tanks, lobby, and donate to pro-wealth parties, to strategically amplify the voices of those who would not be affected by these taxes but fear the potential impact on their wealth. This distracts attention from the reality that these types of taxes are aimed at the ultra-rich. Such manipulation helps to shift the focus away from the critical role that inheritance and wealth taxes could play in reducing wealth inequality.

If you have some time left, check out this project by Matt Korostoff. That wraps it up for this week – thank you for reading. I hope you found this as interesting as I did. We’ll see you next week with a Weekly Chart from Shaylee from our support team.

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Gustav Neustadt

(he/him, @gustavneustadt@vis.social) is an interface designer on Datawrapper's design team. He lives in Potsdam, right outside the gates of Berlin. When he’s not nudging pixels, you can find him out and about with his family, fixing his bike, and tinkering with electronics and code.

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