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Meet the EMILLIs, our everyday millionaires. Australia has plenty of them

Meet the EMILLIs, our everyday millionaires. Australia has plenty of them

The Age19-06-2025
It says a lot that economists have created a new term – 'everyday millionaires', or for short, EMILLIs – to describe the rapidly growing number of people whose net wealth sits between $US1 million and $US5million ($1.5 million and $7.7 million).
Of the 60 million EMILLIs worldwide, Australia boasts about 2 million people who own $US1 million or more, which stands to show that while in this cost-of-living crisis we may not feel economically lucky, relative to the rest of the world a lot of us definitely are.
Given our adult population sits at roughly 21 million, about 10 per cent of us are millionaires in US dollar terms, according to the numbers contained in the UBS Global Wealth Report for 2024 published this week.
Looking at the investment bank's global EMILLI rankings, Switzerland and Luxembourg sit at the top, with more than one in seven adults classified as a US dollar millionaire. A further four places on the planet have a ratio of one in 10: Hong Kong, Australia, the United States and the Netherlands.
EMILLIs may not live in mansions, drive Maseratis or jet off to the Maldives. They're more likely the person driving by in his Lexus, the woman walking her Labrador at the park, or your next-door neighbour.
We sit around eighth in the world for the total number of US dollar millionaires, which includes EMILLIs and those even richer, behind the US, China, France, Japan, Germany, the UK and Canada. With their ranks swelling by more than 1000 a day last year, the US now counts nearly 24 million millionaires – about 40 per cent of all millionaires around the world, and four times as many as the runner-up, China.
In terms of individual wealth, we punch well above our weight. Last year, Australia's median personal wealth grew by 11 per cent to $US268,000 ($413,500), ranking us second in the world on this measure. Luxembourg sits in the top spot. In terms of average wealth per adult, Australia came in fifth with $US516,000 ($796,000). Switzerland tops that list, ahead of the US, Hong Kong and Luxembourg.
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THE ECONOMIST: How Artificial Intelligence could create first solo unicorn as it rewrites the startup playbook
THE ECONOMIST: How Artificial Intelligence could create first solo unicorn as it rewrites the startup playbook

West Australian

time12-08-2025

  • West Australian

THE ECONOMIST: How Artificial Intelligence could create first solo unicorn as it rewrites the startup playbook

Sarah Gwilliam is neither a software engineer nor, she confesses, does she 'speak AI'. But after her father died recently she got the spark of an idea for creating a generative artificial-intelligence startup that would help others like her handle their grief and sort out their late loved ones' affairs. Call it wedding planning for funerals. Her firm, Solace, is still more of an early-stage startup than an established business. But besides herself, almost no human being is helping her build it. She has joined an AI-powered incubator, Audos, which decided her idea was promising. Its bots helped to set her up online and on Instagram. If her idea works out, the incubator will not only provide capital; its AI agents will support Ms Gwilliam with product development, sales, marketing and back-office work, all in exchange for a royalty. She does not need staff. In effect, AI helped her co-found the company. 'I can't tell you how empowering it was,' she says. As is its custom, Silicon Valley has already adopted a neologism that describes one-person founders like Ms Gwilliam: they are 'solopreneurs'. In tech circles, there are bets on which of them is likely to create the first single-person unicorn — an unlisted firm worth more than $US1 billion. Some hope that generative AI will make starting a business so cheap and hassle-free that anyone will be able to become an entrepreneur much as anyone can become a YouTuber — a breath of fresh air in America's concentrated business landscape. Whether people like Ms Gwilliam will be able to escape the suffocating grip of the tech giants, however, is another matter. Technological revolutions have a habit of shaking up the way firms do business. The increased importance of machinery combined with the expansion of transport networks in the late 19th century led to the rise of giant corporations. Ronald Coase, a British economist, argued in his 1937 paper The Nature of the Firm that their existence was a testament to the efficiency of consolidating and managing work within the confines of a business, rather than outsourcing activities to the market. That, however, began to change with the rise of digital communications. Not only could companies more easily outsource manufacturing and back-office jobs to low-cost countries. They could also rely on internet platforms like Google for marketing and Amazon Web Services for computing. The rise of AI could well accelerate the trend, as semi-autonomous agents provided by Silicon Valley enable firms to perform the same amount of work with fewer employees. Henrik Werdelin, who co-founded Audos, says that the rise of cloud computing helped him start several new businesses over the past 20 years or so with little more than the swipe of a credit card to get going. He describes AI as the next wave in that 'democratisation'. 'You don't need to code, you don't need to be able to use Photoshop, because you can get AI to help with that.' This, he hopes, will give rise to a flood of startups built by people like Ms Gwilliam with no background in technology but who have identified real problems to solve. Another evangelist is Karim Lakhani of Harvard Business School. It now offers a leadership course for executives in which they use generative AI to build a snack-food company in 90 minutes, using the technology to perform customer research, generate recipes, find suppliers and design packaging. In a recent paper, Mr Lakhani and his co-authors presented a field trial in which 776 professionals at Procter & Gamble, a consumer-goods company, were asked to address a real business need either individually or in two-person teams, with and without using generative-AI tools. It found that AI significantly boosted performance, helping individuals with AI match the performance of teams without it. AI proved to be more of a 'teammate' than a tool. With the era of free money over, founders are eager to find ways to keep costs down. Peter Walker of Carta, which helps startups manage equity ownership, says that founders used to boast about how many employees they had. 'Now it's a badge of honour to say, 'look how few people work for me'.' According to Carta's data, the median period it takes founders to hire their first employee after their startup incorporates has risen from less than six months in 2022 to more than nine months in 2024. Base44, an AI-native coding startup, made headlines recently when it was sold to Wix, a web-development platform, for $US80 million. It had just eight employees. It is early days, of course. For one thing, AI agents are far from foolproof. In June Anthropic, an AI lab, revealed the results of an experiment in which its Claude Sonnet model operated a vending machine at the company's headquarters. The bot's goal was to avoid bankruptcy. It was good at identifying suppliers and adapting to user requests (including hunting for a tungsten cube mischievously requested by one employee). But it ignored lucrative opportunities, hallucinated, offered too many discounts and ultimately failed to make money. Other forces may also get in the way of an AI-infused surge in entrepreneurship. Despite the growth of the internet, social media, software-as-a-service and cloud computing over the past three decades, business formation in America was anaemic until the pandemic — the result in part of an ageing population. That demographic pressure will only intensify. For all the promise of generative AI, it poses problems for entrepreneurs, too. Annabelle Gawer of the University of Surrey notes that although the technology lowers barriers to entry for new businesses, it also makes it easier to quickly copy ideas. Unless a founder has unique expertise in their domain, that may make it harder to sustain a competitive advantage. Moreover, the provision of AI tools is dominated by tech giants and the labs they invest in, such as OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, and Anthropic, backed by Amazon and Google. Ms Gawer draws an analogy with the rise of cloud computing in the 2010s, which those three tech giants dominate. Although that infrastructure has made life easier for startups, it has also left them dependent on the cloud triumvirate, which has been able to capture a good share of the value these firms have generated. Last year the trio's net profits were equivalent to 7 per cent of America's total, up from 2 per cent a decade before. Another galling possibility is that the tech giants could pinch smaller companies' best ideas. For now, Ms Gwilliam of Solace is sanguine. What she calls 'first-mover disadvantage' could be 'a bummer', but it could also validate her idea. 'Maybe they'll come to me and say, 'We want Solace.' And then I'll be, like, 'Great, sold!'' Just like a typical entrepreneur, then.

Australians are pretty rich but there's a catch
Australians are pretty rich but there's a catch

Sydney Morning Herald

time10-08-2025

  • Sydney Morning Herald

Australians are pretty rich but there's a catch

If an outsider ever wanted to understand Australia's deeply ingrained obsession with owning a house, they need look no further than the latest UBS Global Wealth Report. Released last week, it is perhaps the most succinct snapshot of our nation's immediate financial reality, also highlighting three of the country's biggest economic issues. The annual UBS report analyses key financial data from 56 countries, determining net worth by combining financial assets with real assets (savings, stocks and property), and deducting debt. Australia retained its place as the world's second-richest country for median wealth, and fifth for average wealth. Further, 1.9 million Australians maintained their status as millionaires in US dollar terms (at least $1.55 million to their name). All this looks and sounds pretty good, right? This year's median wealth figure of $411,000 is an increase of 6 per cent over last year's $387,176. The only country with a healthier figure is Luxembourg, with $607,000. By this metric, we are significantly better off than New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Canada, France and the United States, among others. Meanwhile, this year's average wealth figure marks an even greater leap, increasing by 17.8 per cent in just 12 months from last year's $807,862 to $952,000. Switzerland, the US, Hong Kong and Luxembourg took out the top spots, but we are still ahead of the UK, France, Canada and New Zealand. Intriguingly, the wealth growth trend in median and average wealth was not evident in the number of Australian millionaires. In fact, that number decreased slightly, from 1.93 million last year. The UBS report simply highlights what many of us already know to be true, which is that if you want to get ahead in Australia, you need to own property. In isolation, that might not seem much of a dip. The UBS report estimates the number of Australians with a personal wealth of $1.55 million or more will grow by more than 20 per cent over the next three years, so there could be roughly 400,000 more millionaires by 2028. Combine the growth in median and average wealth with the dip in the number of millionaires, and the UBS report paints an eerily similar picture to the concerns that were raised when this year's Australian Financial Review Rich List was published.

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