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- Florida, Texas, and Utah are the fastest-growing hot spots for America’s multimillionaires.
- California still leads in ultrawealthy residents but lags rivals in the pace of new growth.
- Wealth intelligence firm Altrata says America’s wealth is drifting south and west.
The ranks of America’s ultrawealthy are surging — and the biggest winners aren’t New York or California.
A new report from wealth intelligence firm Altrata released on Tuesday shows that Florida, Texas, and Utah are set to experience the fastest growth in ultra-high-net-worth individuals — those worth more than $30 million — over the next five years.
Florida leads the pack, with its population of the superrich projected to grow 8.8% annually through 2030.
Utah, buoyed by Salt Lake City’s expanding business services sector and status as a luxury winter sports hub, is close behind with 8.1% growth.
Texas, powered by Austin’s booming tech industry and Houston’s energy wealth, rounds up the top three with 7.9% growth.
America’s wealth is drifting south and west
The findings highlight a broad shift underway in America’s wealth map.
While traditional hubs like New York and Los Angeles still dominate in absolute numbers, with 21,380 ultrawealthy residents in New York City and 11,680 in Los Angeles, an increasing share of fortunes is heading south and west.
Altrata’s report cited lower taxes, warmer climates, and expanding finance and tech clusters as helping these states attract both new wealth and families relocated from older centers of influence.
Florida and Texas, in particular, have seen an influx of wealthy individuals and corporations in recent years.
The Sunshine State has emerged as a magnet for hedge fund managers and crypto investors alike, while Miami has established itself as a luxury real estate powerhouse.
Texas has also attracted high-profile names: Elon Musk moved Tesla’s headquarters from California to Austin in 2021, followed by other executives eager to escape the West Coast’s higher costs.
Utah, though smaller in scale, is now gaining attention as a desirable combination of lifestyle and business hub, with Salt Lake City drawing in both entrepreneurs and established fortunes.
California still leads the pack — for now
California remains the largest state for the ultrawealthy by a wide margin, with a superrich population roughly 30% larger than Texas’s.
But the momentum is shifting.
The Altrata report — which bases its estimates on national economic data and a proprietary database of millions of wealthy individuals — suggests that while California is still projected to see “firm” growth in ultrawealthy numbers to 2030 and remain the US state with the biggest population of multimillionaires by far, Florida, Utah, and Texas are set to expand faster.
Florida, in particular, is growing at the fastest clip, while California’s growth lags, even as it continues to hold onto its lead.
For the country’s wealthiest individuals, Miami condos, Austin tech campuses, and ski chalets in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains are increasingly competing with Manhattan penthouses and Silicon Valley estates as the symbols of America’s new elite.
Read the original article on Business Insider
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One of Central Asia’s most engaging new cultural projects took on a new dimension last month. The Silk Road Virtual Museum, an online collection of over 20 exhibitions of pre-16th-century Eurasian life and art, has recently opened a section for the ancient trade route’s maritime history.
An initiative by the Institute of Asian Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands, the site allows visitors to move through themed rooms, just as they would wander through a physical museum. Beginning on a map of the world on the museum’s homepage, visitors click on the Silk Road locations that they wish to discover. Each pin on the map takes them to a video replicating a guided tour of art and artefacts from that place at a certain historical era. Just as in a real museum, each exhibit has an information panel explaining what the object is.
Life on the Central Asian parts of the Silk Road is shown in exhibitions to Sogdian traders in Samarkand (6th-8th centuries), with camels often featuring in their ceramic art, and a room dedicated to ancient caravanserais (inns that provided lodging for travellers), including at Tash Rabat in Kyrgyzstan.
Launched in 2024, the Silk Road Virtual Museum already displays over 1,300 objects in total. Their geographical reach mainly stretches from Venice to China, as the Silk Road is often imagined today – but there are collections from places as unexpected as Sweden and Indonesia.
With the launch of the maritime section on 16 September, their scope now spans seas as well as deserts. Virtual visitors can travel along the coasts of the Indian Ocean, where there are already seven shipwreck exhibitions, each with its own unique story.
The project is managed by VirtualMuseum360 and supported by an international network of scholars, who aim to make the Silk Road’s many eras and strands accessible to people wherever they are in the world. The web pages have two advantages over traditional museums, in that they are free to access and open 24/7.
Leading the Silk Road Virtual Museum (SRVM) is Professor Richard Griffiths, the director of Leiden University’s ‘New Silk Roads’ programme. A distinguished economic historian who has specialised in the history of trade, during a spell teaching in the Chinese city of Chengdu, Griffiths took an interest in China’s Belt and Road Initiative. When he began to trace the policy’s history, he realised that the origins of China’s modern trade with the West can be found in the myths and realities of the ancient Silk Roads.
The key to making SRVM work, he says, is collaboration. Griffiths tells The Times of Central Asia: “We’re not replacing real museums – we’re working alongside them. Everything we do depends on the knowledge of academics, archaeologists, and conservators. Together we can make heritage accessible to anyone, anywhere, without losing its depth or integrity.”
“Our visitors are a real mix,” he adds. “Often people tell me they use SRVM before a trip, so that when they see objects in a real museum, they recognise them and understand them better. Students come to prepare for classes, museum professionals dip in to see how we present things, and there are plenty of curious travellers who just want to explore.”
Griffiths names the museum’s tomb murals as his personal favourite exhibits. “They show life in all its variety, from grand court scenes to the everyday,” he explains. “You see children playing in a kitchen, a woman anxiously waiting behind a door for her husband, even a funeral where the deceased surrounded himself with every auspicious symbol he could think of. They bring the past to life in the most human way.”
One of the scholars involved in building the Silk Road Virtual Museum is historian Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. Frankopan gave a talk at the opening ceremony for the museum’s maritime section, which, fittingly, was held online.
He later told The Times of Central Asia: “This is a terrific opportunity to engage global audiences in the histories of Central Asia and the Silk Roads. One of the things I find so fantastic is that the exhibition is interactive. Another is that it will appeal to both specialists and non-specialists, thanks to the high level of scholarship that underpins not only each individual object but also the collection as a whole. What Richard has done is fantastic.”
The new maritime section will not be the last addition to the Silk Road Virtual Museum, with new online exhibitions already in the works, from India as well as Central Asia. As Griffiths says, “the journey is only just beginning.”
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- Ford CEO Jim Farley expects AI to disrupt blue-collar jobs in both positive and negative ways.
- For example, AI-powered augmented reality is making truck repairs much simpler for technicians.
- Farley’s remarks come as the automotive industry faces a severe shortage of skilled workers.
Artificial intelligence’s impact so far has largely been in the office, but Ford CEO Jim Farley says changes are coming for the service bay, too.
Farley said Tuesday that he expects the disruption to blue-collar jobs to be a mix of “negatives and positives” and that it ultimately depends on how companies manage the shift.
One example: “If you’re repairing a Super Duty,” he said, referring to one of Ford’s pro-grade pickup trucks, “augmented reality AI is a game changer. Just ask my team, they’ll tell you. We need to use AI to make those repairs much simpler for people.”
Farley said diesel technician roles can pay more than $100,000 a year and require at least five years of training.
Farley’s comments came as the automaker convened a summit of CEOs in Detroit to address the widespread shortage of labor in the skilled trades in the US. Automotive trade group Tech Force estimates the US needs more than 100,000 new technician jobs a year to satisfy new demand and replace workers leaving the industry — a figure far higher than the number of people currently preparing for careers in the field.
Farley also said automation and AI will likely cause jobs to disappear across all sectors of the economy, echoing Walmart CEO Doug McMillon’s comments last week.
“It’s very clear that AI is going to change literally every job,” McMillon said at a company workforce event at Walmart’s headquarters in Arkansas, The Wall Street Journal reported.
McMillon and other Walmart executives have said repeatedly that automation would enable the company to grow its sales more quickly on a relatively flat head count.
Farley also said tech companies have an opportunity to help bridge the blue-collar gap.
“When I look at the AI solutions that get pitched to Ford, they’re all about white collar efficiency,” he said. “Very few AI companies come to us and say, ‘We want to dramatically help your efficiency repairing cars or your factory workers.'”
Most of the tech being introduced is intended to eliminate jobs, he said. “Right now, I don’t see a huge focus in the technology sector, on the essential economy, and AI as a tool.”
Read the original article on Business Insider
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