[Photo: Bill Gates / theatlantic.com]

In “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery,” Dr. Evil announces he is holding the world ransom for $1 million. Having been cryogenically frozen for 30 years, the comic villain created by the actor Mike Myers is shocked to learn that $1 million isn’t a lot of money in 1997. Trying to regain his composure, he ups the ante, saying: “O.K. then, we hold the world ransom for $100 billion.”

Bill Gates alone is just $10 billion shy of Dr. Evil’s ransom demand, according to a soon-to-be-released list of the world’s top 10 billionaires by Wealth-X, a financial research firm. Mr. Gates, the Microsoft founder, tops the list at $89.3 billion, followed by his friend Warren Buffett at $73.5 billion.

The top 10 - nine from the United States, one from Spain - have a combined net worth of $582 billion. While their wealth would certainly be enough to save the world from Dr. Evil, what they do with it in real life is the subject of great interest and debate.

There were 2,473 billionaires in the world, as of Wealth-X’s last count through 2015 - a 6.4% increase in billionaires from the year before. Who these billionaires are and what they’re like can be difficult to discern.

• Many may seem as ordinary as the guy sitting next to you on the train - or in Michael Bloomberg’s case, standing beside you on the subway, when he was mayor of New York. (Mr. Bloomberg is #9 on Wealth-X’s list.)

• There are certainly billionaires who want to save the world, like Mr. Gates, Mr. Buffett and Mr. Bloomberg, who have pledged to give their fortunes away.

• Others in the top 10 are also philanthropic, but they are still focusing on their day jobs, like Jeff Bezos (#4) of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg (#5) of Facebook and Larry Page (#10) of Alphabet (the parent of Google).

• Yet many of the billionaires beyond the top 10 or 20 have a much lower profile. Who outside of finance or hockey knew of Vincent Viola, a former oil trader and current owner of the Florida Panthers, before President Trump nominated him to be secretary of the Army? Now that he has withdrawn, he can return to relative anonymity.

For that matter, Wilbur Ross, Mr. Trump’s choice for commerce secretary, is the wealthiest of the president’s billionaire cabinet picks. He would pop up in the headlines every few years for a deal he was making but then return to what could be called the quiet opulence of the billionaire class.

Yet for most people, billionaires are just wealthy beyond belief. And these days, they are also much wealthier (and getting even more so) than the broader ultra-high-net-worth population.

• That group is defined as anyone with more than $30 million.
• In 2015, there were 212,615 of them. On the lower end, the 155,050 people worth between $30 million and $99 million had a combined $8.4 trillion.
• At the top, the world’s 2,473 billionaires were worth $7.68 trillion.

And the numbers keep rising.