https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-worlds-richest-10-men-doubled-their-fortunes-to-1-5-trillion-during-the-pandemic-says-oxfam-11642426379?siteid=yhoof2
Last Updated: Jan. 17, 2022 at 8:33 a.m. ET
First Published: Jan. 17, 2022 at 8:32 a.m. ET
By Barbara Kollmeyer
The world’s top ten billionaires increased their wealth by $1.3 billion a day, or $15,000 a second, during the global pandemic.
That’s according to a new report from global charity Oxfam International released on Monday, that said those billionaires doubled their fortunes from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion. Over the same timeframe, the incomes of 99% of humanity fell and over 160 million more people were forced into poverty.
“If these ten men were to lose 99.999 percent of their wealth tomorrow, they would still be richer than 99 percent of all the people on this planet,” said Oxfam International’s Executive Director Gabriela Bucher. “They now have six times more wealth than the poorest 3.1 billion people.”
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Forbes lists the top five wealthiest billionaires and their net worth as the following: Tesla TSLA, -1.82% CEO Elon Musk, $268 billion, Amazon’s AMZN, -1.99% founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, $188 billion, LVMH MC, -1.95% Chief Executive Officer Bernarld Arnault and family $187 billion, Microsoft MSFT, -2.43% co-founder Bill Gates, $134 billion and Oracle ORCL, -2.44% co-founder Larry Ellison, $120 billion.
The Oxfam report found that Musk has more wealth than the bottom 40%, some 131 million Americas, while U.S. billionaires own a half billion more wealth than the bottom 60%, or 197.6 million Americans.
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“Billionaires have had a terrific pandemic. Central banks pumped trillions of dollars into financial markets to save the economy, yet much of that has ended up lining the pockets of billionaires riding a stock market boom,” said Bucher.
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Oxfam added that twenty of the richest billionaires are estimated, on average, to be emitting as much as 8,000 times more carbon than the billion poorest people.
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