Even with the COVID-19 pandemic, the world’s top ten richest men managed to double their wealth, according to an Oxfam-published report on Monday, ABC News reported.
The report stressed the need for policy change as the pandemic prompted “deadly” inequalities and widened the divide between the rich and the poor.
Between March 2020 and November 2021, the ten wealthiest men have increased their fortune from around $700 billion to $1.5 trillion.
During the same period, around 99 percent of the people suffered from income drop, according to the report, and over 160 million fell into poverty.
Using the real-time data by Forbes’, the advocacy team computed the riches accumulated by the ultra-elite. Included in the top ten richest men are:
· Elon Musk
· Jeff Bezos
· Bernard Arnault and family
· Bill Gates
· Larry Ellison
· Larry Page
· Sergey Brin
· Mark Zuckerberg
· Steve Ballmer
· Warren Buffet
Oxfam mentioned in its methodology that the information on the income drop among the 99 percent of the population was derived from the data of World Bank.
Moreover, the calculation shows that the billionaires’ wealth became even bigger since the health pandemic as compared to the increase it had in the last 14 years.
“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,” Gabriela Bucher, Oxfam International Executive Director, said in Monday’s statement.
She said that if the ten wealthiest people will let go 99 percent of their fortune, they will still be richer as compared to 99 percent of the population worldwide.
The richest people’s wealth depends more on stocks as compared to the less-fortunate ones. The Federal Reserve date shows that 1 percent of the wealthiest households in the U.S. own over 50 percent of the market’s publicly traded stock while the bottom 50 percent of households own less than a percent.
