The rich have gotten richer during the pandemic, according to a new report — in fact, the world's five richest people have seen their net worth rise by $869 billion.
Oxfam released its report on Sunday, a day before the business elite gathered for a World Economic Forum meeting in the Swiss resort of Davos. The charity analyzed Forbes' list of billionaires in real time at the end of November to calculate the wealth of billionaires, comparing it to the list from March 2020.
Oxfam found that the five richest men saw their wealth rise by 114% between March 2020 and November 2023. Furthermore, the organization said that the net worth of this elite group rose to $869 billion from $405 billion between 2020 and 2023, equivalent to $14 million. Dollars per hour.
“Oxfam’s new report finds an extraordinary concentration of wealth at the top, with the fortunes of the five richest men – all men – more than doubling since 2020,” Abe Maxman, president and CEO of Oxfam America, said in a statement. .
The richest 1% also own 43% of global financial assets, Oxfam said. The share was higher in the Middle East, Asia and Europe, where the rich own more than 47% of the wealth.
Although “the United States is home to the largest number of billionaires on Earth, including Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, names that have become synonymous with extreme wealth,” Maxman added, “it is also home to tens of millions of people who face unnecessary hardship every year.” day”. Today it is a result of abhorrently low wages, an unfair tax code, and poor public services, to name a few.
The group went on to criticize the impact of billionaire wealth on the global economy and democracy.
“No company or individual should have so much power over our economies and our lives — to be clear, no one should have a billion dollars,” Amitabh Behar, interim executive director of Oxfam International, said in a statement.
Billionaires aside, the gap between CEOs and workers alone has widened over the past few decades. Between 1978 and 2022, compensation for top CEOs rose more than 1,200%, compared with a 15.3% rise in compensation for the typical worker, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
“The United States faces a very deep inequality crisis fueled by decades of exploding monopoly power, which is cruelly depriving tens of millions of Americans of their rights and security,” said Nabil Ahmed, director of economic and racial justice at Oxfam America. Market monitoring.
American billionaires in particular are $1.6 trillion richer than they were in 2020, a 46% increase. Oxfam said that the three richest people as of the end of November – Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Ellison – boosted their wealth by 84%.
In contrast, the average real net worth of an American individual rose only 37%, to $192,900, between 2019 and 2022, the latest year for which data is available. This data comes from the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances.
MarketWatch reached out to the three billionaires and their associated companies and did not receive immediate responses.
Oxfam said that Musk's wealth increased by $216.2 billion between 2020 and 2023, an increase of 737% after accounting for inflation. His business empire includes electric car manufacturer TSLA,
Space startup SpaceX and brain chip company Neuralink.
Meanwhile, Oxfam said Bezos' wealth has increased by 24%, or $32.7 billion, since 2020. The Federal Trade Commission and 17 attorneys general have filed a lawsuit against his company, Amazon AMZN,
in September for what they described as unfair and anti-competitive strategies by the company to “illegally maintain its monopoly power.” (Amazon called the FTC's lawsuit “wrong on the facts and the law,” and added, “We look forward to litigating this case in court.”)
Ellison, Chairman, CTO and Co-Founder of software giant Oracle ORCL,
Oxfam said his wealth had increased by 107%, or $75.2 billion, since 2020.
Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont who usually votes with Democrats, has introduced legislation to impose a tax on what he calls “excessive wealth.” In the introduction to the Oxfam report, Sanders wrote of his desire to address the widening gap between the rich, the working class and the poor.
“In the United States, three people have more wealth than the bottom half of society, while more than 60% of workers live paycheck to paycheck,” Sanders said. “Despite massive increases in worker productivity and the explosion in technology, real weekly wages for the average American worker are lower today than they were 50 years ago.”
Meanwhile, “billionaires are getting richer, the working class is struggling, and the poor are living in despair. This is the sorry state of the global economy,” he added.
Opponents of proposals such as wealth taxes say they would be complicated, expensive and possibly unconstitutional. Some US billionaires, including Musk, have also publicly criticized Democrats' wealth tax proposals in recent years.
The Oxfam report also noted that billionaires' wealth is growing at three times the rate of inflation.
The rate of inflation has affected the costs of living of many Americans. The CPI slowed to an annual rate of 3.1%, down from a 40-year high of 9.1% in June 2022, but has yet to fall to the Fed's 2% target. Fed officials expect inflation to slow to 2% by 2025.
The “other big winners” are global companies, some of which are headed by the world's richest men, the report said. Oxfam estimated that the world's largest companies saw their profits increase by 89% between 2021 and 2022.
“The sharp increase in the wealth of billionaires and the rise in the power of corporations and monopolies are closely linked,” the organization added. “The profits of large corporations are in turn used to benefit shareholders, at the expense of workers and ordinary people.”
