The 10 richest men in the world more than doubled their money during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, according an Oxfam report.
Their money increased at a rate of $15,000 per second or $1.3 billion per day, growing from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion. On the other hand, the incomes of 99% of the world population fell and over 160 million people have been 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,” Oxfam International’s Executive Director Gabriela Bucher said. “They now have six times more wealth than the poorest 3.1 billion people.”
According to Forbes, the 10 richest people in the world are currently: Elon Musk ($266.5 B), Bernard Arnault & family ($185.6 B), Jeff Bezos ($183.9 B) Bill Gates ($133.3 B), Larry Ellison ($118.1 B), Larry Page ($117.1 B), Warren Buffet ($116.1 B), Mark Zuckerberg ($113.6 B), Sergey Brin ($112.9 B), and Mukesh Ambani ($97.3 B).
Since March 2020, they have seen their fortunes grow $821 billion.
Oxfam says in a new briefing "Inequality Kills," that inequality contributes to the death of at least 21,000 people each day. Their findings are based off of global deaths due to a lack of healthcare, gender-based violence, hunger, and climate breakdown.
“One of the single most powerful tools we have to address this level of egregious and deadly inequality is to tax the rich,” said Abby Maxman, CEO and President of Oxfam America. “Instead of lining the pockets of the ultra-wealthy, we should be investing billions of dollars into our economy, our children and our planet, paving the way for a more equal and sustainable future.”
According to Oxfam, billionaires' wealth "increased more since COVID-19 began than it has 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,” Bucher said. “Vaccines were meant to end this pandemic, yet rich governments allowed pharma billionaires and monopolies to cut off the supply to billions of people. The result is that every kind of inequality imaginable risks rising. The predictability of it is sickening. The consequences of it kill.”
The report also found that women lost an estimated $800 billion in earnings in 2020, and there are 13 million less women in the workforce today than in 2019. Additionally, an estimated 252 men have more wealth than all 1 billion women in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean combined.
The pandemic has had a major impact on people of color, as 3.4 million Black Americans in the United States would be alive today if their life expectancy was the same as a white person.
“Inequality at such pace and scale is happening by choice, not chance,” Bucher said. “Not only have our economic structures made all of us less safe against this pandemic, they are actively enabling those who are already extremely rich and powerful to exploit this crisis for their own profit.”
Oxfam calls for Congress to pass a billionaires' tax that would require them to pay taxes every year on their wealth increases. The 25 richest billionaires in America paid only 3% in income tax between 2014 and 2018, compared to the average American household paying 14% in federal taxes.
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