The world may see its first-ever trillionaire within the next 10 years, the anti-poverty group Oxfam said in a report published on Monday, reflecting the increasingly large wealth divide between the few of the world’s richest people and the rest of the population below them.
Oxfam’s report, titled Inequality Inc., paints a bleak picture of a dynamic between the world’s elite and impoverished that has only grown worse since the pandemic started in 2020. Since then, the wealth of the world’s five richest men — Tesla CEO Elon Musk, LVMH founder Bernard Arnault, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, and Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett — ballooned 114 percent, Oxfam said, citing data from Forbes’s real-time billionaires list.
Bezos’s wealth grew the smallest in that time frame at a mere $32.7 billion increase to about $167.4 billion, per the report, while Musk’s increased the most, up to $245.5 billion from $24.6 billion in 2020. The five billionaires‘ total wealth combines to about $869 billion.
Meanwhile five billion other people — a majority of the world’s population — grew poorer since the Covid pandemic, Oxfam said, with the bottom 60 percent of the world’s population losing a total of about $20 billion.
“A huge concentration of global corporate and monopoly power is exacerbating inequality economy-wide,” the report said, calling for heavier government regulation to redistribute wealth. “Seven out of ten of the world’s biggest corporates have either a billionaire CEO or a billionaire as their principal shareholder. Through squeezing workers, dodging tax, privatizing the state and spurring climate breakdown, corporations are driving inequality and acting in the service of delivering ever-greater wealth to their rich owners. To end extreme inequality, governments must radically redistribute the power of billionaires and corporations back to ordinary people.”
In the report’s foreword, Sen. Bernie Sanders wrote that “never before have we seen this unprecedented level of greed, arrogance and irresponsibility on the part of the ruling class.”
“Billionaires become richer, the working class struggles, and the poor live in desperation. That is the unfortunate state of the world economy,” Sanders noted in the report’s foreword. “Here is the simple truth: If we stand together in our common humanity there are enormous opportunities in front of us to create a better life for all.”
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