Oxfam report
Financial boosters for billionaires: The super-rich are benefiting so much in the pandemic
Tesla boss and Space X founder Elon Musk
© Frederic J. Brown / AFP
The super-rich are getting through the pandemic well: According to Oxfam, the fortunes of the ten richest billionaires alone have doubled since the beginning of the Corona crisis. At the same time, poverty has increased.
While some are struggling to survive, others are constantly advancing into new dimensions of wealth. The corona pandemic has one Oxfam report according to which the global inequality of wealth has increased massively. The ten richest men on the planet alone have more than doubled their wealth since the pandemic began.
According to the evaluation, the assets of the top 10 on the Forbes list rose from 700 billion US dollars (613 billion euros) to 1.5 trillion dollars between March 2020 and November 2021. Elon Musk and Co were getting about $1.3 billion richer every day.
The other billionaires were also doing well financially during the pandemic. The assets of the 2,755 billionaires worldwide increased by five trillion dollars, from $8.6 to $13.8 trillion. “They have increased their wealth more during the pandemic than in the entire fourteen years before – fourteen years that were themselves like a gold rush for the super-rich,” writes Oxfam.
The evaluation is based, among other things, on the data from the Forbes list. The ten richest people on the planet include Tesla boss Elon Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft creators Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, and ex- Oracle boss Larry Ellison, investor Warren Buffett and Bernard Arnault, who runs the French luxury goods group LVMH.
drifting apart of rich and poor
On the other hand, according to Oxfam, global poverty has increased in the Corona crisis. At the beginning of the pandemic, 3.2 billion people would have had to get by on less than $5.5 a day. Today, due to the pandemic, an additional 163 million people live below the poverty line defined by the World Bank.
According to Oxfam, the global drifting apart of rich and poor is mainly due to the fact that the economy in rich countries is recovering faster from the consequences of the pandemic. The aid organization also criticizes that vaccine developers in rich countries make billions while there are not enough vaccines elsewhere.
More inequality in Germany
But even within Germany, Oxfam is seeing a growing wealth gap. The ten richest Germans have increased their wealth by 78 percent since the pandemic began, while the poverty rate has risen. The concentration of wealth, which is already high in comparison to other EU and OECD countries, has increased further.
Oxfam is not a neutral research organization, but an association of aid organizations that fights poverty worldwide. The demands on the German government linked to the report include the introduction of a wealth tax, the suspension of patent protection for Covid-19 vaccines and measures to break the power of large corporations.