"The number of billionaires on
Forbes’ 35th annual ranking swelled by 660 to
2,755 — a roughly 30 percent jump from a year ago — and
493 of them are first-timers. Seven of eight are richer than they were before the pandemic."
...
"Dan Romanoff, a Morningstar equity research analyst who covers Amazon, said the company seized 42 percent of the e-commerce as the pandemic fueled a surge in online shopping.
“Amazon had a phenomenal year, from a financial perspective,” he said. “They are pretty much the only game in town.”
The company’s revenue grew nearly 38 percent year-over-year in 2020, according to an earnings
report filed in February, and its stock price has jumped more than 60 percent in the past year. On Tuesday, Amazon closed at $3,223.82, giving the company a market capitalization of $1.6 trillion."
...
"Musk owns 21 percent of Tesla, according to Forbes, which closed Tuesday at $691.62 and has spiked more than 530 percent in the past year. His rocket company, SpaceX, is valued at $74 billion, the report said."
...
"Rounding out the top five are Bernard Arnault ($150 billion), who oversees LVMH, an empire of 70 beauty and luxury fashion brands including Louis Vuitton and Sephora; Bill Gates ($124 billion), the Microsoft founder and co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest private charitable foundation; and Mark Zuckerberg ($97 billion), the CEO and co-founder of Facebook."
...
"As a class,
billionaires added about $8 trillion to their total net worth from last year, totaling $13.1 trillion.
The United States had the most billionaires, at 724, extending a rapid rise in wealth that hasn’t happened since the Rockefellers and the Carnegies roughly a century ago.
China, including Hong Kong and Macao, had the second highest number of billionaires: 698."
...
"Gabriel Zucman, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, said in an email that the explosive acceleration of wealth among the richest of the rich has only
accelerated during the pandemic. “I
n the United States, the top 400 wealthiest Americans now own the equivalent 18% of GDP in wealth, twice as much as in 2010 (9% of GDP). The pandemic has reinforced this trend, with
a boom in top-end wealth despite the decline in economic activity,” he wrote. “
This trend is unlikely to be sustainable: with growing wealth concentration comes a growing concentration of economic and political power in a few hands — a dangerous evolution that governments would be wise to address.”
