The Trends Journal has extensively covered COVID-19 and its contributions to wealth disparities around the world. Over the past year, the rich got far richer while the poor and middle class have suffered financial hardships.
On 5 January, in our article titled, “RICH GETTING RICHER: MUSK & BEZOS RAKING IT IN,” we reported how Amazon founder Jeff Bezos increased his net worth by $140 billion in 2020. Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, saw his net worth jump by $151 billion. The Washington Post reported at the time that $25 billion would be enough to end all hunger in the U.S. eight times over.
The Post, citing Forbes, reported last Tuesday that the world’s billionaire club grew by nearly a third – to 2,755 – during the year marred by the worldwide outbreak. The report identified 660 newly-minted billionaires. The report also said established billionaires added $8 trillion to their net worth in the past year.
Dan Romanoff, a researcher at Morningstar, told the paper that a surge in online sales contributed to the jump in net worth for Bezos. Many stores across the U.S. were impacted by lockdowns, and customers got used to making purchases with a click – online shoppers turned to Amazon 42 percent of the time. Their stock jumped 60 percent in the last year and is worth $1.6 trillion.
“Amazon had a phenomenal year,” he told the paper. “They are pretty much the only game in town.”
Gabriel Zucman, an economist at U.C. Berkeley, told The Post that the top 400 wealthiest Americans in the U.S. now own the equivalent of 18 percent of the GDP in wealth. In 2010, the same group owned about 9 percent of the GDP in wealth.
“The trend is unlikely to be sustainable,” Zucman told the paper. “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.”
