According to a survey released on Monday, the world’s ten wealthiest men doubled their fortunes over the first two years of the coronavirus epidemic as poverty and inequality rose.
In a briefing released ahead of a virtual mini-summit of world leaders being hosted under the umbrella of the World Economic Forum, Oxfam claimed the men’s fortune grew from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion, at an average pace of $1.3 billion every day.
The billionaires’ wealth increased more during the epidemic than it did over the preceding 14 years when the world economy was experiencing the worst recession since the 1929 Wall Street Crash, according to Oxfam, a confederation of organisations dedicated to relieving global poverty.
It dubbed this disparity “economic violence,” claiming that it contributes to the deaths of 21,000 people per day owing to a lack of healthcare, gender-based violence, malnutrition, and climate change.
According to the organisation, the epidemic has pushed 160 million people into poverty, with non-white ethnic minorities and women suffering the brunt of the damage as inequality has risen.
The research comes after a December 2021 analysis by the organisation, which revealed that the world’s wealthiest people’s proportion of global wealth increased at an unprecedented rate during the epidemic.
Oxfam called for tax reforms to help save lives by funding global vaccine manufacturing, as well as healthcare, climate adaption, and gender-based violence reduction.
The organisation stated that it based its wealth estimations on the most up-to-date and thorough data sources available, citing the Forbes 2021 Billionaires List as an example.
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, former Microsoft CEOs Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, former Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, US investor Warren Buffet, and Bernard Arnault, the CEO of the French luxury group LVMH, are among the world’s richest men, according to Forbes.