A Year of Billionaire Growth
In 2021, billionaires collectively have more money than they’ve ever had – amassing $17 trillion worth among the 2,755 billionaires in the world, according to the Independent. That is a colossal amount of money.
To put that into perspective, the number “17 trillion” is fourteen digits long – it looks like this: 17,000,000,000,000. Over $5 trillion of that was accumulated during the year of the pandemic, the largest year-on-year increase ever; and during that year there were 493 names added to the list, – another record broken.
But where has the wealth come from, who has it, and what has enabled it in the pandemic to thrive while so many people have been furloughed or made redundant?
The billionaire boom has affected all sorts of industries, some pivotal to our lives under lockdown, while others have thrived despite it. From pharmaceuticals to e-cigs, business networking to social networks, there has been growth across the spectrum. Not all of it has been through good virtue, though.
The Good
The light at the end of the tunnel came into view in December 2020, when the first COVID-19 vaccine was administered in the world. After a year of covid-catastrophe, there was something to look forward to, a sure way out of the pandemic.
It makes no surprise, then, that Uğur Şahin, one of the cofounders of BioNTech, who with Pfizer developed the first authorised vaccine for Covid in the world, has joined the billionaire club, with the Turkish physician valued by Forbes at $4 billion.
He is not the only billionaire in the healthcare industry on the rich list, joined by the likes of Stéphane Bancel (valued at $4.3 billion), the CEO of another vaccine developer Moderna; and Sergio Stevanato, the majority stakeholder in Stevanato Group which produces medical glassware, is valued at $1.9 billion.
If you ever had to work from home, there was a high chance you had to “zoom”, or use some other software to connect with your co-workers, which is why the likes of Eric Yuan & Robert Pera have shot up the billionaire list as well. Yuan is the founder and CEO of Zoom, the online conferencing company that has become pivotal for businesses in the social distance pandemic – so much so that his wealth has grown 233% over the past year, and Yuan is now worth $18.3 billion. Pera meanwhile is CEO of Ubiquiti Networks, a wireless broadband company that helped him amass $19.8 billion – a 182.5% increase over the year before.
There are also the likes of social media titans Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey at the top of the pile, as people have had more time than ever before to browse through the likes of Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, or use Whatsapp.
Zuckerberg’s wealth increased by 75% in 2020 to the figure of $95.7 billion, which sits him at fourth among the most valuable people on earth. Dorsey, on the other hand, has a more modest $15 billion valuation, although it is an eye-raising 478% increase in the same period.
The Bad
Jeff Bezos, the most valuable man in the world, made $76 billion in 2020, according to inequality.org, taking him to the dizzy heights of $189.3 billion. Bezos made so much money in the pandemic year that he could give each of his 810,000 US Amazon employees $94,000, and he would still have more money than at the beginning of the Covid pandemic.
There is no shortage of speculations when it comes to how Bezos accumulated his fortune: off of the back of well-documented poor working conditions in his Amazon warehouses and delivery trucks. This included a lack of adequate social distancing and harsh warehouse quotas that have forced workers to forego toilet breaks and urinate in bottles to keep up with the work during the pandemic.
Furthermore, the number two on the list, Elon Musk, has made an enormous leap. His increase of 642% is one of the largest in the year, taking him from a valuation of $24 billion to $182 billion. However, when it comes to the pandemic, Musk has not showered himself in glory.
Instead, he has peddled falsehoods on his Twitter about the virus, such as suggesting it would disappear by April 2020. He even opened his Tesla factory to work again in May 2020, despite Californian state rules, believing that there would be no Covid threat. It appears that there were about four hundred and fifty cases recorded in 2020 in the factory.
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