The world’s ten richest people, including Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos, have seen their collective wealth grow by $500 billion since the beginning of the coronavirus, according to a report.
The report from Oxfam International claimed the business magnates could vaccinate the entire world with what they made in profits last year.
The anti-poverty group took figures from the Forbes 2020 Billionaire List and matched it up against wealth data from Credit Suisse to investigate the coronavirus’s financial impact on the world’s wealthiest.
The organization found that fallout from the virus would lead to the largest increase in global inequality unless governments radically reform their economies.
The report, called “The Inequality Virus,” was meant to be published on the opening day of the World Economic Forum to inform online panels held by political and business leaders this week.
Oxfam said the richest 1,000 people have already regained their losses in the early days of the pandemic due to the rebound in the stock markets. The organization added that the wealthiest people regained their losses within ten months.
Among the wealthy that saw the biggest gains include Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who grew his fortune by $78 billion, Tesla’s Elon Musk, who gained $129 billion, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who doubled his wealth by $45 billion, and Microsoft’s Bill Gates who gained $22 billion.
Yet Oxfam also said it could also take more than a decade for the world’s poorest to recoup their losses.
Even before Oxfam’s report, America’s 614 billionaires were already raking in a collective $931 billion, according to a December USA Today report.