While workers fight to be paid and treated like the “essential” workforce they are touted to be, the ownership class is making billions on top of billions. CNBC reports that since the public health-driven stay-at-home orders across the country began in the middle of March up until the middle of May, American billionaires have added almost half a trillion more U.S. dollars to their already egregious pile of money.
The list of billionaires adding to their money is topped by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who have added $34.6 billion and $25 billion respectively. In total, America’s billionaires’ wealth grew about 15% while no fewer than 40.5 million American workers filed for unemployment benefits. Maybe there’s a box American workers can check for adding a few billion to their unemployment check?
According to CNBC, which was working off of data from Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies’ program for inequality data, the top billionaire winners during the COVID-19 pandemic are Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, and Larry Ellison. Together they have combined and amassed another $76 billion to add to their collective wealth. Yay! U! S! A! U! S! A! U! S! A! In total, American billionaires added $434 billion. Tesla owner and strange sort of dumb “genius” Elon Musk had the “largest percentage gain of billionaires during the two months, seeing his net worth jump by 48% in the two months to $36 billion.” That jump however, seems to be connected to the enormous incentive package milestones that were preexisting in his agreement with the board of directors at Tesla.
And while CNBC points out that some billionaires—particularly those with heavy hospitality and retail business interests—had lost money, the money lost pales in comparison to their wealth. Ralph Lauren reportedly dropped $100 million and is still worth $5.6 billion. Hotel dude John Pritzler went from about $2.59 billion to $2.56 billion. (I’ll give you a moment to dry your tears.) As with most traditional media outlets—especially one like CNBC, which relies heavily on its business news wing—the attempt at saying some billionaires went up while others went down fails.
Every few weeks or months, billionaires like Bezos offer up some crumbs from their solid gold table and get enough good press to sail into the following few weeks of exploitation and globally detrimental, growing income inequality. To exemplify how much money this billionaire class has, which is difficult to wrap one’s mind around, you could take the $434 billion the richest of the rich have added to their wealth and use it to give every single child, adult, and senior a $1,200 “stimulus” check ... still have almost $50 billion left over.
There are a little over 600 billionaires in America. With that $50 billion, these rich folks could purchase 20 or so Major League Baseball teams, fire everyone, and then pretend they were professional baseball players. Literally.
That’s how much money that is.