The world’s five richest men have doubled their fortunes since 2020, according to a new report from the charitable organization Oxfam.
The analysis, released on the eve of the elite World Economic Forum in Davos, found that the wealth of the world’s five richest billionaires has more than doubled since the start of the decade, despite the majority of the world growing poorer.
“We’re witnessing the beginnings of a decade of division, with billions of people shouldering the economic shockwaves of pandemic, inflation and war, while billionaires’ fortunes boom,” said Oxfam International Interim Executive Director Amitabh Behar in a press release. “This inequality is no accident; the billionaire class is ensuring corporations deliver more wealth to them at the expense of everyone else.”
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Oxfam releases a yearly report ahead of Davos, a meeting of governments, major international organizations, and CEOs from 1,000 multinational companies. Last year, the organization found that the world’s richest one percent accumulated nearly two-thirds of the wealth created since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic—an increase of $26 trillion.
This year, the organization found that billionaires were up $3.3 trillion from the start of the decade—an increase three times the rate of inflation. CEO pay in the 350 largest US companies was up a whopping 1,200 percent, and the world’s biggest companies saw a 89 percent jump in profits in 2021 and 2022. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos alone saw his fortune increase by $32.7 billion since the start of the decade.
The wealth increase is also divided among gender and racial lines: Men owned $105 trillion more wealth than women, and the typical Black household in the U.S. had just 15.8 percent the wealth of a typical white household.
Oxfam is an international conglomerate of charities focused on ending global poverty. Its reports have been criticized in the past for taking debt into account in its calculations of the worlds’ poorest individuals, which some experts say is misleading. However, the increase in the fortunes of the super-rich are largely agreed upon.
The organization called on governments to rein in corporate power by capping CEO pay and passing legislation to ensure living wages for workers, and to “embrace and invest in high-quality universal public healthcare and education.”
“Public power can rein in runaway corporate power and inequality—shaping the market to be fairer and free from billionaire control,” Behar said. “Governments must intervene to break up monopolies, empower workers, tax these massive corporate profits and, crucially, invest in a new era of public goods and services.”
