Jeff Bezos made $13bn in one day last year; and he’s not the only one getting rich during the Covid crisis. When are they going to be made to give some of it back?
$13,000,000,000. If all those 000s are making your eyes go funny, I’ll spell it out: thirteen billion. That’s how much Jeff Bezos added to his net worth in one day last July after the pandemic caused Amazon’s stock price to surge. Bezos’s $13bn (£10bn) payday set a record for the largest single-day increase in individual wealth ever recorded; however, he was far from the only billionaire getting that corona cash. According to a report by Oxfam, the combined wealth of the world’s 10 richest men has increased by $540bn since March 2020.
How much money is half a trillion dollars? Enough to vaccinate everyone in the world and ensure no one is pushed into poverty by the pandemic, Oxfam’s report, The Inequality Virus, claims. As for Bezos’s billions, Oxfam notes he could have paid all 876,000 Amazon employees a $105,000 bonus in September 2020 and remained just as wealthy as he was pre-pandemic.