- The wealth of American rulers exceeded more than $ 360 billion during the pandemic, according to The Washington Post.
- Oracle and Dell’s leaders are among the other tech billionaires who benefited last year.
- Their wealth explored amid systemic inequality in the US.
The pandemic was a crisis for many people, but not for America’s richest billionaires.
The wealth of nine of the country’s best tech titans increased to more than $ 360 billion last year, reports The Washington Post.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as the richest person in the world is being challenged because Tesla CEO Elon Musk more than quintupled his wealth and Tesla shares rose 547% last year.
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg exceeded the $ 100 billion mark, while Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin made a combined fortune of $ 65 billion.
Apple’s market capitalization stood above the $ 2 trillion mark last year, which made its CEO, Tim Cook, a billionaire, according to The Washington Post.
Amazon has benefited significantly from people shopping online during the pandemic. The consumer demand at the beginning of the crisis was so great that the company, along with other retailers, was short of supplies such as toilet paper and disinfectant.
As companies have switched to remote work models, employees are relying more heavily on cloud computing services, where customers rent data storage from companies including Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
Google and Facebook have also benefited from a boom in online marketing, as well as a greater demand for reliable communication tools, including Google Classroom and WhatsApp owned by Facebook, according to The Washington Post.
Wealthy consumers, who were less likely to become unemployed during the pandemic, benefited from an increase in disposable income by staying at home.
Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg are not the only billionaires whose wealth has blossomed. According to Yahoo Finance, Oracle and CTO CEO Larry Ellison has raised his net worth over the past year from $ 59 billion to $ 90.3 billion. The net worth of Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell rose from $ 22.9 billion to $ 44.4 billion in the same period.
The significant increase in their profits contrasts sharply with the economic destruction facing millions of Americans as unemployment and evictions skyrocket. It highlighted deep-rooted societal issues of inequality and the ever-growing wealth gap.
A recent report also showed that US billionaires were able to finance two-thirds of Biden’s aid package COVID-19, simply by financing the profits generated during the pandemic.