The world’s billionaires became $ 1 trillion richer in 2021

The world’s richest people, whose fortunes already strained understanding, collectively made $ 1 trillion last year, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Elon Musk alone, the world’s richest person, made nearly $ 118 billion in the last 12 months alone. Meanwhile, the United Nations estimated that 150 million people fell into poverty in 2021.

Other big winners in the billionaire pool: luxury goods mogul Bernard Arnault (up to $ 62.7 billion) and Google colleagues Larry Page and Sergey Brin (up to $ 47 billion and $ 45 billion, respectively). Mark Zuckerberg’s year was the subject of the tech titan’s nightmares, but he’s still around $ 25 billion richer for it.

While 2021 may be remembered as the year of the worker, thanks to rising wages and renewed organizing efforts fueled by a tight labor market, the astronomical gains of 0.001% globally underscore the huge wealth gap between workers and the executives and shareholders they serve.

For the umpteenth year in a row, 2021 was a good time to be rich. Time and again, Wall Street ignored concerns about inflation, supply chain bottlenecks, and new covid-19 variants to keep stock markets going. On that front, the wealthy owe a big hat to the Federal Reserve, which poured tens of billions of dollars into financial markets each month while keeping interest rates near zero, an ultra-lax monetary policy designed to keep cash in check. Movement in financial markets as the pandemic rocked the global economy in 2020. That stimulus effort fueled a stock market bonanza in 2020 and 2021, but the Fed’s gold mine will disappear in the first half of this year.

The S&P 500 gained nearly 27% last year, while the Dow Jones gained about 19% and the Nasdaq ended the year up 21%.

Valuations of other assets such as cryptocurrencies, commodities and property also soared, further bolstering the coffers of the super-rich.

According to Bloomberg, the combined net worth of the 500 people in its billionaires index now exceeds $ 8.4 trillion. That’s more than the gross domestic product of any country on the planet except the United States and China.

Throughout the year, US lawmakers’ proposals for a billionaires tax were ridiculed, unsurprisingly, by billionaires like Musk. The chief executive of Tesla, who has paid little or no income tax in recent years and whose now trillion-dollar car company was built in part with government help, has especially voiced his opposition to a Taxing the Super-Rich to Fund a Stronger Social Safety Net in America.

Since the pandemic began, American billionaires have seen their collective fortunes skyrocket more than 70% to more than $ 5 trillion, according to a report by Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies Program on Inequality, which analyzed data. from Forbes.

Democrats argue that the windfall of billionaires over the past two years would be enough to pay for President Joe Biden’s social infrastructure plan. But the multibillion-dollar tax bill was dead upon its arrival this fall when Senator Joe Manchin raised concerns about penalizing “the people in the stratosphere.”