The combined wealth of America’s billionaires, including Amazon.com Inc founder Jeff Bezos and Facebook Inc CEO Mark Zuckerberg, jumped over 19% or by half a trillion since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, according to a report published by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).
The five wealthiest Americans — Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett and Larry Elison — saw their combined fortune surge by $75.5 billion, or roughly 19 percent. Together, they represent about 21 percent of the total wealth growth of all 600 billionaires in the last two months
During the 11 weeks from March 18, when U.S. lockdowns started, the wealth of America’s richest people surged by over $565 billion, while 42.6 million workers filed for unemployment, the report said.
American billionaires have gotten half a trillion richer during the pandemic, but the country’s racial wealth gap has grown, too
American billionaires are now nearly 20% richer by $565 billion, to be exact than they were at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new report by the Institute for Policy Studies .
Six billionaires, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Tesla’s Elon Musk, and Zoom’s Eric Yuan, have seen their net worths grow by more than $2 billion each since March, according to the think tank’s analysis of Forbes’ Billionaires List.
The coronavirus crisis has been an economic disaster for the rest of America, as an unprecedented 42.6 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits in the past 11 weeks.
The job losses have disproportionately affected black Americans , and the country’s racial wealth g has just kept on growing. The Washington Post reports the gap is in many ways unimproved and in other ways worse since 1968, when a host of historic civil rights legislation was passed.
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A surge in the stock prices of companies developing COVID-19 vaccines, treatments and testing kits has minted at least one new billionaire and boosted the fortunes of nine members of the three-comma-club.
After the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on March 11, stock markets collapsed around the globe and the Dow recorded its worst sell-off since 1987. While markets have rebounded somewhat, one group of companies never got hit and have instead steadily risen: publicly traded healthcare outfits hard at work on vaccines, treatments and testing kits. Shares of these companies, which are doing work desperately needed to defeat the virus, have seen a remarkable surge in the past seven weeks — creating a new billionaire and boosting the fortunes of at least nine more.
The most notable winner is new billionaire Stéphane Bancel, the CEO of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Moderna, which was the first company to begin human trials of a COVID-19 vaccine on March 16 in Seattle. When the WHO declared a pandemic, Bancel’s estimated net worth was some $720 million. Since then, Moderna’s stock has rallied more than 103%, lifting his fortune to an estimated $1.5 billion. A French citizen, Bancel first joined the billionaire ranks on April 2, when Moderna’s stock rose on the news that the firm was planning to begin phase two trials of its vaccine.
Getting Rich Off The Pandemic
These ten healthcare billionaires have collectively gained more than $7 billion since the WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on March 11.
Bancel is the biggest gainer in percentage terms, with his net worth rising 109% in the past seven weeks. In a distant second is serial entrepreneur Gustavo Denegri, whose net worth increased by 32%, or $1.1 billion, thanks to his 45% stake in Italian biotech outfit DiaSorin.
The biggest dollar gainers have been French billionaire Alain Mérieux, founder of diagnostic test maker BioMérieux (where Moderna’s Bancel was CEO until 2011), and Seo Jung-Jin, CEO of South Korean biopharmaceutical firm Celltrion, who are both about $1.5 billion richer since March 11. BioMérieux and DiaSorin are key players in the race to expand testing for COVID-19; both firms released diagnostic kits for the disease in late March.
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