Categories: Stories

The 8 people who own the same wealth as the poorest 3.6 billion people

British charity organisation Oxfam has just released a report that shows that eight of the richest people in the world owe the same wealth as the world’s poorest 3.6 billion.

Its report entitled: An economy for  the 99 percent was released yesterday  as political and business leaders of the world met in Davos, Switzerland.

The 8 richest men are:

  • Bill Gates: America founder of Microsoft (net worth $75 billion)
  • Amancio Ortega: Spanish founder of Inditex which owns the Zara fashion chain (net worth $67 billion)
  • Warren Buffett: American CEO and largest shareholder in Berkshire Hathaway (net worth $60.8 billion)
  • Carlos Slim Helu: Mexican owner of Grupo Carso (net worth: $50 billion)
  • Jeff Bezos: American founder, chairman and chief executive of Amazon (net worth: $45.2 billion)
  • Mark Zuckerberg: American chairman, chief executive officer, and co-founder of Facebook (net worth $44.6 billion)
  • Larry Ellison: American co-founder and CEO of Oracle  (net worth $43.6 billion)
  • Michael Bloomberg: American founder, owner and CEO of Bloomberg LP (net worth: $40 billion)

Other interesting tit-bits from the report are:

  • Since 2015, the richest 1% has owned more wealth than the rest of the planet.
  • Over the next 20 years, 500 people will hand over $2.1 trillion to their heirs – a sum larger than the GDP of India, a country of 1.3 billion people.
  • The incomes of the poorest 10% of people increased by less than $3 a year between 1988 and 2011, while the incomes of the richest 1% increased 182 times as much.
  • A FTSE-100 CEO earns as much in a year as 10,000 people in working in garment factories in Bangladesh.
  • In the US, new research by economist Thomas Piketty shows that over the last 30 years the growth in the incomes of the bottom 50% has been zero, whereas incomes of the top 1% have grown 300%.
  • In Vietnam, the country’s richest man earns more in a day than the poorest person earns in 10 years.

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This post was last modified on %s = human-readable time difference 7:44 pm

Charles Rukuni

The Insider is a political and business bulletin about Zimbabwe, edited by Charles Rukuni. Founded in 1990, it was a printed 12-page subscription only newsletter until 2003 when Zimbabwe's hyper-inflation made it impossible to continue printing.

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