[ad_1]
-
The wealth of American tycoons topped $ 360 billion during the pandemic, according to the Washington Post.
-
Executives at Oracle and Dell are among the other tech billionaires to have profited from the past year.
-
Their wealth has come under scrutiny amid systemic inequalities in the United States.
The pandemic has been a crisis for many, but not for America’s richest billionaires.
The wealth of nine of the country’s biggest tech titans topped $ 360 billion last year, the Washington Post reported.
The title of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as the richest person in the world has been challenged as Tesla CEO Elon Musk more than quintupled his wealth. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has passed the $ 100 billion mark. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have acquired a combined fortune of $ 65 billion.
Apple’s market capitalization surpassed the $ 2 trillion mark last year, making its CEO, Tim Cook, a billionaire, according to the Washington Post.
Amazon has benefited greatly from people’s online shopping during the pandemic. Consumer demand at the start of the crisis was so high that Amazon and other retailers faced a shortage of items such as toilet paper and sanitizer.
As businesses shifted to remote working models, employees have relied more on cloud computing services, where customers rent data storage from companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.
Google and Facebook also benefited from a rebound in online marketing, as well as the need for sustainable communication tools, which included Google Classroom and Facebook-owned WhatsApp, according to the Washington Post.
Affluent consumers, who were less likely to find themselves unemployed during the pandemic, have benefited from an increase in disposable income by staying at home, helping Tesla shares soar 547% last year.
These tech titans aren’t the only billionaires whose wealth has exploded. According to Yahoo Finance, Oracle executive chairman and chief technical officer Larry Ellison saw his net worth jump from $ 59 billion to $ 90.3 billion last year. The net worth of Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Technologies, rose from $ 22.9 billion to $ 44.4 billion during the same period.
The significant increase in their earnings stands in stark contrast to the economic destruction suffered by millions of Americans as unemployment and evictions soared. This highlighted the deep-rooted societal issues of inequality and the ever-growing wealth gap.
A recent report also showed that US billionaires could fund two-thirds of Biden’s COVID-19 relief program using only the profits generated during the pandemic.
Read the original article on Business Insider
[ad_2]
Source link