The world’s richest people saw their wealth top record levels during the Covid-19 crisis, a new report has found.
A rally in stock prices and gains in technology and healthcare means the wealth of the world’s richest has now broken the $10.2tn (£7.8tn) mark.
The report by UBS and PwC, which covers 2,000 billionaires representing some 98% of the cohort’s total wealth, found billionaire wealth grew by more than a quarter (27.5%) during the early months of the pandemic.
Individuals were not ranked in the report, but Jeff Bezos – Amazon founder and the world’s richest man – saw his wealth surpass $200tn (£152bn) as demand for the site’s services rocketed during the pandemic.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s fortune has nearly quadrupled since the start of 2020, the largest increase in wealth amongst the world’s richest.
The Guardian reported a statement from Josef Stadler, the head of UBS’s global family office department, who said: “Billionaires did extremely well during the Covid crisis, not only [did] they ride the storm to the downside, but also gained up on the upside [as stock markets rebounded].”
Stadler also explained that billionaires were able to take advantage of the crisis due to their “significant risk appetite”, and had the confidence to invest as markets crashed.
But as the rich got ever richer, millions of people worldwide have been plunged into economic uncertainty.
Government data published in mid-September showed nearly 700,000 people had lost their job in the UK alone through the course of the pandemic, and that was with the full furlough scheme still in place.
Meanwhile, the Trussell Trust forecasts that it will give out six emergency food parcels a minute across the UK in the coming months – a 61% increase on October to December last year – and in May the president of the World Bank said 60 million people globally would be pushed into into “extreme poverty” by the pandemic.
The $10.2tn figure identified in the UBS and PwCreport represents a five- to ten-fold rise over the past 25 years, the span covered by the UBS and PwC database, when billionaire wealth stood at just over $1tn (£774bn)
Between April 7 and July 31 this year, billionaires across every industry covered by the study saw their wealth rise by double digits, with billionaires in the technology, healthcare and industrial sectors leading the pack with 36%-44% gains.
The pandemic accelerated a trend of technology and healthcare entrepreneurs, and other business innovators, pulling ahead of their ultra-rich peers.
From 2018 through July 2020, tech billionaires saw their wealth rise 42.5% to $1.8tn (£1,4tn) the report found, while billionaires deriving their fortune from healthcare similarly saw their wealth rise 50.3% during the period to $658.6bn (£510bn)
Just over 200 of those billionaires publicly committed a fraction of this amount – $7.2bn (£5.6bn) – to help tackle the Covid-19 pandemic, the study found, but noted that donations to combat the medical crisis as well as the societal and economic turmoil it caused were likely actually higher.