Rights group Oxfam, which released its annual inequality report on the first day of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, said that fortunes of five richest men have more than doubled since 2020. The report pointed out that the world could have its first-ever trillionaire in just a decade while it would take more than two centuries to end poverty.
According to Oxfam report, seven of 10 of the world's biggest corporations have a billionaire as a CEO, or principal shareholder. It also said noted that 148 top corporations made $1.8 trillion in profits, 52 per cent up on three-year average, and dished out huge payouts to rich shareholders, while hundreds of millions faced cuts in real-term pay.
Oxfam called for a new era of public action, including public services, corporate regulation, breaking up monopolies and enacting permanent wealth and excess profit taxes.
The world's five richest men have more than doubled their fortunes from $405 billion to $869 billion since 2020 "at a rate of $14 million per hour", while nearly five billion people have already been made poorer in this "decade of division", said the Oxfam report on inequality and global corporate power. "If current trends continue, the world will have its first trillionaire within a decade but poverty won't be eradicated for another 229 years," it said.
The top 5 richest persons featured in the Oxfam report.
Bernard Arnault
Bernard Arnault (net worth: $191.3bn) is the world’s second richest man and presides over Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton (LVMH), the world’s largest luxury goods empire, which holds a reported 22 per cent of the global luxury market. Arnault not only collects exclusive properties on the Champs-Élysées, but media houses too, including France’s biggest media outlet, Les Echos, and Le Parisien, a newspaper widely read by the working classes. LVMH has been fined by France’s anti-trust body for anti-competitive practices.
Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos (net worth: $167.4bn) built the Amazon ‘empire’ – that now spans from producing television series to being the world’s largest provider of computing services – by positioning the company at the ‘center of ecommerce’ and cultivating reliance on Amazon across markets, using its scale to set pricing.
Aliko Dangote
Aliko Dangote (net worth: $10.5bn) is Africa’s richest person and holds a ‘near-monopoly’ on cement in Nigeria and market power Africa-wide.204 Dangote Cement has enjoyed some of the world’s highest profit margins on cement (45 per cent), while paying a tax rate of 1 per cent over 15 years. World Bank data has in the past shown that Africans pay more than others worldwide for cement. Dangote is now expanding his empire into oil, raising concerns about a new private monopoly.
Julio Ponce Lerou
Julio Ponce Lerou (net worth: $2.5bn), Chile’s second richest man and the former son-in-law of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, is described as the ‘Lithium King’ due to his ownership stake in SQM, the world’s second largest lithium-mining firm. SQM was privatised by Pinochet in the 1980s. The Chilean government plans to bring lithium under greater state control.
Masayoshi Son
Masayoshi Son (net worth: $22.5bn) runs Japanese investment giant Softbank, which has been described as a ‘monopoly manufacturing machine’. Firms under its ownership include Arm, which holds a 99 per cent market share on designs of chips found in smartphones.
On the other hand, Oxfam in its report, titled 'Inequality Inc.', said seven of ten of the world's biggest corporations have a billionaire as CEO, or principal shareholder, and these corporations are worth $10.2 trillion, equivalent to more than the combined GDPs of all countries in Africa and Latin America.
"We are witnessing the beginnings of a decade of division, with billions of people shouldering the economic shockwaves of pandemic, inflation and war, while billionaires' fortunes boom. This inequality is no accident; the billionaire class is ensuring corporations deliver more wealth to them at the expense of everyone else," Oxfam International interim Executive Director Amitabh Behar said.
Despite representing just 21 per cent of the global population, rich countries in the Global North own 69 per cent of global wealth and are home to 74 per cent of the world's billionaire wealth, Oxfam added.