Rich People

These Eight Billionaires Have As Much Money As Half The World Combined

Running low on cash? Ask one of these people to spot you 20 (thousand).
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Happy Davos Week! Isn’t is great to be rich? As the business elites of the universe gather in Switzerland to discuss the populist backlash sweeping across the Western world, and to ponder whether or not Donald Trump is all their fault, a new Oxfam report reveals that the eight richest people in the world now have about as much wealth as the bottom 50 percent of the global population. If that sounds outrageous to you—Oxfam’s Mark Goldring, for one, says “It is beyond grotesque that a group of men who could easily fit in a single golf buggy own more than the poorest half of humanity”—remember that it could be worse: the octet could be as rich as the top fifty percent of the the world.

The eight billionaires mentioned in the report, according to the Forbes billionaires list published in March 2016, are veteran investor Warren Buffett, Microsoft's Bill Gates, Inditex founder Amancio Ortega, Mexico's Carlos Slim, Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle's Larry Ellison and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The report also hits out at companies for creating an inequity crisis and says business models are increasingly focused on delivering ever-higher returns to wealthy owners and top executives. “Companies are structured to dodge taxes, drive down workers' wages and squeeze producers instead of fairly contributing to an economy that benefits everyone,” the report said.

The inequality crisis has risen up the global agenda recently with U.S. President Barack Obama and the International Monetary Fund among those warning on the issue. The rise of populism and general anti-establishment sentiment has also been attributed to the feeling of rising inequality and the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of few.

In Davos this week, heads of state, bank C.E.O.s, private equity chiefs, and hedge fund managers will hold a bunch of panels to grapple with the possibility that the policies they’ve advocated over the years—globalization, automation, deregulation—may have exacerbated the inequality crisis that spawned, among other things, Brexit and the unexpected political ascent of Donald Trump. And according to Oxfam, things are only going to get worse from here: Over the next twenty years, ”500 people will hand over $2.1 [trillion] to their heirs—a sum larger than the annual GDP of India, a country with 1.3 billion people.”

Of course, not everyone is disturbed by the report, or at least for the reasons you’d expect them to be. Mark Littlewood, the general director of the Institute of Economic Affairs, told the Guardian that income inequality is nothing more than a gentle rising tide, lifting all the world’s many-sized boats. “Once again Oxfam have come out with a report that demonizes capitalism,” Littlewood said, “conveniently skimming over the fact that free markets have helped over 100 million people rise out of poverty in the last year alone.”