06-08-20
The richest Americans continue to get richer, while 21 million Americans are on unemployment.
As millions of unemployed Americans bear the brunt of economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. billionaires have seen the opposite: a massive accumulation of wealth. The total amount of wealth controlled by U.S. billionaires’ swelled by more than $565 billion since the beginning of the coronavirus crisis.
The latest numbers on billionaire wealth from the Institute for Policy Studies are an update to the progressive think tank’s April Billionaire Bonanza 2020 report, which first highlighted the “pandemic profiteers” who saw their net worths rise as millions of Americans lost their jobs. Just a month after March 18, the date picked by the report as the rough start of the COVID-19 shutdown, when most statewide economic restrictions were in place, the American billionaire’s wealth had already bounced back from the initial stock market crash for a collective gain of $282 billion compared to the beginning of March.
In the 11 weeks after the start of the pandemic, that collective wealth has surged to $565 billion. In the most recent week alone, billionaires saw their wealth jump $79 billion. Collectively, for the group of American billionaires, the report calculates that their May 27 wealth was $3,432,979,108,000. At market close on June 3, their total wealth was $3,512,041,310,000.
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