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Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg were among the billionaires who saw massive wealth gains over the course of the pandemic.

By Sharon Zhang, Truthout

As most of the world’s population suffered under a deadly pandemic, the world’s 10 richest people doubled their wealth while the world’s billionaires added $5 trillion to their collective wealth, a new report by Oxfam finds.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, billionaires have been profiting greatly from the global economy, the report’s authors wrote. Since March 2021, billionaire wealth has risen from an already high $8.6 trillion to $13.8 trillion and previous reports have found that the 10 richest people alone account for hundreds of billions of dollars of that growth in wealth. This is a larger growth in billionaire wealth than that of the last 14 years combined.

Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates stand in front of a backdrop of a burning city

“A new billionaire has been created every 26 hours since the pandemic began,” the report reads. “The world’s 10 richest men have doubled their fortunes, while over 160 million people are projected to have been pushed into poverty.”

The report’s authors wrote that such growing economic inequality is a result of purposeful choices by government officials.

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