There are 2,153 billionaires and they hold more wealth and income than the bottom 60 percent of the world’s population that is, 4.6 billion people. Income inequality in world society in the last two decades has increased incredibly as a result of government policies and free market system. According to recent Comparisun reports, if the system continues in a similar fashion and world economy goes down further because of COVID-19, Jeff Bezos will be world’s first trillionaire by 2026.
Ever since the pandemic has come into limelight and world economies have announced lockdowns, people at the bottom of the economic pyramid have been facing difficulties. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, opened ‘Amazon Relief Fund’ as a result of these difficulties faced by the working-class, including workers at Amazon. He put 25 million dollars from his personal wealth, and asked rest of the United States to donate money for his employees and partners. In other words, the world’s richest man refused to help his employees at a time of crisis, and chose to protect the vulgar amount of money he possesses while asking Americans who were losing their jobs as a result of the lockdown to donate.
Jeff Bezos is the world’s richest man with 112 billion dollars and he couldn’t even spare a billion dollars for the men and women working in his company? Take the example of CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey. He has contributed one billion dollars from the Corona Relief Fund from his net worth of 4.6 billion dollars. Among all the billionaires, he is the only one who has made a substantial contribution to help people across the globe during the world’s worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, during a global pandemic.
While billionaires such as Bill Gates, Mukesh Ambani, Jack Ma and Gautam Adani have made contributions, it is nothing substantial to the proportion of their income. Their contributions during a pandemic have come out as a marketing gimmick to gain public support or to make another gain or both.
Bill Gates is spending millions of dollars on research for building a vaccine that might help him make profits if it is developed later. Another example is Gautam Adani’s contribution to the Indian Prime Minister’s Relief Fund called PM Cares Fund of 15 million dollars. We all know how the contribution of corporate sector to election campaigns in democratic countries help them gain support of the government and its leaders – Adani’s contribution to the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund is because of the support he wishes to gain from the government ruling the country from the Centre.
As noted before, billionaires are contributing to the COVID-19 crisis and their respective country’s economy during these difficult times, but their contribution is minuscule. While people in the world are dying because of the virus, hunger or seeing their economies slip away which will lead to more people losing their jobs eventually – the billionaires are just staking up more money in order to win the race of who will be the world’s richest man?
By Shreya Fotedar