During the Pandemic, a Lot of Billionaires Have Gotten a Lot Richer

According to a new report from Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies’ Program for Inequality, over the last two months, while most of the country has been in lockdown and unemployment has risen to Depression-era rates, many of the United States’s richest people only got richer.

Between March 18th and May 19th, U.S. billionaires saw their wealth grow by a combined $434 billion. A similar report from Inequality.org notes that in the 10 days after that, that wealth grew by another $51 billion. Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg have seen their combined wealth increase over $63 billion in those 10 weeks.

A weird number of people online who have appointed themselves as the defenders of the ultra-wealthy have been quick to point out that in mid-March, the billionaires’ worth would have been unusually low, since that was when the stock market was at its lowest point this year. But the starting date for that tracking isn’t arbitrary, it comes from Forbes’ annual billionaires list. And while pretty much everyone on that list might have been seeing losses at that point, Inequality.org notes that “within weeks … these losses were erased.”

Billionaires have bounced back from the coronavirus’ effect on the economy. The rest of us haven’t been so lucky.

Wednesday night, protests erupted in Minneapolis and other cities across the country in response to the police’s killing of George Floyd. That this study went viral on the same day some of those protesters are facing criticism for looting is not a coincidence and it’s not going unnoticed.

Obviously, these are two very different conversations. But disparities in wealth, respect, safety, and security run through the core of both.

(via CNBC, image: JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images)

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Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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