Bezos, Zuckerberg and Musk made US$115 billion this year, increasing their wealth as Covid-19 drives more people online
- Five of the largest US tech companies – Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, and Microsoft – have market values equivalent to about 30 per cent of US gross domestic product, almost double what they were at the end of 2018
- The collective wealth of tech billionaires in Bloomberg’s ranking of the world’s 500 richest people has nearly doubled since 2016, from US$751 billion to US$1.4 trillion today
The message from his personal fortune: Oh yes it is.
As Bezos and three other technology magnates prepare to defend their businesses at a Congressional hearing on antitrust worries Wednesday, their fast-growing wealth provides a breathtaking measure of their companies’ economic might. The Amazon.com founder has seen his net worth soar by US$63.6 billion this year. On one day this month, it leapt an unprecedented US$13 billion. The world’s richest man is now on the cusp of another record: a fortune exceeding US$200 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The mind-boggling accumulation of money under way in technology is unrivalled in speed and scale. No other group of executives has prospered to such a degree. Indeed, the world’s richest people are growing even richer, even faster, as the coronavirus pandemic upends the global economy and drives ever more activity online.
“We moved the bricks-and-mortar economy to an online economy dramatically,” said Luigi Zingales, a finance professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. “Probably the same thing would have happened in a longer period of time. Now it’s happening in weeks instead of years.”