Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg Creative Photos
- The world is not far off seeing its first trillionaire, Oxfam predicted.
- Oxfam's annual inequality report said the world's five richest men had collectively doubled their wealth since 2020.
- But most people have gotten poorer in that period, the report said.
The world could mint its first trillionaire within a decade as the majority of us gets poorer, according to a new report.
The prediction came in Oxfam's annual inequality report, published on Monday to coincide with the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
The predicted trillionaire would represent an unprecedented high-water mark in levels of global inequality that even now are starker than ever, the report said.
Since 2020, the world's five richest men doubled their combined fortunes, while five billion people, or around 60% of the world's population, got poorer, it said.
The growth in the fortunes of those five — Bernard Arnault and his family, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison, and Elon Musk — can now be measured in millions of dollars per hour, Oxfam said.
Their combined fortunes have gone from "$405 billion to $869 billion since 2020 —at a rate of $14 million per hour," the researchers wrote in a summary.
Oxfam makes regular headlines with its annual wealth inequality report, which in recent years has made some jarring assessments.
"You might think there would be little that could surprise us," Rachel Riddell, a policy lead at the organization, told NPR.
But this time was different, she said. "The astronomical nature of gains at the very top since 2020 — during a time when so many suffered — really stood out."
During the 2020s "the ultra-ultra-rich are pulling away from everyone else," she said.
Jeff Bezos' fortune, for example, has grown by $32.7 billion since 2020, to hit $167.4 billion, Oxfam wrote.
In 2022, the organization made headlines by saying one billionaire had been minted every 30 hours during the pandemic.
Three major factors set this decade off to a difficult start for the majority of the world's population: major conflicts, climate breakdown, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic, the latest report said.
Those contributory factors were exacerbated by corporate tax-dodging, stagnating real-terms wages, the erosion of workers' rights, rampant privatization, and corporate climate denial, it added.
"A huge concentration of global corporate and monopoly power is exacerbating inequality economy-wide," Oxfam said. It called for the strengthening of the state and the regulation of corporate power to address the issues at their roots.
The report's calculations are based on Forbes' "Real-Time Billionaires" list and UBS' Global Wealth Report of 2023.
Its method to calculate the fate of the poorest five billion of us has its critics, however. Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, told NPR that is was potentially misleading to use wealth as the metric to arrive at this number.
The wealth measurement, which subtracts people's debt from whatever they own, doesn't necessarily illustrate poverty in all real-life outcomes, as it could easily reflect someone in a richer country taking on debt to study or take on a mortgage, he said.
However, nobody questions the idea that global poverty is a major issue — according to the World Bank, 700 million people currently live in extreme poverty, around half of them in sub-Saharan Africa.