American billionaires have gotten half a trillion richer during the pandemic, but the country's racial wealth gap has grown, too
REUTERS/Aly Song/File Photo; Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for Dropbox; REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne; Taylor Nicole Rogers/Business Insider- American billionaires are now nearly 20% richer — by $565 billion, to be exact — than they were at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new report by the Institute for Policy Studies.
- Six billionaires, including Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Tesla's Elon Musk, and Zoom's Eric Yuan, have seen their net worths grow by more than $2 billion each since March, according to the think tank's analysis of Forbes' Billionaires List.
- The coronavirus crisis has been an economic disaster for the rest of America, as an unprecedented 42.6 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits in the past 11 weeks.
- The job losses have disproportionately affected black Americans, and the country's racial wealth gap has just kept on growing. The Washington Post reports the gap is in many ways unimproved — and in other ways worse — since 1968, when a host of historic civil rights legislation was passed.
- One Citi executive thinks governments may soon consider raising taxes on the ultrawealthy to fund coronavirus relief efforts.
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Source
:https://www.businessinsider.com/billionaires-got-565-billion-richer-during-the-coronavirus-pandemic-2020-6:
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