Fastcompany | The recently released Forbes World’s Billionaires List includes some shocking figures about our tech overlords. At the start of 2020, the tech barons were collectively worth $419 billion. A year later, their wealth had soared to $651 billion—a 56% increase. The hoarding of that wealth harms us all: It distributes resources away from those who need it most and, by allowing the tech barons to influence government policy, corrodes democratic society.
Most of us will never grow our wealth by 56% in a year. But wealth begets wealth. The superrich have access to investments that yield higher returns, the corporations they run pay less and less corporate tax, and as individuals they pay less in income tax than the rest of us.
The barons’ financial advantage over the average person is extraordinary. While their median net worth is $90.2 billion, the net worth of the median white American household is $189,000, while that of Black American families is $24,000. In other words, the median Big Tech billionaire is more than 477,000 times wealthier than the median white American family, and more than 3.7 million times wealthier than the median Black family.
To get a further sense of scale, consider what these billionaires could achieve with their wealth if they decided to. Together, they could:
- End global hunger ($330 billion);
- Eradicate malaria from the face of the earth ($120 billion);
- End homelessness in America ($20 billion);
- Feed the hungry suffering in Yemen’s famine ($4 billion);
- Give everyone in the world access to clean water and sanitation for six years ($22 billion per year); and
- Vaccinate the world from COVID-19 ($25 billion).
With that done, they would still have enough for each of them to take home $2.6 billion. With their spare change, they could each afford to collect the 10 most expensive works of art in the world ($2.3 billion) or take on another pet project, such as saving 520,000 lives by providing critical vaccines to children across the world.
Some may find it unreasonable to ask the Big Tech barons to survive on just $2.6 billion each. After all, the thinking goes, the barons earned that money. But these billionaires could give away $144 billion—more than enough to eradicate malaria on our planet—and still be as rich as they were when the pandemic started in 2020.
While maintaining their 2020 level of wealth, these Big Tech billionaires could start a direct cash transfer campaign and send $1,100 checks to every American family. Or they could send $19 to every person in the world. (That would be far more impactful: 689 million people around the world live on less than $1.90 a day.) Jeff Bezos would still walk away with $113 billion, and Mark Zuckerberg with $54.7 billion.
As long as the tech barons remain in possession of extraordinary concentrations of wealth, that inequity will continue to erode our society’s democracy. At a time when Congress, independent agencies, and state attorneys general are looking to rein in the power of Big Tech, the sheer wealth of these individuals makes it hard to hold them and their corporations accountable.
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