Billionaires profit from COVID-19 disaster

This 28 June 2020 video says about itself:

Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg see wealth ‘surge’ amid coronavirus pandemic: Report

According to a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies, American billionaires have seen their wealth grow over $600 billion dollars since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. Chuck Collins of Institute for Policy Studies joins Yahoo Finance’s The Ticker to discuss.

Translated from Dutch NOS radio today:

Despite the coronavirus crisis, the wealth of more than 2,000 billionaires in the world has continued to rise. They had combined assets of $ 10.2 trillion at the end of July, Swiss bank UBS and accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers report in an annual report on billionaires. This broke the previous record set at the end of 2019 of $ 8.98 trillion.

The billionaires mainly benefited from the higher stock market prices. Billionaires active in healthcare, tech and industry in particular became richer, the researchers report, but real estate also yielded a lot of money.

Most billionaires are in Asia, but American billionaires, such as Amazon‘s Jeff Bezos and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, have the biggest combined wealth.

American billionaires are making money from the pandemic ($1.1 trillion to date) way faster than they can give it away, assuming they even want to give it away. My latest. https://t.co/3DEivYBxZA

— Michael Mechanic (@MichaelMechanic) January 26, 2021