The year 2021 smiled in an unprecedented way for billionaires, to collect an additional trillion dollars to their wealth from the madness of stock prices and valuations, and it was a different year, especially for America’s billionaires who turned a large part of their paper profits into reality, after they raised stock prices in an unprecedented way.
The wealth of Tesla CEO Elon Musk reached levels that only John D. Rockefeller, who acquired 90% of production, refining and oil exploration in the United States, until the end of the nineteenth century, and is the founder of Standard Oil, which was divided into 34 companies by court ruling American universities, and all of them are almost the largest in the world to this day and include “Mobil” and “Exxon” before their merger again, “Chevron”, and many other companies.
The year 2021 was not in the name of all billionaires, as it witnessed the rise of many to the top, the bankruptcy of some of them, and the division of the wealth of others.
Archigos Capital CEO Bill Huang lost $20 billion in days, destroying his family’s fortune, while Bill Gates’ fortune was divided between him and his wife Melinda French Gates, after a divorce agreement to join the 500 richest people in the world, while Gates remains among the five grown ups.
as shown China’s billionaires To the scrutiny campaigns, which were a reason to destroy the gains of decades ago for most of them, according to “Bloomberg” and reviewed by “Al Arabiya.net.”
But mostly, it was a good time to be a billionaire, as soaring stock markets and rising valuations for everything from shortcomings to cryptocurrencies and commodities have boosted the collective wealth of the world’s 500 richest people by more than $1 trillion even as the coronavirus pandemic spreads across the globe for a second year.
For the first time in history, the number of billionaires with a fortune of more than $100 billion exceeded about 10 people, while Musk reached the level of wealth, adjusted for inflation, achieved by the richest person in modern history.
The combined net worth of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index now exceeds $8.4 trillion, more than the GDP of any country in the world except for the United States and China.
Meanwhile, the coronavirus pandemic has pushed up to 150 million people around the world into extreme poverty, according to World Bank estimates, a figure likely to increase if inflation continues to rise.
According to Lucas Chancel, co-director of the Global Inequality Laboratory at the Paris School of Economics, since the mid-1990s, the share of wealth held by the world’s richest 0.10% has risen from about 7% to 11%.
Lawmakers’ calls against the wealthy from Washington, Moscow and Beijing, by imposing wealth taxes and closing loopholes in response to public pressure and draining budgets, did not deter that wealth from continuing to grow.
None of these calls succeeded, except in Beijing under the campaign of shared prosperity, where the richest Chinese lost $ 61 billion of their wealth in 2021.
At the end of the year, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index revealed that 42 new members joined the index for the first time, mostly due to initial public offerings.
All in all, it was a year of big swings and huge payments. With valuations rising and caution over potential tax increases, many billionaires are seizing the moment to sell.