By Rachel Clayton for the ABC
Total billionaire wealth grew by $3 trillion last year globally, while Elon Musk remained the world's richest person. Photo: Frederic J. Brown/ AFP
Imagine earning $3.5 million ($US2 million) a day - that was the average daily income for the world's billionaires last year.
For the 10 richest among them, all men, that figure soared to more than $150 million a day.
The figures have been revealed in the latest inequality report from the charity Oxfam, which highlights just how unachievable that sort of wealth is for the average person.
Even if someone had saved $1600 every day since the first humans 315,000 years ago, they would still not have accumulated enough money to crack the top 10.
The report has been released as political and business leaders meet in Davos, Switzerland for the exclusive and high-profile World Economic Forum this week.
The event's guest list - it is invite only - sees high-net worth individuals and influential businesspeople mixing with heads of state, government ministers, economists and academics in the alpine resort village.
Elon Musk remains world's richest person
Globally, total billionaire wealth grew by $3 trillion last year, equivalent to roughly $8.4 billion a day.
That's a rate three times faster than the year before and the second-largest annual increase in billionaire wealth since records began.
Two hundred and four billionaires were created, an average of almost four a week.
The five richest people last year, according to Forbes, were:
- 1. Elon Musk
- 2. Jeff Bezos
- 3. Bernard Arnault and family
- 4. Larry Ellison
- 5. Mark Zuckerberg
"The crown jewel of this oligarchy is a billionaire president, backed and bought by the world's richest man Elon Musk, running the world's largest economy," said Oxfam Australia chief executive Lyn Morgain.
Calls for wealth tax on Australian billionaires
Australia's 47 billionaires make an average A$67,000 an hour, according to the report - a figure 1300 times higher than that of the average Australian worker.
Mining magnate Gina Rinehart remains Australia's richest, and the world's 56th richest, person, with a net worth of A$47.3 billion.
Andrew "Twiggy" Forrest is Australia's second richest, worth A$29.2 billion and real estate developer Harry Triguboff is third, worth A$25.3 billion.
The report finds that last year Australia's total billionaire wealth increased by more than 8 per cent, or A$28 billion, at a rate of A$3.2 million per hour.
Morgain noted the "rampant growth" of billionaires' wealth in Australia "was the legacy of colonisation", with 35 per cent of billionaire wealth inherited.
"There is a relationship between this concentration of wealth and extractive industries in Australia. There's a particular historical context to this in Australia and it's that all our billionaires dug their wealth out of the ground," she said.
"The scale [of wealth] is so great that even if we adopted a 2 to 5 per cent wealth tax in Australia, they would not notice the difference, but the difference to the Australian public would be enormous."
Morgain said historically politicians were extremely reluctant to propose wealth taxes on the super-rich because of a "notion that it wasn't fair to tax people's wealth".
"The premise there was because they earned it, they deserve it and somehow they shouldn't be penalised for that.
"Those beliefs came from a prior economic time and I think these days, many, many Australians are concerned by the fact corporations don't pay tax at the level they do."
But what was once "a fringe socialist proposition" was now "a common conversation", Morgain said.
"Governments have not had an appetite [to tax] because it's seen as a radical proposition. But times have changed enormously and that's been influenced by the cost-of-living crisis."
The rich get richer, the poor stay poor
The latest iteration of the Takers Not Makers report focuses on the ability of the world's wealthiest countries and individuals to continue amassing wealth, often at the expense of the Global South.
"The unearned nature of much of the extreme wealth of the ultra-rich is arguably a result of colonialism and its impacts," the report argues.
"Today most billionaires still live in the rich countries of the Global North, despite these countries being home to just one-fifth of the global population."
The report sheds light on the growing chasm between the world's richest and poorest people.
It references figures from the World Bank showing the number of people living in poverty had barely changed since 1990 at just over 3.5 billion - 44 percent of humanity.
Meanwhile, the richest 1 percent owns 45 percent of the world's wealth.
"Profound inequality between the richest and the rest of society, both between rich nations and the Global South and within countries in the Global South, is the legacy of historical colonialism," the report says.
"In 1820, the furthest back the data goes, the income of the global richest 10 per cent was 18 times higher than the poorest 50 per cent; in 2020, it was 38 times higher."
Oxfam critical of IMF, World Bank
An example given in the report of the legacy of colonisation on global wealth inequality is Haiti.
After slavery was abolished in the country and it became independent from France, Haiti was forced to borrow 150 million francs from France (the equivalent of around $34 billion today) to reimburse slave owners.
Eighty percent of that was paid to the richest enslavers which created "a cycle of debt and disaster that has continued until the present day".
The report also criticises the work of global financing organisations the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
"G7 countries still hold 41 per cent of the votes in the IMF and World Bank despite having less than 10 per cent of the world's population.
"The leaders of the World Bank and the IMF are still decided by the USA and Europe, respectively.
"Similarly, European and other Global North nations hold 47 per cent of the total seats in the UN Security Council despite representing only 17 per cent of the global population."
-ABC
