cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/16704
Led by Big Tech billionaires including Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and Elon Musk, the world's 500 richest people added a record $2.2 trillion to their collective wealth in 2025, Bloomberg reported as the year ended on Wednesday.
"Obscene greed! While billions of people live in poverty," human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell responded on X—a social media platform now controlled by Musk, the richest person on Earth. "It's why we need a global wealth tax."
Musk—who could become the world's first trillionaire thanks to his new controversial pay package as CEO of Tesla—is one of just eight ultrawealthy individuals who got around a quarter of all the gains recorded by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The others are Amazon founder Bezos and Oracle chairman Ellison, as well as Michael Dell, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg. The previous year, Bloomberg noted, "the same eight billionaires made up 43% of the total gains."
According to Bloomberg, the gains that brought the combined net worth of all 500 people to $11.9 trillion "were turbocharged" by the 2024 election victory of President Donald Trump. The Republican and his relatives were among the "biggest winners" of 2025, gaining at least $282 million, for a net worth of $6.8 billion.
The "winners" also include Musk, who gained $190.3 billion for a net worth of $622.7 billion; Ellison, who gained $57.7 billion for a net worth of $249.8 billion; and Australian mining magnate Gina Rinehart, who gained $12.6 billion for a net worth of $37.7 billion.
After Trump's electoral win, several Big Tech billionaires buddied up to him, with Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai all attending his inauguration. Musk then spent several months spearheading the administration's attack on federal workforce as the de facto leader of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The world’s 500 richest people have total wealth of $11.9tn.Their wealth up by $2.2tn in 2025. 8 billionaires accounting for a 25% of the gains.No one becomes this rich by working.They fund right-wing parties, oppose worker/human rights, cause more pollution than normal people.
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— Prem Sikka (@premnsikka.bsky.social) January 1, 2026 at 3:21 AMSharing the Guardian's coverage of the findings on the social media network Bluesky, British climate scientist Bill McGuire warned that "if the monstrous political-economic system that is tearing our planet, the climate, and its people apart isn't brought to its knees—then humanity will be."
The Guardian pointed to Oxfam International's November statement that $2.2 trillion "would have been more than enough to lift 3.8 billion people out of poverty," which the humanitarian group highlighted ahead of the Group of 20 Summit hosted by South Africa, whose government used its G20 presidency to push for solutions to global inequality.
"Inequality is a deliberate policy choice. Despite record wealth at the top, public wealth is stagnating, even declining, and debt distress is growing," Oxfam executive director Amitabh Behar said at the time. "Inequality rips away life opportunities and rights from the majority of citizens, sparking poverty, hunger, resentment, distrust, and instability."
A June 2024 report from French economist and EU Tax Observatory director Gabriel Zucman—prepared for the G20's Brazilian presidency—estimated that a global 2% minimum tax on the wealth of 3,000 billionaires could generate about $250 billion.
As seven Nobel laureates, including Joseph Stiglitz, noted in a July op-ed published by the French newspaper Le Monde, "By extending this minimum rate to individuals with wealth over $100 million, these sums would increase significantly."
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I'm still shocked by their behavior. They had unlimited wealth already, right? It was first strange to me that people who have less are more concerned with the environment. You'd think people who could afford to sit around and pontificate, especially so in the generous interpretation where they are responsive to the market demands around them, would eventually come to the conclusion that they could receive more cool things/look at more cool things/interact with more cool things from an Earth that's not choking on CO2. To that same end, why wouldn't they be concerned with liberating more Einsteins from sweatshops? You're crystalizing their life work into primarive accumulation of dollars? You don't even need to buy anything with them! Why wouldn't you angel invest in a future where you get to see cooler things created by liberated people? Don't you want to see a thriving open air market? A mountain pass that's not littered? A factory making things you couldn't have imagined yourself? No? You just want to give Israel and OpenAI another couple billion?
What the fuck, why? Is labor discipline that much more important? That sucks for everyone
aside from the pathology of greed (there is no "enough"), any sort of meaningful control over actions to reduce contributions to global warming potential which do not benefit the greater good would completely upend the lifestyles of the wealthy. they are the most outrageous consumers across all categories with no broad, societal benefit.
exotic luxury materials, personal parcel flights, personal assistants stocking multiple homes with perishables that get thrown out, not to mention the cascading impacts of the tribute paid to these parasites through the banking and rentier systems where people work fucked up, extractive jobs just to be able to afford the debt servicing and rents that funnel upward, both as individuals and through corporate bonds and shareholder dividends.
i accept the limitations of carbon footprint as it has been paraded in a "we must all do our part", but when it is used as a lens effectively... well, OxFam released a statement last year.
not only do broke people lack the political power to make structurally necessary changes for a more carbon neutral lifestyle, they don't even need to make those changes! they are already 66%, on the aggregate, under budget. so, the solution is rich people not being allowed to fly so much or just generally burn so much fuel to have all the faraway treats brought rapidly to them. it's also them giving up the profit machine that makes them wealthy, because generally speaking the profit machine is build on desperation and environmental destruction.
this framing (wealth as a factor or carbon footprint) has been around for probably 15 years at least, because i remember seeing it in school. but the fact that inequality is a huge driver/predictor of environmental destruction is simply not allowed to be a topic of discussion, ever.
this is a 1-2 punch the powerful are just not going to accept, because it is existential.