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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That's four billion per person on average. I think the title should say "The 500 most evil people on earth". No, seriously, hear me out! I know it's stupid and idealist to try to quantify something as vague as evil, but if we're going to use the word at all, than personal wealth beyond a point where it can only be achieved by exploiting millions of people makes a lot of sense.
Stolen surplus value is clearly wasted on any exploiter who didn't do anything to deserve it. But which capitalist is more evil? If your workers have horrible working conditions, that's more evil, right? But it doesn't matter at the billionaire scale, because these investments are so large, they can not be contained within a single workplace or firm or country or continent. They have to spread out and it all evens out more or less. Some of those people might have personally done or said evil things, but it doesn't matter. It's all dwarfed by the huge army of exploited workers, the enormous chunks they keep biting out of our planet destroying the environment, the global war machine they all keep feeding, the systems of bigotry they need to uphold to keep us from banding together to overthrow them...
So, if personal words and actions cease to matter and the "style" of exploitation is all the same on average, than the sum of the extracted surplus value is all that remains to quantify the enormity of a billionaire's evil deeds. If there can even be an objective measure of pure evil, the wealth of billionaires certainly comes pretty close. If we ever have them stand before a court, the judges wont have to debate much and the ruling can be swift. In fact, instead of "the billionaire Elon Musk", we could just say "the evil Elon Musk".
Okay, I just had to get that rant off my chest, but I know, it's not a new idea. A camel goes through the eye of needle and all that...
Oh and remember the profits of last year are the added extra investments of this year on top of the investments that yielded the profits. So they not only quantify past evil, but are also evidence of planned (and ongoing) future expansion of morally abhorrent activities.
Careful what you wish for. That's how you elect someone who loves art, dogs, and their own mother.