Eight People Own as Much Wealth as 3.6 Billion People Combined

Current global population: 7.4 billion people.

I feel like this image says it all:

Oxfam released a report titled “An Economy for the 99 Percent,” which includes this statistic as well as several other disheartening financial stats, like the fact that “Over the next 20 years, 500 people will hand over $2.1 trillion to their heirs — a sum larger than the GDP of India, a country of 1.3 billion people.”

What’s driving this wealth inequality? Capitalism—although it might be more appropriate to say that capitalism enhances this inequality when it could be mitigating it. I’ll quote the report summary again: “While many chief executives, who are often paid in shares, have seen their incomes skyrocket, wages for ordinary workers and producers have barely increased, and in some cases have got worse.”

But let’s get to the information you really want to know: who are the eight men? (Because of course they’re all men.)

The world’s eight richest people have same amount of money as half the world’s poor: Oxfam

The eight billionaires mentioned in the report, according to the Forbes billionaires list published in March 2016, are veteran investor Warren Buffett, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Inditex founder Amancio Ortega, Mexico’s Carlos Slim, Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.

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