Just eight billionaires accounted for a quarter of the gains, led by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison and Larry Page

The richest 500 individuals in the world added a record $2.2tn to their wealth in 2025, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with just eight billionaires accounting for a quarter of the gains.

The gains increased their collective net worth to $11.9tn, bolstered by billionaire Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory and booming markets in cryptocurrencies, equities and metals.

Around a quarter of the gains were attributed to eight billionaires, including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Oracle chair Larry Ellison and Alphabet Inc co-founder Larry Page, though 2024 saw more concentrated net worth gains with the same eight billionaires making up 43% of total net worth gains for the wealthiest 500 individuals in the world.

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    9
    ·
    9 hours ago

    So when are we finally going to stop this, stop the billionaires?

    We need laws that put hard caps on ownership and personal wealth. Nobody should be able to have a net worth of over, say, 10 million dollars. Any income over that should be taxed 100% until the person goes below the 10 million line

    We done even need different economic systems, capitalism works well to generate wealth, that is fine, we just need to put rules on where that wealth goes.

    With taxes, that is a simple fix.

    Imagine if you will, if nobody can be worth over 10M, and companies het similarly capped at, say, 1 billion.

    You have a company worth 1 billion? You can’t have a single owner because of the 10M cap. You’ll end up with many ay more smaller companies or bigger companies with loads of small share holders. Companies can compete and grow but the perverse incentives of endless growth would be gone. Companies can finally focus on the end consumers again, and make better products

    Meanwhile governments get a huge tax influx, that can be used to fund independent investment foundations that help new startups with funding and professional help to get your new company started

    That tax money could be used as well to fund free healthcare, free education, maybe even universal income. We could eradicate the poor.

    People could stop focusing on survival and start focusing on living and loving.

    I dunno, there are loads of details missing, of course, but this sounds like something doable.