Please note, the following information about billionaires is based on the Forbes list of billionaires, which excludes royal families, dictators and whomever else they choose to leave out for whatever reason – heck, we wouldn’t be in the unfair society we are in now if there weren’t so many secrets around money, as we highlighted last year in our article about the $12 trillion dollar tax havens. However, whilst the list of billionaires is not the whole truth, it does show a clear overall trend. So let’s dissect the data for a minute to see what is happening, and where we might be heading.

Hint: don’t get your hopes up.

There are many different ways to evaluate the statistics on billionaires, to keep things simple we will cover a couple of the most obvious – quantity and total value. That is, how many billionaires there are, and what is their total wealth. We can assume that they are are both on the increase, as in all of our lifetimes, overall, the richer have only ever got richer, the stock market has only ever gone up over time, house prices have over ever risen in price, land prices and so on, then on top of that globalisation and technology have increased the ability to trade internationally at higher margins when mass-produced, and so it would hardly be surprising if both of these data points went up.

What might surprise you though, is the pace and scale.

It is rising exponentially. We hear this word a lot nowadays, exponential - it means that not only is something increasing, but the rate at which it is increasing, is itself ever-increasing. So the rate at which billionaires were made 10 years ago is higher than was 100 years ago, it was higher last year than it was 10 years ago. Same goes for the wealth accumulated by billionaires.

Infact the combined wealth of billionaires was its highest ever in 2021, rising a record-breaking $5 trillion in a single year. Or to put it another way, the combined wealth of billionaires increased last year by more than double the GDP of the UK!

How the f**k is this acceptable? This is the biggest immorality in history and worse than any war where millions died, because right now billions of people are suffering daily because of this massive injustice.

And anyone who says the billionaires “deserve it because they worked hard” or “we wouldn’t have these wonderful companies without them” can go f**k themselves. This is a total fallacy. Working hard has NOTHING to do with the amount of money you have, or else people who do 80+ hour weeks and worked 3 jobs would all be billionaires too. Every nurse doing a double shift would be a billionaire, every teacher marking late into the night, every warehouse worker or delivery driver doing 14 hour shifts. And there is no reason why the companies wouldn’t exist without such extreme wealth, the best companies are run by passion, not profit. Companies that are run purely for profit are bad for the planet, and bad for society, so we are better off without them anyway.

Profit should not come before all else: businesses should exist to serve, not enslave; to provide for, not divide; to be sincere, not sin.

And does anyone REALLY think that these tech entrepreneurs or oil barons and so on wouldn’t do it if they only earnt $100 million instead of $100 billion? Of course they would, they’d still be stinking-rich and my inclination is that more people would would do things that they felt had a purpose or that they enjoyed, more so than just doing something to make a quick buck. Without the incentive of ever-more money, there would probably be much less shite on sale and better quality offerings. Not to mention less corruption, lobbying and privatisation of parts of society where it is not adding any benefit, merely ransacking it for more profit, at the direct expense of the society.

Ok, so let’s break down the data. In the year 2000, the dot com bubble burst and the everyone thought it was the end of cheap and easy billionaires and their total net wealth was less than $1 trillion in total, a measly $0.89 trillion… so what happened the following year after all this panic, well there was an increase in the number of billionaires and their total wealth doubled to £1.9 trillion. At the start of the next decade, in 2010, there were double the number of billionaires than in 2000 and quadruple the net wealth at $3.5 trillion.

Ok, but we have been living through government enforced pandemics now… so surely this would bring down the number or wealth of billionaires, right? We have all been suffering together… right? Well, all of the smaller companies are told to close and the largest companies left to trade to keep us ticking over… the governments borrow money and give it to people on furlough… but where does this money go? Well, considering people are bored and can only really spend their money with the bigger companies which are allowed to continue trading… so it is no surprise that they all got much richer. Smaller companies fail and are bought out on the cheap and/or their market share taken over by a larger company. This pandemic has only led to even more growth of the already gargantuan behemoths feasting lavishly like a king at a banquet, while leaving the rest of us with scraps.

Infact, last year in 2021, over 85% of the billionaires increased their wealth. Massively, by over 60% from the previous year, or just over $5 trillion! The combined wealth of billionaires was less than 1 trillion in 2000, in 2021 it was $13.1 trillion, just shy of the GDP of the EU and over 60% of the GDP of the US! And remember, the Forbes list does not include all billionaires – which means that the total share of the money pie held by a minuscule number of people, is even more disproportionate than even this shocking data shows.

To get an idea of how fast this is increasing in recent years, Bill Gates was the richest man for 18 years in a row until 2017, but he never once topped the $100 billion mark. In 2021, he increased his wealth from $98 billion to $124 billion. He made around 25% more in 1 year of a pandemic than he had managed in the previous 20 years. And he is only 4th highest on the list, Jeff Bezos tops the list at a gut-wrenching $177 billion.

If we take 10th place on the Forbes billionaire’s list, we can see that wealth has increased across the board for the world’s most selfish people. In 1987, Keizo Saji ranked in 10th place with $4 billion, in 1997 it was Tsai Wanlin with $11.3 billion, in 2007, David Thompson hits 10th spot with $22 billion and in 2017 it was Michael Bloomberg sitting on a whopping $47.5 billion. In 2021, 10th place was held by Mukesh Ambani with a ridiculous $84.5 billion, taking only 4 years for the 10th place to double its net wealth.

At least a billion of the world’s population live in extreme poverty on under $1 per day, or $365 per year.  There were 2,755 billionaires in 2021, which if we divided all of their wealth, we could give the poorest billion people on this planet $13,000 each. More than half of the world’s population live on less than $10 a day, the billionaires could give them all a year’s wage. If we divide $13.1 trillion between the 2,755 billionaires, we get an average of $4.75 billion each.

With the $13.1 trillion, they could give just shy of 7.2 billion people (7,178,082,191) $5 per day, or $1,825 per year, bringing the entire world out of poverty. Or even more shocking is that just with the difference from 2020 to 2021, $5 trillion, they could give 2,739,726,027 (2.7 billion) people $5 per day, or $1,825 per year, bringing almost 3 billion people out of poverty. Yes, you read that correctly, purely with the additional profit 2,755 people made in 2021, they could practically wipe out child hunger and poverty.

On average the 2,755 billionaires have the ability to help just over 1 million people each. Jeff Bezos could help out well over 30 million people on his own, infact he could give almost 7 million people $25,000 dollars each, have no money left and at the rate he is going still be a billionaire by the end of the week!

The billionaires could give every child on earth food and water and shelter and still all be billionaires. There are just no excuses for children, or anyone or anything else on this Earth for that matter, living in squaller while a few people live so decadently. People in the future will surely be looking back at this time in absolute utter disgust at the hoarding billionaires self-imposed power via 0’s and 1’s, all while children around the world die, often directly at the expense of profit.

The problems that exist in the world, which are mostly because of money, do not need to exist. The problem is not that there isn’t enough money, the problem is a few people are very greedy. $12 trillion in tax havens, $13 trillion in just 2,755 people’s pockets, that’s more than enough to solve pretty much any problem, even climate change was only predicted to cost around $30 trillion, this village’s worth of people could enable it. The unfairness is painfully disgusting on every level. 99% of people either live on less than $5 per day or is in debt and therefore have negative wealth.

Modern capitalism is broken.

No other time in history have so few caused harm to so many. But because the crime is hoarding money, not the physical assault of someone, in this capitalist society it goes unnoticed, or put down to “it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there”. It gets rewarded, but it should be punished! Why is “well that’s capitalism” always the response to this massive unfairness in the world? If “this” is capitalism, then it is entirely broken and the few people who are hoarding at the expense of the many starving should be at the very least ashamed, but better still they should be shame, removed and their wealth redistributed.

Why does capitalism have no limits, when we live in a society filled with rules and limits. Yet the limit of money is the one thing that escapes it. It is immoral is so many ways. Limit the amount of wealth people can hold and close all loopholes to it. Globally. Before we burn our planet to the ground through greed. At least any more so than we have already.

And to anyone who says we wouldn’t have these wonderful companies and technologies without the billionaires, remember the vast majority of these companies weren’t built on their owner’s wealth, they were built first AND THEN the owners got rich. The ones that were built on wealth and debt, are built solely for profit and end up detrimental to society, not benefitting it – such as Uber which hires people on 0 hour contracts, Amazon which ran at a loss for decades in order to price everyone else out of the market or Facebook which also ran at a loss of billions for years in order to assert dominance – and is now both simultaneously creating echo-chambers for sections of society, while also censoring anything that they disagree with. And some of the billionaires have done nothing of any real worth and just either made money from money, by being rich and able to buy struggling businesses on the cheap, from inheritance, from under-paying their staff, from government-support, stealing pension pots and digging up and selling the Earth at profit for themselves when it is owned by everyone. Not all billionaires add value to the world. Most devalue it. And the majority of the people working for these companies and actually making and doing things day to day are not the billionaires, the ordinary working people who are the bloodline of these companies are not the ones are are benefitting, it is the owners and shareholders.

The world does NOT NEED billionaires, it has them at the direct expense of billions of people. Good things can happen and do happen every day without billionaires. No Nobel prize winners have been, or have even become, billionaires. And if you want to say how brilliant new technology companies are and have changed our lives, well Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Larry Page and so on…. None of these were billionaires when they started! And we are absolutely certain they would still have started the companies and done the same even if they would of earned less money. Mother Teresa, Ghandi, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, volunteers, nurses, first-responders, teachers and so on… none of these were or are even close to being billionaires, nor would they ever choose to be when there is so much suffering in the world. At this level of wealth, there comes with it a responsibility for the citizens of the world, and that means sharing and not hoarding.

Most billionaires could bring entire countries out of poverty on their own. So why don’t they? There is only one explanation for this, they are selfish and lack empathy, they are broken, just like our capitalist system.