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.”
From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.
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.
The richest 1 percent have burned through their share of the annual global carbon budget —the amount of CO2 that can be added to the atmosphere without pushing the world beyond 1.5°C of warming— within the first 10 days of 2025, reveals new Oxfam analysis.
In stark contrast, it would take someone from the poorest half of the global population nearly three years (1022 days) to use up their share of the annual global carbon budget.
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.
You’re easily one of my favorite posters here. I have never seen a post of yours that misses.
thanks, i generally feel like i’m just vomiting out a bunch of partially coherent rage, so i’m happy to know somebody is getting something positive out of it.
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.
Ahhh, I forgot that the top 500 richest people aren’t just taking their poodle to a beach resort in first class. How absolutely sickening
hear me out, what if we gave them 5 trillion? that might fix everything. ok let’s give all our gold to the dragon.
Due to the rules against fedposting I am unable to express how I feel at this time.
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.
where is Bard the Bowman when we need him?
Should be a call for lynching the wealthy.
By “tax” you mean 
, right?Just a little off the top
A capital idea, chum!
