The richest people in the world are getting richer, sometimes the assets grow by up to $ 100 million a day. In contrast, according to Oxfam, more people have to suffer hunger.
As the development organization Oxfam calculated at the beginning of the World Economic Forum in Davos, there were 204 new billionaires worldwide last year. As a result, the assets of the super-rich are increasing: their total assets have increased from $ 13 trillion to $ 15 trillion in 2024 within one year. In contrast, 733 million people do not have enough to eat – around 152 million people more than in 2019.
According to the Oxfam study “Takers Not Makers”, there are currently 2,769 billionaires worldwide. In 2024, her total assets grown three times faster than in the previous year. In the richest ten billionaires, the assets have grown on average by $ 100 million a day. The number of people who live under the expanded poverty limit of the World Bank of $ 6.85 a day has stagnated since 1990 and, according to Oxfam, is almost 3.6 billion.
There are 130 billionaires in Germany
In 2024, the total assets of the super rich rose by $ 26.8 billion to $ 625.4 billion. Nine billionaires were added, there are now 130. Germany has the most billionaires after the United States, China and India. Oxfam also calculated that German billionaires benefit from inheritances above average. While 36 percent of the billionaire assets worldwide comes from inheritances, it is even 71 percent in Germany.
At the same time, poverty has increased significantly in recent years, many people could not keep their usual standard of living. “This extreme inequality is significantly created by an unjust tax policy,” said Oxfam speaker Manuel Schmitt. “In this country, super -rich often pay less taxes and levies than middle -class families.”
Oxfam: growing gap is a danger to democratic societies
According to the study makers, the rich are the big winners of the crisis years. From the perspective of the aid organization, the growing gap has consequences for the global community, but also the national societies. Because the super rich ensured that the unjust structures remained stable. “The economically strong countries in the global north continue to determine the rules from which super rich and their corporations benefit,” the report said. That is still a consequence of colonialism.
The executive CEO of OXFAM Germany, Serap Altiisik, warns of negative consequences for democracies: “Because wealth is hand in hand with political power. We see this today in the inauguration of US President Donald Trump: A billion-dollar president supports the richest man of the World, Elon Musk. ” Altinisik criticizes: “The increase in wealth of the super -rich is limitless, while there is hardly any progress in combating poverty.”
US tech entrepreneur at the forefront
The report refers to data from the Forbes magazine. “Even if they lost 99 percent of their wealth overnight, they remained billionaires,” said emergency aid and development organization. The so-called Forbes list also leads in the top ten the US Tech entrepreneurs Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer (both Microsoft) and Larry Page (Google ) on. The richest German is therefore the Hamburg logistics entrepreneur Klaus-Michael Kühne.
The super -rich influence on tax legislation also has growing influence. For example, when reducing corporate taxes, insufficient taxation of capital gains, exceptional regulations for inheritance taxes and the abolition of wealth taxes. “Between 1990 and 2017, the number of countries tripled from 50 to more than 150, while the number of countries has dropped from twelve to four,” the study said.