Billionaire Wealth Rises During Pandemic

According to a new report by Swiss bank UBS, the combined fortunes of billionaires around the world have soared despite the coronavirus pandemic. The event has proven to be an accelerator of change for billionaires and their businesses, according to the authors, which see tech billionaires and those ready to lift their fortunes into the digital age as the winners of the current state of the world.

The U.S. and China saw the biggest absolute wealth increases for billionaires between mid-2019 and mid-2020, with $660 billion and $490 billion added to the wealth of the ultra-rich, respectively. The highest percent increases were recorded in France (+47 percent), China (+41 percent) and Brazil (+38 percent).

Billionaire wealth rose by 27 percent to $10.2 trillion between the beginning of April until the end of July of this year alone. Tech billionaires’ wealth was up by almost 42 percent – or $529 billion – to $1.8 trillion in the same time frame, while industrialists’ wealth was up by 44 percent to $921 billion and billionaires dealing in consumer goods and retail could expand their wealth by $478 billion (up 26 percent) to $2.3 trillion.