It comes at a time when billionaire wealth has surged three times faster last year than the year before, while the number of people living in poverty has barely changed since 1990.
Figures from Oxfam’s January global inequality report showed global billionaire wealth grew by $2t in 2024 alone. In Aotearoa New Zealand, billionaire wealth increased by $5b ($12m per day).
In 2024, the number of billionaires rose to 2,769, up from 2,565 in 2023.
Oxfam’s Nick Henry told The Front Page that billions of dollars are wealth generated by wealth, and wealth generated by accumulating the benefits of work that other people do.
“On a household median income, a million dollars is about 14 years of income. And of course, no one saves their entire income.
“A billion is a thousand times that. So that’s 14,000 years of the middle household income. When you put that into perspective... It’s impossible for someone to earn a billion dollars,” he said.
Musk is currently worth about $466 billion - and that fluctuates, given a lot of his wealth is tied up in stocks.
“Forbes says that he lost $17 billion in one day [last week]. It’ll go up again tomorrow, and maybe down again next week, then up again, because this is bouncing around with the value of Tesla stock prices, crypto assets, and other things.
“To put that into perspective, the national deficit of the New Zealand Government is $6.7b, which would be less than US$4b. Elon Musk lost about four times more than that in just one day on the stock market,” Henry said.
Recently, singer Billie Eilish has criticised the world’s richest, urging billionaires to donate their wealth to the needy at the Wall Street Journal’s Innovator Awards.
But there are examples of the world’s elite giving away their riches.
“If one found oneself in the position of being a billionaire, the only ethical way to cope with that situation, I think, would be to put in place a plan to not be a billionaire any more.
“The one example that’s sometimes used of a billionaire who did do that was the late Chuck Feeney, an Irish American billionaire who made his money on duty-free stores.
“He actually, confidentially, transferred his wealth into a charitable trust which over the course of a decade gave away the majority of his wealth... It wound up in 2020, having given away billions of dollars.
“When Chuck Feeney died, he was no longer a billionaire. He was very comfortable as a multi-millionaire, living his best life, but he had given away enough money to no longer be a billionaire,” he said.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about:
- Billionaire wealth statistics
- Political power that comes with money
- The ethics of the billionaire status
- Philanthropy
- Should billionaires exist?
The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.
You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
