The pandemic has been a blessing for Big Tech billionaires, with the CEOs of companies such as Tesla, Amazon, Google, and Facebook increasing their personal wealth by tens of billions each in the past year.
Many of the United States’s wealthiest individuals are tech barons, showing the strength and dominance of an industry that has grown substantially despite the coronavirus-induced pandemic.
The respective CEOs — Elon Musk of Tesla, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and seven other tech titans — made more than $380 billion from last February to this February, according to an analysis of Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index by the Washington Examiner.
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Nearly all the wealth accumulation was tied to significant increases in the share price of the companies the billionaires co-founded or lead and in which they still hold major shares.
Musk, who more than quadrupled his wealth from $41.3 billion to $200 billion from Feb. 17, 2020, to the same day in 2021, is now neck and neck with Bezos for the title of world’s richest person. Zuckerberg’s wealth topped $100 billion, thanks to a $22 billion bump in his share of Facebook stocks, while Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin gained a combined $50 billion in wealth.
Other tech leaders among the top 30 richest people in the world are Oracle’s Chairman Larry Ellison, Dell CEO Michael Dell, and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. The only non-tech CEO who benefited from the industry’s boom is MacKenzie Scott, Bezos’s former wife, who owns a significant number of shares in Amazon.
Tech giants such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix drove more than 60% of the S&P 500’s return in 2020, according to Yardeni Research.
Tesla’s stock shot up more than 500% in the past year.
Amazon has benefited significantly from people shopping online during the pandemic, while Google, Facebook, and Microsoft saw growth thanks to parents and children working and learning online from home. There has been huge increased demand for cloud computing services in particular, from which many Big Tech companies profited.
Very little of Bezos’s personal wealth increases were pumped back into the economy or given to charitable causes.
Bezos donated less than 0.5% of his wealth gained during the pandemic to COVID-19-related causes, Musk gave $5 million, or less than 0.1% of his gains to coronavirus research, while Zuckerberg gave $104 million, or less than 0.5% of his accumulated pandemic wealth, to coronavirus assistance, according to the Washington Post.
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The one exception was Scott, who gave close to $6 billion or 35% of her Amazon-created pandemic wealth to charitable organizations and educational institutes in need over the past year.
