It’s by now widely understood that the past twelve months have been a tale of two very different pandemics. Amid the countless stories of human misery buried in monthly unemployment figures, reports of widespread hunger, and tragic (though avoidable) deaths of frontline workers, COVID-19 has been a veritable bonanza for the tiny few at the commanding heights of the hyper-financialized global economy. Recent numbers published by the Financial Times underscore just how dramatic these gains have really been:

Over the past two decades, as the global population of billionaires rose more than fivefold and the largest fortunes rocketed past $100bn . . . The pandemic has reinforced this trend. As the virus spread, central banks injected $9tn into economies worldwide, aiming to keep the world economy afloat. Much of that stimulus has gone into financial markets, and from there into the net worth of the ultra-rich. The total wealth of billionaires worldwide rose by $5tn to $13tn in 12 months, the most dramatic surge ever registered on the annual billionaire list compiled by Forbes magazine.

In addition to increasing the wealth of existing billionaires, the pandemic has also created quite a few new ones. As the Times’ Ruchir Sharma notes, China alone added 238 to the global total — roughly one every 36 hours. More than 100 new billionaires have been created in the United States in the past year, the global number of individuals worth $1 billion or more jumping from around 2,000 a year ago to a record of just over 2,700 as of April 2021. A few, like Tesla CEO Elon Musk, have seen spikes in their wealth that border on incomprehensible (in Musk’s case from a mere $25 billion to over $150 billion in a single year).