“The crown jewel in this oligarchy is a billionaire president, supported and bought by the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, and running the world’s largest economy,” criticizes Amitabh Behar, the executive director of long. The boss of the automobile manufacturer Tesla and the space company SpaceX, also owner of the social network X, largely financed Donald Trump’s campaign and obtained an extra-governmental mission to cut public spending.
Protesters demand to “tax the rich”
According to Oxfam, the fortunes of billionaires soared last year by 2,000 billion dollars globally, or three times more than in 2023, to reach 15,000 billion. And “the policies defended by President Trump should cause inequalities to soar,” warns the NGO.
“Tax the rich” was one of the slogans of demonstrators who blocked the access road to Davos on Sunday to protest against the World Economic Forum meeting. Several hundred were evicted by the police, according to the Keystone-ATS agency.
“The World Economic Forum symbolizes the power that rich people like me hold,” Austrian Marlene Engelhorn, who last year redistributed her inheritance of 25 million euros to various organizations, told AFP. “Simply because we were born millionaires, or because we were lucky once (…), we can now influence politicians around the world with our political preferences.”
Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg and Ellison, the four richest men in the world
Oxfam calculates that five men can claim to have a fortune of 1,000 billion dollars within ten years, when “the number of people trapped in poverty has hardly changed since 1990”.
-A thousand billion is already the combined fortune of the four richest men in the world, all Americans and from tech: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos (Amazon, Blue Origin), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta) and Larry Ellison (Oracle) . The first three, expected Monday at the inauguration ceremony, “today have more wealth than the poorest half of American society,” criticized Bernie Sanders, a figure of the left in the United States.
In the United States, “we are in the situation of being able to buy a country,” denounced the boss of Oxfam France, Cécile Duflot, during a press conference.
Donald Trump has appointed other billionaires to his new administration, and wealthy businessmen and women to positions of ambassadors or directors of federal agencies. Their common point is often to have contributed financially to his campaign.
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