(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Twelve U.S. Billionaires Now Have a Combined $2 Trillion [1]

['Omar Ocampo']

Date: 2024-12

The collective net worth of America’s top twelve billionaires has surpassed $2 trillion as of December 3.

This is an unsettling new milestone for wealth concentration in the United States. The oligarchic dozen is richer than ever, and they are endowed with extreme material power that can be used to pursue narrow political interests at the expense of democratic majorities.

There is one newcomer to the moneyed club that we surveyed back in 2020: Jensen Huang. He replaces Walmart heiress Alice Walton.

The collective wealth of this iteration of the oligarchic dozen has increased by more than $1.3 trillion, or 193 percent, since Forbes published its 34th annual list of global billionaires in April 2020.

The ascendancy of Huang is noteworthy. As cofounder and CEO of Nvidia, his wealth has skyrocketed from $4.7 billion in 2020 to $122.4 billion — a mind-boggling 2,504 percent increase — over the last four years.

Huang’s surging wealth is directly tied to the hype surrounding artificial intelligence. The demand from Big Tech for Nvidia’s semiconductor chips to power AI has pushed the company’s stock market value to new heights. To put that demand into perspective, Huang could have been the world’s first trillionaire if his ownership stake in Nvidia, currently at 3.5 percent, mirrored Larry Ellison’s 40 percent stake in software giant Oracle.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://inequality.org/great-divide/twelve-billionaires-now-have-a-combined-2-trillion/

Published and (C) by Common Dreams
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0..

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/commondreams/

You are viewing proxied material from magical.fish. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.