More than 40 years ago, Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft Corporation, the most renowned tech company in the world. The 61-year-old Washington native has been the richest person in the world for quite some time now. His current net worth? Oh nothing, just $84.7 billion.
Well, guess what? A non-government organization who did the math and found out that in 25 years, or by 2042, Gates could become the first trillionaire in the whole universe. How is that even possible?
Not surprising really. The Microsoft co-founder is said to earn $250 every second, which means he earns $20 million a day and $7.8 billion a year.
The richest of them all
Oxfam, a non-government organization that aims to eradicate global poverty, just released a paper about the continuously rising wealth gap in the world.
According to their paper titled “An economy for the 99%,” the world’s “one percenters”—Gates and other billionaires—saw their fortune grow enormously over the last decade.
Oxfam says the richest 793 individuals in the world who belong in the billionaires’ club have a total value of $5 trillion last year, which is a huge jump from their collective wealth of $2.4 trillion.
The super-rich see an average increase in wealth of 11% per year. That means they can buy the Philippines three times over, with some loose change. “If these returns continue, it is quite possible that we could see the world’s first trillionaire within 25 years,” the paper furthered.
However, Business Insider says it may be unlikely since he’s been out of Microsoft since 2006. He and his wife Melinda have been putting their efforts in providing long-term solutions to disease eradication and worldwide education through their own Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
As of 2013, the duo has donated at least $28 billion to the charity. “Unless the 61-year-old can figure out how to give even more away in the coming years, he could enter a never-before-seen class of wealth by the time he’s 86,” Chris Weller of Business Insider wrote.
Oxfam also talks about deeper issues, especially the unequal distribution of wealth in the world population. Among them:
- Since 2015, the richest 1% have owned more wealth than the rest of the planet.
- Eight men now own the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the world.
- Over the next 20 years, 500 people will hand over $2.1 trillion to their heirs—a sum larger than the GDP of India, a country of 1.3 billion people.
- The incomes of the poorest 10% of people increased by less than $3 a year between 1988 and 2011, while the incomes of the richest 1% increased 182 times as much.
- An FTSE-100 CEO earns as much in a year as 10,000 people in working in garment factories in Bangladesh.
“Left unchecked, growing inequality threatens to pull our societies apart,” Oxfam warns. “It increases crime and insecurity, and undermines the fight to end poverty.”