- World’s super-rich head to Gujarat for wedding party thrown by India’s richest person The Guardian
- Billionaire Heir and Fiancée Hosting Extravagant Pre-Wedding Celebration in India Where Guests Must Adhere to 9-Page Dress Code PEOPLE
- Ambani son’s pre-wedding bash to feature Rihanna, tycoons and Bollywood stars Reuters India
- Anant Ambani, Radhika Merchant wedding party: Ranbir Kapoor heads to Jamnagar with daughter Raha, Rihanna’s team arrives Hindustan Times
- Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant kick off lavish pre-wedding party by feeding more than 50,000 villagers in J Daily Mail
Tag Archives: superrich
Call for new taxes on super-rich after 1% pocket two-thirds of all new wealth | Inequality
Oxfam has called for immediate action to tackle a post-Covid widening in global inequality after revealing that almost two-thirds of the new wealth amassed since the start of the pandemic has gone to the richest 1%.
In report to coincide with the annual gathering of the global elite at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the charity said the best-off had pocketed $26tn (£21tn) in new wealth up to the end of 2021. That represented 63% of the total new wealth, with the rest going to the remaining 99% of people.
Oxfam said for the first time in a quarter of a century the rise in extreme wealth was being accompanied by an increase in extreme poverty, and called for new taxes to be levied on the super-rich.
Policies introduced to combat the economic impact of Covid 19 – such as cuts in interest rates and the money creation process known as quantitative easing – boosted the value of property and shares, which tend to be owned by richer people.
The report said that for every $1 of new global wealth earned by a person in the bottom 90%in the past two years, each billionaire gained roughly $1.7m. Despite small falls in 2022, the combined fortune of billionaires had increased by $2.7bn a day. Pandemic gains came after a decade when both the number and wealth of billionaires had doubled.
Danny Sriskandarajah, the chief executive of Oxfam GB: “The current economic reality is an affront to basic human values. Extreme poverty is increasing for the first time in 25 years and close to a billion people are going hungry but for billionaires, every day is a bonanza.
“Multiple crises have pushed millions to the brink while our leaders fail to grasp the nettle – governments must stop acting for the vested interests of the few.
“How can we accept a system where the poorest people in many countries pay much higher tax rates than the super-rich? Governments must introduce higher taxes on the super-rich now.”
Oxfam said extreme concentrations of wealth led to weaker growth, corrupted politics and the media, corroded democracy and led to political polarisation. The super-rich were key contributors to the climate crisis, the charity added, with a billionaire emitting a million times more carbon than the average person. They were also twice as likely to invest in polluting industries, compared with the average investor.
The report called on governments to introduce immediate one-off wealth levies on the richest 1%, together with windfall taxes to clamp down on profiteering during the global cost of living crisis. Subsequently, there should be a permanent increase in taxes on rich, with higher rates for multimillionaires and billionaires.
In support of its call for redistribution of wealth, Oxfam said:
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Food and energy companies had more than doubled their profits in 2022, paying out $257bn to wealthy shareholders at a time when more than 800 million people were going hungry.
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Only 4 cents in every dollar of tax revenue came from wealth taxes, and half the world’s billionaires lived in countries with no inheritance tax on money they give to their children.
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A tax of up to 5% on the world’s multimillionaires and billionaires could raise $1.7tn a year, enough to lift 2 billion people out of poverty, and fund a global plan to end hunger.
In a foreword to the report, Colombia’s finance minister, José Antonio Ocampo, said: “Taxing the wealthiest is no longer an option – it’s a must. Global inequality has exploded, and there is no better way to tackle inequality than by redistributing wealth.”
He added: “Fairness is at the heart of Colombia’s tax reforms. Concretely, this means a new wealth tax, higher taxes for high-income earners and large corporations reaping extraordinary profits in international markets, and ending tax incentives that exist without clear social or environmental justification.
“We are also implementing digital services taxes and adopting a corporate minimum tax rate, building on the international tax deal,.”
From Trump to Kanye and Musk: why are the super-rich buying social media sites? | Digital media
Ever wonder what the richest man in the world buys? Elon Musk, rated No 1 by Forbes on its 2022 list of billionaires, may soon own a social media network imbued with so much political capital it could fracture nations.
It’s the latest expression of an uncomfortable truth: tech CEOs have become the most crucial political gatekeepers in modern media history. Not by running for office – a cliche for today’s moneyed elite – but by using social media ownership as a proxy for political influence.
It’s a trend years in the making. From the political largess of former Facebook executives like Sheryl Sandberg and Joel Kaplan to the metapolitics of Peter Thiel, tech titans have long adopted an inside/outside playbook for conducting politics by other means.
But recent developments, including Donald Trump’s investment in Twitter clone Truth Social and Kanye West’s supposed agreement to purchase ailing social network Parler, illustrate how crucial these new technologies have become in politics. More than just communication tools, platforms have become the stage on which politics is played.
Trump, for one, appears to have understood the trend. Despite all his storm and bluster, the former president never cracked the top 1,000 of the Forbes richest list, but he and Musk do appear to have one thing in common: they’re both investing in social media companies they intend to use to transform politics and society.
The vision of social media owners like Musk and Trump for the internet’s future could profoundly impact the political landscape.
In our new book, Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America, my co-authors and I trace the rise of global communications companies through the eyes of the bad actors who have used these technologies to gain recognition. As researchers, we were alarmed by the power of social media companies to influence politics from Occupy to the January 6 insurrection. We charted the rise of technology companies in the last decade and their changing content moderation policies to show how the design of social media platforms provides strategic advantages to those willing to employ digital dirty tricks to incite the public. The way that Trump was able to mobilize a large group of rioters to disrupt the election process proved that It Can’t Happen Here had been happening for years.
As technologies like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook have become more and more consequential for how the public gathers information about politicians and elections, so has the power of those who control them. In our digital age, the information superhighway is full of tolls, from the purchasing of legitimate pathways through digital advertising to preferential fast passes by tech CEOs and dark money used to game algorithmic recommendations and search engine optimization. And because there are no regulations for the integrity of civic information online, the public is betrothed to the whims of CEOs’ personal moral codes.
That means that Musk’s vision for Twitter matters. Musk has stated that he plans to take Twitter private and perhaps roll it into a new app. In May, he said he’d reverse the platform’s ban on Trump, potentially paving the way for the return of others from the former president’s digital army, like US conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, the far right activist Milo Yiannopoulos, Baked Alaska (the former Buzzfeed journalist turned white nationalist livestreamer who was arrested after the January 6 insurrection) and the far right nationalist Nick Fuentes. All of these pundits have attained political superstardom by riding the wave of support for Trump’s Make America Great Again movement, while also using social media – and livestreaming in particular – to broadcast conspiracy theories, violence and hate.
Musk, and other new platform owners, not only influence what information gets shared. They could also remove guardrails on the ways platforms are used to move money. No doubt whatever Twitter morphs into, it will include some form of digital cash exchange as another way to undermine the power of governments. If you don’t believe me, remember that Wells Fargo carried packages before it turned into a bank.
Further, politicians turning to tech companies for support begins with political messaging and could easily morph into political donations of another sort: from silencing opponents and amplifying preferred candidates to sowing confusion during moments of crisis.
Trump’s return to Twitter could signal a smash-and-grab on the White House, or perhaps it could mean nothing at all – just as Ye’s antisemitic tweets won’t mean much until they are quoted in the manifesto of the next mass murderer (similar to how “subscribe to PewDiePie” only became a commonly known phrase after the influencer was quoted by a mass shooter who killed more than 50 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand).
The success of figures like Musk and Trump to use social media platforms also depends on buy-in from the public at large. If journalists abandoned Twitter, it would no longer have the social and political influence it does now.
In many ways, the infamous provocateur journalist Andrew Breitbart was right: politics are downstream of culture. To this I’d add that culture is downstream of infrastructure. The politics we get are the ones that sprout from our technology, so we should cultivate a digital public infrastructure that does not rely on the whims of billionaires. If we do not invest in building an online public commons, our speech will only be as free as our hopefully benevolent dictators say it is.
Number of global ultra high net worth individuals hits record high | The super-rich
The ranks of the global “ultra high net worth” (UHNW) individuals swelled by 46,000 last year to a record 218,200 as the world’s richest people benefited from “almost an explosion of wealth” during the recovery from the pandemic.
The number of UHNW people – those with assets of more than $50m (£43.7m) – jumped in 2021 as the super-rich benefited from soaring house prices and booming stock markets, according to a report by investment bank Credit Suisse. The number of people in the UHNW bracket has increased by more than 50% over the past two years.
The huge increase in wealth of the richest 0.00004% of the world’s adult population comes as billions of low- and middle-income people – many of whom saw their savings wiped out during the pandemic – struggle to cope with soaring food and energy prices.
“The strong rise in financial assets resulted in an increase in inequality in 2021,” the report by Credit Suisse, which helps manage the fortunes of many of the world’s richest people, said. “The rise in inequality is probably due to the surge in the value of financial assets during the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Credit Suisse’s Global Wealth Report found that “the recovery of macroeconomic activity in a low interest environment produced exceptionally favourable conditions for household wealth growth during 2021”.
“We estimate that global wealth totalled $463.6tn at the end of 2021, a rise of $41.4tn (9.8%),” the report said. “Wealth per adult grew by $6,800 (8.4%) during the course of the year to reach $87,489, close to three times the level recorded at the turn of the century.”
Anthony Shorrocks, an economics professor and an author of the report, said there had been “almost an explosion of wealth last year … Probably higher than any other year we have ever recorded”.
The increase in wealth has not been distributed fairly. The richest 1% of the global population increased their share of all the world’s wealth for a second year running to 46%, up from 44% in 2020.
The number of US dollar millionaires increased by 5.2 million during 2021 to a total of 62.5 million – just under the 67 million population of the UK. Shorrocks said the number of millionaires was becoming so large that it was becoming “an increasingly irrelevant measure of wealth”.
More than a third of the millionaires live in the US, which is home to 24.5 million millionaires, or 39% of the world’s total.
The number of US millionaires increased by 2.5 million – almost half of all new millionaires minted across the world. “This is the largest increase in millionaire numbers recorded for any country in any year this century and reinforces the rapid rise in millionaire numbers seen in the US since 2016,” the report said.
China is in second place, with 10% of the world’s millionaires, ahead of Japan with 5.4%, the UK (4.6%) and France (4.5%).
Switzerland was once again named the richest country in terms of mean average wealth per adult at $700,000, ahead of the US at $579,000.
However, the inequalities in those countries are highlighted when the median average wealth per adult is examined. Switzerland falls to sixth place with a median wealth of $168,000 and the US drops to 18th place with $93,000. Australia is top of the median wealth table with $274,000.
UK adults have a mean wealth of $309,000 (14th place) and a median wealth of $142,000 (ninth place).
The country with the biggest jump in mean average wealth was New Zealand, which saw a $114,000 average increase to $472,000.