Top 5 billionaires find that global pandemics are good for business – and their wallets
- Reference: 1600446610
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/09/18/pandemic_billionaires/
- Source link:
As Europe looks set to be submerged by a second wave of COVID-19 with [1]France's Marseille hospitals near breaking point and the [2]UK's test-and-trace systems in tatters , tech billionaires are among the lucky few who seem able to sit back, put their feet up, and watch the cash roll in.
Whatever 'new normal' emerges from the ghastly infectious outbreak, investors seem confident it will involve a large slice of cloud computing and plenty of home-delivered packages in cardboard boxes.
Amazon's coronavirus symptoms: Swelling of the profit, large sales deposits, insatiable demand [3]READ MORE
Yes, the world's richest man, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, has seen his personal wealth swell by $43bn or 39 per cent to $156.8bn between 18 March and 17 June 2020, [4]according to figures released by the Institute for Policy Studies , a US scholar-activists think tank. That is enough for him to give $100 to every man, woman, and child in the United States, and still be worth more than he was in spring.
Although staggering, his inflating wealth is not unique. The top five billionaires – Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, and Larry Ellison – saw their wealth grow by a total of $101.7bn, or 26 per cent over the same spring period. That's roughly the [5]GDP of Puerto Rico .
Bezos may be leader of the pack in terms of absolute wealth, but the tech billionaire who saw the largest relative increase was Mark Zuckerberg, whose wealth grew from $54.7bn in March to $86.8bn in June, a climb of nearly 59 per cent. The Facebook founder's mounting fortune comes from the simple business model of delivering eyeballs to advertisers. As long as consumers are sucked into content, everyone is happy. Well, not quite everyone.
US-based global activist org [6]Avaaz found that at the height of the global COVID-19 pandemic in April, 82 websites spreading health misinformation attracted an estimated 460 million views on Facebook.
The pandemic has already claimed more than 950,000 lives. As the northern hemisphere anxiously awaits winter, when seasonal flu is expected to mingle with a virulent second wave of COVID-19, health systems are stretched to breaking point, and the world's major economies sweat over whether to introduce more lockdowns, the ultimate tech bro will be secure in the knowledge things are getting better. For him. ®
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[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54151281
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/17/covid-19-uk-test-and-trace-barely-functional-as-nearly-10-million-face-lockdown
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/31/amazon_q2_2020/
[4] https://inequality.org/billionaire-bonanza-2020-updates/
[5] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/print_rq.html#:~:text=Despite%20massive%20efforts%2C%20more%20than,%24130%20billion%20(2017%20est.)
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/19/facebook_medical_misinformation/
[7] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
We need a Tesla tumbrel.
All that money in the United States, and every day when I drive home there are people standing by the road as I get of the Interstate, they are homeless and begging. It looks like most of the time they get either nothing or a dollar because they are always standing there. I only hand out $20 bills and then they leave the road because they can finally afford a meal. People tell me that I'm being faked when they hear that I do this, but I'd rather be faked than refuse to give money to someone who's starving. I'm not rich but when I was a kid I was poor.
true story
Back in the 90's my friend's family owned a bar in the Chicago Loop near the Chicago Board of Trade, they were open for lunch. He told me the 'beggars' would come in to cash in their coins, it was not uncommon for them to cash in $100.00 at a time, he loved it because he rarely needed to hit the bank for coins.
Herd immunity = mutation = mass death = unlimited profits
Look at the Trump strategy, the one he got from the Fox News pundit Dr Atlas:
Spread it as widely as possible. Let everyone catch it, people die, the rest have herd immunity.
330 million US citizens, 1% death rate optimistically, that's 3.3 million dead. That's more than 12 Hiroshimas.
It's like Trump dropped 12 Hiroshimas sized nuclear weapons on 12 US cities and killed 12 times the death toll that those World War 2 nukes killed.
THAT'S NOT THE WORST CASE SCENARIO.
We have no herd immunity for the Flu. It spreads widely, it mutates often and new strains spread continuously. That flu-shot you get for the flu, that's the latest vaccines for last years strains of flu. It lags the Flu virus. It's out of date even as you're getting the injection.
If you attempt Herd immunity for Corona Virus, you will never have a vaccine and will never eradicate it.
The death toll will be ongoing, you will continuously be getting vaccine shots to protect you from the strains for which there is a vaccine and hoping you don't get the new strains.
The vaccine companies will love it, it gives them unlimited profits forever.
The Fed will print so much fooking funny money, they already struggle to find enough ways to give the money to billionaires, they've been giving out fake "loans" that don't need to be repaid, and Trump's economic advisor was proposing a "capital gains tax" holiday for rich people so they didn't have to pay tax on all the free printed money they are getting from Trump.
Not 12 Hiroshimas. He'll kill 12 Hiroshimas worth of Americans EACH YEAR.
Where exactly are you going to take care of the 15% of people who need hospital treatment to get the 1% death rate you are seeking? See Marseille here? It's hospitals are full already.
USA is screwed. 1% death toll is really optimistic if you overrun your hospital capacity.
Now we get the Red states, the Republicans, deliberately reducing testing in their states to make the number of daily cases lower. You have Trump saying "if you take out the blue states the numbers look great". So it's clearly the election plan there, reduce testing in red states, accuse blue states of failing, get re-elected on the back of the lie.
They don't care if their voters die, they don't care if Republicans in Republican states die. Just as long as they vote based on the lie, then die later, after the election.
By the time it becomes clear from the "excess deaths" numbers, the election will be past, and you can reveal you've sentenced X million to death. Ha ha, too late, they already voted.
Dr Atlas, turned out to be Dr Death, he didn't give you a roadmap, he's not even an immunologist or know anything, he was just a Fox News talking head, he wrote your death certificate and got handsomely paid to do so by the Hoover institute.
Corporate Billionaires - the New Aristocracy - made wealthy from a siphon of money from everybody else without paying it back.
I feel we need some expert advice. Let's see ... hmm, I think the French has an idea what to do with indolent hoarding aristocrats.