722
7 years ago there were no billionaires worth more than $100 billion - today there are 18!
(sh.itjust.works)
Billionaires 7 years ago:
https://web.archive.org/web/20171004002738/https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/
Billionaires today:
The overall average median lifetime earnings of $1,850,000 for men and $1,100,200 for women. Let's just take the average and say an average American earns $1,475,100 in their lifetime.
The important thing to remember is, in an unequal system where workers have most of the value of their work taken by a single person who the system disproportionately favors, that value is translatable to literal life. They are directly, inexorably going to die having had that value simply transferred to the other person or people who collect that value. Or put succinctly, they are giving up life, and the "owner" of the business is gaining the value of their life.
Another note is that even though most valuations are stock, stock valuations do not exist in a vacuum. The stock market is the realizable increase in productivity value that we all collectively have caused.
So based on that principle, just for fun, let's convert these fortunes to human lives, to better understand just how much (economically-valued) life force these people have taken from people:
Elon Musk: $262,000,000,000 = 176,259 American lives.
Jeff Bezos: $208,000,000,000 = 141,007 American lives.
Mark Zuckerberg: $203,000,000,000 = 137,617 American lives.
Muh capitalism