These statistics are the estimated net worths of the 10 richest Americans in 2022, according to Forbes.
Whose net worth surprised you the most?
It’s interesting to see how America’s wealthiest got even wealthier during the pandemic, all while the poor got poorer.
It makes you question the true intentions of pandemics, from a socio-economic perspective.
The ones declaring pandemics (the wealthy elites) are the same ones who benefit from their very nature.
It’s no wonder they are so comfortable declaring them, considering they don’t hurt their financial status…
Now, monkeypox has been declared a public health emergency by the United States and the W.H.O., simply because the decision would give the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services access to new money for vaccines. Big Pharma wants their paycheck.
It makes perfect sense as to why they would be in such a rush to declare a virus with only 4,639 confirmed cases of a public health emergency.
IT’S ALWAYS ABOUT MONEY!
READ MORE: PANDEMIC 2.0? Biden to Declare Monkeypox a Public Health Emergency…
⭐️ TOP 10 WEALTHIEST AMERICANS ⭐️
1. Elon Musk — $264.9 Billion
Tesla, SpaceX
Elon Musk cofounded six companies including electric car maker Tesla, rocket producer SpaceX and tunneling startup Boring Company.
He owns about 25% of Tesla between stock and options, but has pledged more than half his stock as collateral for loans.
SpaceX, founded in 2002, is worth $125 billion after a funding round in May 2022; it quadrupled its value in three years.
Boring Company, which aims to defeat traffic, raised $675 million in April 2022 at a $5.7 billion valuation.
Twitter’s board agreed to sell the company to Musk for $44 billion on April 25, 2022, after he disclosed a 9.1% stake and threatened a hostile takeover.
Musk secretly fathered twins with Shivon Zilis, an executive at his company, Neuralink, which has been testing Bluetooth-enabled implantable chips in monkeys.
2. Jeff Bezos — $166.4 Billion
Amazon
Jeff Bezos founded e-commerce giant Amazon in 1994 out of his garage in Seattle. He stepped down as CEO to become executive chairman in July 2021.
Bezos sold $8.8 billion worth of his Amazon stock in 2021 and also gave some shares away; he now owns a bit less than 10% of the company.
He and his wife MacKenzie divorced in 2019 after 25 years of marriage and he transferred a quarter of his then-16% Amazon stake to her.
Bezos owns The Washington Post and Blue Origin, an aerospace company developing rockets; he briefly flew to space in one in July 2021.
3. Bill Gates — $111.8 Billion
Microsoft
Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975. He turned his fortune from the software firm into diversified holdings including investments zero-carbon energy.
He is currently the largest owner of farmland in America…
As of March 2020, when Gates stepped down from the Microsoft board, he owned about 1% of the software and computing company’s shares.
He has invested in dozens of companies including Canadian National Railway and AutoNation, and is one of the largest owners of farmland in the U.S.
In May 2021, Bill and Melinda each announced on Twitter they were ending their marriage after 27 years. They still co-chair the charitable Gates Foundation.
To date, Gates has donated nearly $57 billion to the Gates Foundation, including a $20 billion gift announced in July 2022. Most of his early donations were gifts of Microsoft stock.
4. Warren Buffett — $101.6 Billion
Berkshire Hathaway
Known as the “Oracle of Omaha,” Warren Buffett is one of the most successful investors of all time.
Buffett runs Berkshire Hathaway, which owns dozens of companies, including insurer Geico, battery maker Duracell and restaurant chain Dairy Queen.
The son of a U.S. congressman, he first bought stock at age 11 and first filed taxes at age 13.
He has promised to donate over 99% of his wealth. So far he has given more than $48 billion, mostly to the Gates Foundation and his kids’ foundations.
In 2010, he and Bill Gates launched the Giving Pledge, asking billionaires to commit to donating at least half of their wealth to charitable causes.
5. Larry Page — $111 Billion
Larry Page stepped down as CEO of Alphabet, the parent of Google, in December 2019 but remains a board member and a controlling shareholder.
He cofounded Google in 1998 with fellow Stanford Ph.D. student Sergey Brin.
With Brin, Page invented Google’s PageRank algorithm, which powers the search engine.
Page was CEO until 2001, when Eric Schmidt took over, and then from 2011 until 2015, when he became CEO of Google’s new parent company Alphabet.
He is a founding investor in space exploration company Planetary Resources and is also funding “flying car” startups Kitty Hawk and Opener.
6. Sergey Brin — $97.2 Billion
Sergey Brin stepped down as president of Alphabet, parent company of Google, in December 2019 but remains a controller shareholder and a board member.
He cofounded Google with Larry Page in 1998 after the two met at Stanford University while studying for advanced degrees in computer science.
Google went public in 2004 and began trading as Alphabet, a newly created parent company, in 2015.
Brin was absent from public Alphabet events for much of 2019; he spent his time on Alphabet’s moonshot research lab X.
Brin is reportedly funding a high-tech airship project.
7. Larry Ellison — $106.7 Billion
Oracle
Larry Ellison is chairman, chief technology officer and cofounder of software giant Oracle, of which he owns about 35%.
He gave up the Oracle CEO role in 2014 after 37 years at the helm.
Oracle has grown in part through steady acquisitions of software companies, the biggest of which was $9.3 billion for NetSuite in 2016.
In 2020, Ellison moved permanently to the Hawaiian island Lanai, which he bought nearly all of in 2012 for $300 million.
Ellison joined Tesla’s board in December 2018, after purchasing 3 million Tesla shares earlier that year.
8. Steve Ballmer — $92.1 Billion
Microsoft
Steve Ballmer is the high-wattage former CEO of Microsoft, who led the company from 2000 to 2014.
He joined Microsoft in 1980 as employee No. 30 after dropping out of Stanford’s MBA program.
Ballmer oversaw Microsoft after the first dot-com crash and through efforts to catch up to Google in search capabilities and Apple in mobile phones.
The same year he retired from Microsoft he bought the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers for $2 billion.
He has ramped up his philanthropy since 2014, putting over $2 billion into a donor-advised fund, with a focus on lifting Americans out of poverty.
In 2018, he invested $59 million in Social Solutions, which makes software for nonprofits and government agencies.
9. Michael Bloomberg — $76.8 Billion
Bloomberg
Michael Bloomberg cofounded financial information and media company Bloomberg LP in 1981.
He put in the seed funding for the company and now owns 88% of the business, which has revenues north of $10 billion.
Bloomberg got his start on Wall Street in 1966 with an entry level job at investment bank Salomon Brothers. He was fired 15 years later.
A major philanthropist, he has donated more than $12.7 billion to gun control, climate change and other causes.
He announced a run for president in November 2019 (but dropped out in March 2020), and spent hundreds of millions to defeat Donald Trump in 2020.
The mayor of New York City for 12 years, Bloomberg is one of just four individuals to have served that long.
10. Mark Zuckerberg — $60.2 Billion
Meta (Facebook)
Facebook, the social network Zuckerberg runs, has been an information hub during the pandemic, but has come under scrutiny for spreading vaccine misinformation.
In June 2021, a judge dismissed antitrust cases brought by states and the federal government, which could have forced Facebook to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp.
Zuckerberg started Facebook at Harvard in 2004 at the age of 19 for students to match names with photos of classmates.
He took Facebook public in May 2012; he now owns about 12% of the company’s stock.
In December 2015, Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, pledged to give away 99% of their Facebook stake over their lifetimes.
ABOUT THE WRITER:
Elena Patestas is a journalist and writer for Valuetainment media. She attended Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, and Adelphi University on Long Island, New York. She was born and raised in Roslyn, New York, and currently lives in Miami, Florida.
Elena is passionate about bringing positive change to our world and believes education is the root to solving many societal problems. After overcoming a chronic health condition, Elena became passionate about health and believes food is the key to preventing dis-ease and achieving optimum health.
Amongst her many goals, she hopes to bring positive, impactful change to our world to create a healthy, financially sound, and unified society.
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