The 94-year-old investor is retiring as Berkshire Hathaway's CEO. He's built both a fortune and a reputation as "the nicest billionaire" — at a time when many other billionaires are widely criticized.
There are now more than 3,000 billionaires in the world, according to Forbes' annual ranking of the wealthiest people. They collectively hold about $16.1 trillion in wealth.
The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is underway this week — and there are calls for taxing the extremely rich to address global inequality.
Researchers at Oxfam, a nonprofit devoted to combating poverty, examined billionaires who collectively own $2.4 trillion in company equity, with investments across 183 companies.
The poverty-fighting charity points to unprecedented new wealth accrued by the ultra-rich — and asserts that the result of the world's growing inequality is "economic violence" for the impoverished.
Progressives are pushing for a wealth tax targeted at the ultra rich like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. However, as it turns out, taxing the richest people in the world is easier said than done.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is an evangelist for stakeholder capitalism — the belief that companies should be driven by more than profits: They should also take care of the broader social good.
"This pandemic has been a wrecking ball in the lives of Americans already struggling," Scott wrote, announcing gifts to organizations in all 50 states, D.C. and Puerto Rico.
