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Semi-Finals World’s richest men added billions to their fortunes last year as others struggledBillionaires have added about $1 trillion to their total net worth since the pandemic began.Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos unveils his space company Blue Origin’s lunar lander rocket on May 9, 2019. (Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters) HYPERLINK "" By?Christopher IngrahamJan. 1, 2021 at 6:00 a.m. ESTAdd to listThe pandemic has forced untold hardships onto many Americans, with?tens of millions of families now reporting that they don’t have enough to eat?and millions more out of work on account of layoffs and lockdowns.America’s wealthiest, on the other hand, had a very different kind of year: Billionaires as a class have added?about $1 trillion to their total net worth?since the pandemic began. And roughly one-fifth of that haul?flowed into the pockets of just two men: Jeff Bezos, chief executive of Amazon (and owner of The Washington Post), and Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX fame.Musk has quintupled his net worth since January,?according to estimates put together by Bloomberg, adding $132 billion to his wealth and vaulting him to the No. 2 spot among the world’s richest with a fortune of about $159 billion. Bezos’s wealth has grown by roughly $70 billion over the same period, putting his net worth estimate at roughly $186 billion as the year came to an end.The fortunes of both men owe largely to the stock gains posted by the companies they run, Tesla in Musk’s case and Amazon in Bezos’s. Shares of Tesla are up?roughly 800 percent this year?after a?five-to-one stock split in August. The meteoric rise is driven by a number of factors: its massive factory in Shanghai?started churning out vehicles this year, the company?began posting consistent quarterly profits?and?demand for electric vehicles in general?is expected to surge in 2021.ADAmazon’s stock, on the other hand, has risen?around 70 percent this year, a figure that is modest only in comparison to Tesla’s gains. Much of Amazon’s performance is due to homebound Americans turning to the e-commerce giant to order products they?would have otherwise purchased at retail outlets shut down by the pandemic. Amazon Web Services, a big profit generator for the company, has also experienced?increased demand during the pandemic.All told, the two men increased their net worth by a staggering $200 billion last year, a sum?greater than the gross domestic products of 139 countries. A billion dollars — a radically life-changing sum in nearly any other context — becomes just “an entry in a database,” as Musk?recently characterized his Tesla assets.Such a rapid accumulation of individual wealth hasn’t happened in the United States since the time of the Rockefellers and Carnegies a century ago, and we as a society are only just beginning to grapple with the ethical implications.ADWhat does it mean, for instance, that two men amassed enough wealth this year to end all hunger in America (with a price tag of $25 billion, according to one estimate) eight times over? Or that the $200 billion accumulated by Bezos and Musk is greater than the amount of coronavirus relief?allocated to state and local governments in the Cares Act?Of course, the wealth of Bezos and Musk exists largely on paper, as it’s mostly tied up in the company stock they own. In order to convert that stock to tangible assets, they would have to sell it, which could potentially crater the stock’s value on top of?incurring tax obligations.Beyond that, the task of ending hunger or plugging state budget holes is?a lot more complicated than simply writing a check. If you have the money on hand, the challenge is delivering it in a useful form to the myriad places that need it. It’s a lot harder to spend billions in practice than it is in theory, or at least?billionaires often say it is.ADIn 2018, for instance, the 10 wealthiest people donated?an average of less than 1 percent of their net worth?to charitable causes, according to an analysis by economist Gabriel Zucman.The pandemic is testing the generosity of billionaires, according to a Washington Post survey of the 50 richest AmericansBezos last year announced he would give $10 billion to fight climate change, and in November he announced the recipients of?the first $800 million in spending?on Instagram.?A Washington Post analysis in June?of charitable spending by the wealthiest Americans — when Bezos‘s fortune totaled $143 billion — showed he gave $100 million to Feeding America and up to $25 million for All in WA, a statewide relief effort in Washington state. For the median American, Bezos’s giving was the equivalent of donating $85 at that time.Musk has?given at least $257 million to his own charitable foundation, or less than one-fifth of 1 percent of his estimated wealth since founding it in 2002, according to an analysis by Quartz.ADRepresentatives from Amazon declined to comment, while representatives from Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.The?evident difficulty of getting billionaire wealth to trickle down to everyone else?is a challenge for policymakers in our new gilded era. The runaway accumulation of riches at a time of widespread deprivation and hardship is?one of the widely recognized drivers of democratic decline. Most political scientists?believe the erosion has already started.Our ability to reverse that erosion will depend, in part, on whether the staggering amounts of money flowing to the top of society can be put to work to improve the lives of those at the bottom.Finals Was a Test. How Did We Do?The pandemic gave us an unwelcome chance to find out what we missed, what we could do without — and how much risk we are willing to take.Richard A. FriedmanBy Richard A. FriedmanDr. Friedman, a psychiatrist, is a contributing writer.Dec. 31, 2020You don’t need a psychiatrist to tell you it’s been a brutal year. But looking back on 2020, it’s clear we’ve undergone a big psychosocial stress test: Our response to the deadly challenge of Covid-19 helped us discover what we value and who we really are, a mirror held up to humanity.Without much preparation, the pandemic cut us off from friends, family and much of the external world. And many of us got the unwelcome chance to find out what we missed and what we could do without.Do we have a ferocious attachment to our everyday routine? And how adaptable and flexible can we be in the face of adversity? The answers were sometimes surprising.First, the stress of 2020 did not make most of us clinically depressed for the same reason that a vast majority of people don’t get PTSD after exposure to trauma. Humans are pretty resilient. Sure, snapshot surveys show we currently feel more anxious and down, but it remains to be seen if this will subside or translate into a rise in the rate of major depression.Many people discovered that they could maintain their relationships with friends and families, even if they couldn’t be with them in the flesh, through virtual technology like Zoom and FaceTime.Think about it. Is it more comforting to touch, hear or text a loved one? Researchers tried to answer this question in a study of young children who were put in a mildly stressful situation — asked to perform math and verbal tasks in front of an audience — and then given a randomly assigned form of parental contact: in-person; by text, by telephone and no contact at all.Researchers asked the children afterward how they felt, and then measured their levels of the stress hormone cortisol as well as the level of the prosocial hormone oxytocin. Strikingly, texting with a parent provided no more comfort than having no contact at all. But telephone communication was just as effective as being able to touch and see a parent.The clear implication is that you don’t need to literally see your loved ones and friends to feel your bond with them. As a maxim sometimes attributed to Helen Keller says, “Blindness cuts us off from things; but deafness cuts us off from people.”Despite the availability of technology, some people I know found it impossible to abide the quarantine, even though they are in high-risk groups. They longed for parties and socializing and dined inside at restaurants.They probably would not have considered themselves risk-takers at all before the pandemic. They took good care of themselves: They ate healthfully, exercised and dutifully went for their medical checkups. They rolled up their sleeves for all their vaccines. Yet here they were ready to put their lives on the line for the pleasure of the company of friends.We each discovered our own tolerance for risk and what, exactly, we meant by being safe. For some, it meant no human contact and almost never leaving home; for others, socializing with friends who said they had quarantined for a requisite period of time was sufficient.This experience also revealed our capacity for trusting others — and trusting our own memory. Did we inadvertently forget a brief exposure in the outside world the day before we saw a friend?Some decided that safety was paramount. A good friend, who’s a very smart writer just turned 70, half-jokingly told me she was sure that her gregarious husband couldn’t be trusted not to socialize.“He said he went shopping, but then I saw a post of him on Instagram with friends!” she said with a laugh. She said that she learned this year that everyone else is more social than she is, and that she could be happy “going for long stretches just reading and wandering around.”That’s surprising because I’ve known her as a very social person who loves to give dinner parties and hold deep conversations. Aside from risk, maybe the experience of being locked down showed her she could thrive without physically being with friends.Some of us found that the solitude wasn’t as bad as we feared. Psychologists love to remind us that we humans are easily bored and have trouble entertaining ourselves without stimulating activities, which is exactly what the pandemic took from us. Maybe we can tolerate our own company better than experts predicted.Some discovered their altruism — and paid for it with solitude. I’m thinking of my anesthesiology colleagues at the hospital who worked selflessly and at their own peril through the worst of the pandemic and reluctantly decided that they had to live away from their families to avoid infecting them.What was striking was that they did not even think of themselves as altruistic, much less the heroes the public recognized them to be. “We’re just doing our jobs,” one wearily told me.So how did we do with our stress test? I’d say for many, pretty well. Surveys tell us that we are more anxious and depressed than we were a year ago. Still, we adapted the best we could and did OK. Here’s to a better 2021. ................
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