Largest tech company CEOs made billions amid pandemic

A handful of American billionaires have reportedly seen notable increases to their net worth during the coronavirus pandemic, which has caused over 38.6 million people in the country to lose their jobs.

The new finding comes from a report published on Thursday by Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies’ Program for Inequality.

The two groups examined the financial data that Forbes keeps on the country’s billionaires, specifically looking at information collected from March 18 to May 19.

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos — already comfortably the richest man in the world before the pandemic — has seen his net worth grow 30.6 percent in the past two months, boosting it to $147.6 billion.

According to the analysis, which was first reported by CNBC, both Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg and Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk saw their net worths increase by nearly half. Zuckerberg’s rose 46.2 percent to $80 billion, while Musk’s jumped 48 percent to $36.4 billion.

Bezos, Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Larry Ellison — the five richest Americans — saw a combined wealth increase of $76 billion dollars.

America’s billionaires have allegedly seen their collective net worth increase 15 percent during the pandemic, going from $2.948 trillion to $3.382 trillion.