Ever wondered how rich the 5 richest families are?

Bloomberg has released its annual tally of the 25 wealthiest dynasties on the planet. While not exactly shocking, the reminder that an incomprehensible amount of money is controlled by such a small minority of people remains … unsettling. 

Nobody particularly wants to feel completely at the mercy of the world’s ‘elite’, so we’ll just leave these facts here: 

1. The 25 wealthiest dynasties on the planet control about USD$1.4 trillion. Up 24 ($250 billion) percent from last year, that figure is, quite literally, growing every second but for now it’s just under the nominal GDP of Australia. The 13th richest country in the world with about 25 million inhabitants. Yeah, that one. 

2. The richest so-called ‘dynasty’ on the coveted Bloomberg list is the family behind the quintessential American experience, Walmart. Yes, the Walton family gained the top spot by reportedly earning a “mind-boggling $70,000 per minute, $4 million per hour, $100 million per day.”

3. Mind-boggling indeed. For scale, the hourly rate for a new Walmart employee is $11. To be fair to the Walton’s, that figure does jump exponentially when you consider the average salary of all full-time Walmart employees. At an hourly rate of $14.26, it translates to less than $30,000 per year – or the equivalent of about 25 seconds of Walton ‘work’.

4. America’s richest 0.1 percent now control more wealth than any other time since 1929. To boot, the top 0.1 percent is comprised of fewer than 200,000 families, but own as much as the bottom 90 percent including 110 million households. 

5. The Mars family, the ones responsible for establishing snacks like Snickers, M&Ms and Milky Way, came in at a lackluster number 2 on the list for their mere net worth of $126 billion. That is, however, enough to buy a couple hundred billion chocolate bars, or feed 17 million Americans three meals a day for a year. 

-Source: RT

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