The four richest Americans increased their wealth by $189 billion since 2019 and are now worth $522 billion

The top four richest people in the U.S. have increased their wealth by a combined $76 billion between October 2019 and October 2020.

The top four richest people in the U.S. have increased their wealth by a combined $76 billion between October 2019 and October 2020.Bezos, Gates, Zuckerberg, and Buffett remain the richest people in the U.S., and they have made significant gains in their total wealth in 2020 compared to 2019. However, the exact amount of wealth gained by these top four richest people in the U.S during the period between the wage bill being struck down and November 2020 is not available.

On 27 October 2020, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders tweeted that in June 2019, the House passed Raise the Wage Act to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour, but the Republican Senate refused to consider it. Since then, the four richest Americans have increased their wealth by $189 billion and are now worth $522 billion.

A spokesperson for Senator Lamar Alexander, who chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, told that the committee is not considering a bill that would raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, or any other increase. The current minimum wages are set to $7.5 an hour.

A total of 231 members of the House of Representatives voted in favor of the Raise the Wage Act, including three Republicans, while 199 members opposed it. But this proposal was struck down by the Senate because they said the reasons cited in the proposed bill were not justified.

During the U.S. lockdown, which ran from mid-March to mid-May, America’s billionaires saw their fortunes rise by $434 billion. According to the report from Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies’ Program for Inequality, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg had the biggest gains, with Bezos adding $34.6 billion to his wealth and Zuckerberg adding $25 billion.

The billionaires who made the 2019 lineup have a combined net worth of $2.96 trillion. Behind Bezos, whose net worth is estimated to be $114 billion, was Microsoft entrepreneur Bill Gates, whose worth is an estimated $106 billion. Warren Buffet is the third-richest person in the U.S. with $80.8 billion. According to the report, America’s billionaires' net worth grew 15% during the two months, to $3.382 trillion from $2.948 trillion. The biggest gains were at the top of the 2020 billionaire remains, with the richest five billionaires—Bezos, Gates, Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett saw a combined wealth gain of $76 billion.