Richest One Per Cent Disappointed to Possess Only Half of World's Wealth

By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker

20 January 15

The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report."

new Oxfam report indicating that the wealthiest one per cent possesses about half of the world’s wealth has left the richest people in the world “reeling with disappointment,” a leading billionaire said on Tuesday.

Speaking to reporters in Davos, Switzerland, where he is attending the World Economic Forum, the hedge-fund owner Harland Dorrinson said, “I think I speak for a lot of my fellow billionaires when I say I thought we were doing a good deal better than that.”

Calling the Oxfam findings “sobering,” he said that he hoped they would serve “as a wake-up call to billionaires everywhere that it’s time to up our game.”

“Quite frankly, a lot of us thought that by buying politicians, rewriting tax laws, and hiding money overseas, we were getting it done,” said Dorrinson, who owns the hedge fund Garrote Capital. “If, at the end of the day, all we control is a measly half of the world’s wealth, clearly we need to do more—much more.”

In Davos, Dorrinson is huddling with other billionaires in the hopes of setting an ambitious goal for the top one per cent: to own the other half of the world’s wealth by 2025.

While he considers this target “doable,” Dorrinson said that he does not underestimate the challenge of wresting the other half from the “vise-like grip” of the approximately seven billion people who comprise the bottom ninety-nine per cent.

“Getting that other half is not going to be a walk in the park,” he said. “But ten years from now, when Oxfam says that the top one per cent owns everything in the world, it’ll all have been worth it.”