In less than a month, the Treasury Department's balance fell by more than $27 billion. The agency responsible for ensuring U.S. financial security had $76.5 billion in funds at the beginning of May. Currently, this figure has fallen to $48.51 billion.
Keeping this figure in mind, The New York Times made a comparison that warns about the gravity of these dwindling reserves:
For comparison, $48.5 billion is on par with the gross domestic product of Azerbaijan and Tunisia and lower than the net worth of the two dozen wealthiest people in the world. Of course, much of the assets of those billionaires are tied up in stocks, rather than liquid assets.
Who are the billionaires with more money than the Treasury?
Bloomberg updates a list daily that ranks the world's richest people based on net worth. According to this index, 24 people have more money than the Treasury currently has. These are some of them:
- Elon Musk, CEO of Twitter, SpaceX and Tesla: $200 billion.
- Bernard Arnault, CEO of LVMH: $191 billion.
- Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon: $148 billion.
- Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft: $128 billion.
- Larry Ellison, co-founder and president of Oracle: $119 billion.
- Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft: $116 billion.
- Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway: $116 billion.
- Larry Page, co-founder of Google: $113 billion.
#9 Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google: $107 billion.
#10 Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of Meta: $99.3 billion.
- Carlos Slim, investor and founder of América Móvil: $92.7 billion.
- Francoise Bettencourt Meyers, heiress of L'Oréal: $87.4 billion.
- Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries: $84.6 billion.
- Amancio Ortega, founder of Inditex: $69.8 billion.
The NYT noted that Michael Bloomberg, the founder of Bloomberg, is not on the list of the world's richest due to his editorial policy, but Forbes lists his net worth at around $94.5 billion.
