US$1 TRILLION OF WEALTH WAS CREATED FOR THE 19 RICHEST U.S. HOUSEHOLDS LAST YEAR / THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

$1 Trillion of Wealth Was Created for the 19 Richest U.S. Households Last Year

The richest of the rich in America are controlling a record slice of the nation’s wealth

By Juliet Chung

The wealthiest have gotten richer, and control a record share of America’s wealth. 

New data suggest $1 trillion of wealth was created for the 19 richest American households alone in 2024. 

That’s more than the value of Switzerland’s entire economy.

It took four decades for the top 0.00001% of Americans’ share of total U.S. household wealth to grow from 0.1% in 1982—when 11 households made up that rarefied group—to 1.2% in 2023, according to an analysis by Gabriel Zucman, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Paris School of Economics.

In one year, by the end of 2024, the share of total U.S. household wealth for the modern 0.00001%—those 19 households—jumped to 1.8%, or about $2.6 trillion. 

That is the biggest one-year increase on record, according to Zucman.

Total U.S. household wealth stood at about $148 trillion at the end of 2024, according to a measure Zucman used that subtracts the value of big-ticket items such as appliances as well as unfunded pensions from the Federal Reserve’s estimate of household wealth.

The average net worth of all groups has climbed since the third quarter of 1990 as the U.S. economy has grown. 

The growth in wealth of the richest Americans has far outpaced that of all other U.S. wealth groups.

“You see this gradual rise and then, very recently, dramatic acceleration in the rise of the share of wealth owned by the truly superwealthy,” said Zucman. 

His analysis looks at wealth distribution from 1913, part of a period known as America’s Gilded Age, through 2024. 

The work of Zucman and his colleague Emmanuel Saez was cited by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) in their 2020-era arguments to increase taxes on the wealthy.

Wealth managers say the surging stock market in 2024 supercharged wealth creation at the top, following already sizable gains the prior year. 

Together, those two years made for the S&P 500’s best consecutive years in a quarter-century. 

(Markets have fallen since President Trump unleashed a global trade war, dramatizing the volatile nature of wealth for the richest of the rich. 

With much of their wealth tied up in the stock market, their net worth can swing by billions daily.)

Those in Zucman’s research on the top 0.00001% in the U.S. are worth at least $45 billion per household and include Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and private-equity investor Stephen Schwarzman. 

Other researchers have dubbed those with around that magnitude of wealth “superbillionaires.”

The growth of wealth among the rich has minted new billionaires across the globe, and especially in the U.S.

JPMorgan Chase’s private bank estimates U.S. billionaires numbered nearly 2,000 last year, up from about 1,400 in 2021, when it began tracking billionaires. 

Wealth-data firm Altrata, meanwhile, estimates the figure at 1,050 billionaires in 2023, the most recent year for which it has data, up from 975 in 2021. Altrata pegs their total wealth in 2023 as approaching $4.9 trillion.

As of 2023, the top 1% in the U.S. held 34.8% of total U.S. household wealth, according to the World Inequality Database. 

By comparison, the top 1% in the U.K. held 21.3% of total wealth there. 

In France, the top 1% held 27.2%, and in Germany, 27.6%.

The wealthier a household was in 1990, the quicker its wealth has accumulated in the years since. 

While the top 1% grew its share of total household wealth, all other U.S. wealth groups have seen their shares decrease.

A household in the top 0.1%—roughly 133,000 households each worth at least $46.3 million—accumulated an average $3.4 million a year since the third quarter of 1990, in 2024 dollars, according to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by Steven Fazzari, an economist at Washington University in St. Louis. 

In comparison, the wealth of the rest of the top 1%—roughly 1.2 million households each worth at least $11.2 million—grew by an average $450,000 per household, per year.