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A stunning $1 trillion in wealth was created for America’s richest families in 2024, according to a new analysis.
Gabriel Zucman, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley and the Paris School of Economics, analyzed the massive increase in wealth and shared the data with The Wall Street Journal. He found that the richest people in the U.S. control a record amount of the country’s total wealth — and that their share of that wealth is accelerating like never before.
According to the analysis, it took more than 40 years for the top 0.00001% of Americans to grow their share of the total wealth from 0.1% in 1982 to 1.2% in 2023
But in 2024, that 0.00001% — or 19 households — saw its share of the total wealth increase to 1.8%. Total U.S. household wealth in 2024 was around $148 trillion, according to Zucman.
“You see this gradual rise and then, very recently, dramatic acceleration in the rise of the share of wealth owned by the truly superwealthy,” he told the Journal.
The 19 households include some familiar names, such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Stephen Schwarzman, and Warren Buffett. Their growing share of the country’s total wealth comes as the U.S. has seen a record number of billionaires.
Forbes released its 2025 World Billionaires List earlier this month, finding more than 3,000 billionaires who have a collective $16 trillion — at minimum — making it their biggest and richest class of billionaires ever.