According to researcher Gabriel Zucman of the University of California, Berkeley, America’s 19 richest households gained $1 trillion last year. He used Federal Reserve data for part of his calculation. Based on the same metric, the total wealth of all Americans reached $148 trillion at the end of last year.
24/7 Wall St. Key Points:
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New research shows that America’s 19 richest households gained $1 trillion apiece last year.
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The rise in the stock market accounted for much of their gains.
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The group of 19 is 0.00001% of American households. According to The Wall Street Journal, “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.”
The rise in the stock market accounted for a large part of their gains.
The figure should be no surprise. Even with a market sell-off in the early part of 2025, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index puts Musk’s net worth at $310 billion, followed by Bezos at $202 billion, Zuckerberg at $185 billion, Buffett at $164 billion, and Gates at $157 billion. That puts the top five people on the list with a net worth of $1.02 trillion.
None of the 500 billionaires on Bloomberg’s list has a net worth below $6.02 billion. According to J.P. Morgan, the total number of billionaires in the United States has reached 1,990.
At this point, the 2025 increase may be less than in 2024. So far this year, the net worth of top five billionaires has dropped to $161 billion.
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