Who owns America's wealth

1 · Top vs. bottom over time

Y-axis = each group's share of all U.S. wealth, by year. Four groups shown (see the color key below): Top 1%, Top 0.1%, Bottom 90%, and Bottom 50% (poorest half). WID/Fed toggle switches data source — World Inequality Database (tax-record estimates, back to 1913) vs. the Federal Reserve's own household survey (only back to 1989) — same story, two independent measurements.

2 · One bar, poorest to richest

The same year's wealth split as chart 1, drawn as one bar instead of a time line — its full width = 100% of U.S. wealth, poorest on the left, richest on the right. Compare the tiny top-0.001% sliver to the whole bottom-50% block.

Drag the year slider below to see this chart change over time.

Year: 2024

3 · Full history, stacked

Chart 2's single bar, turned on its side and repeated for every year since 1913, so the bands show how the split has shifted over time. Bands, bottom→top: . Watch the bottom-50% band dip below zero in 2007–2017 — the poorer half of the country owed more (mortgages, loans, credit cards) than it owned.

4 · The billionaire tail

Horizontal bars = net worth in dollars for five named billionaires, plus (for scale) a median U.S. household and the bottom-50%'s average household. Bars are so lopsided that a linear scale hides everyone but the billionaires; toggle to log to see all bars at once (each gridline is 10× the last). Sources: Bloomberg Billionaires Index, June 2026; median & bottom-50% from the Fed.

5 · Forbes 400 vs. the bottom half

Two lines, each the total combined net worth (not a share or average) of a whole group, by year — 400 people vs. roughly 66 million households. Forbes 400 = the Forbes 400 list's members added together (gaps = years Forbes didn't publish a total). Bottom 50% = the poorer half of U.S. households added together, from the Fed's Distributional Financial Accounts (one reading per year, Q4; the Fed didn't track this before 1989). Toggle to log scale to see the early, smaller years in more detail. Dollars are not inflation-adjusted — $1 in 1982 took about $3.50 in 2026 dollars to buy the same thing, so part of both lines' rise is just inflation, not real growth.

6 · The wealth split we have vs. the one we'd choose

Researchers surveyed 5,522 Americans, showing them unlabeled pie charts of different possible wealth splits and asking two questions: which one do you think is the real United States, and — regardless of your own personal wealth — which split of the whole country's wealth would you prefer everyone lived under? Each bar splits the country into five equal-size wealth quintiles (poorest 20% → richest 20%) and shows how much of all wealth each group holds. Ideal = the split they said the country should have · Estimated = their guess at the real split · Actual ~2005 = the real split at survey time · Actual 2024 = the real split today. People badly underestimated how concentrated wealth already was — and preferred a far more equal country than even their (too-low) guess of reality. The two Actual bars, 19 years apart, show almost no change since the survey — the split Americans say they'd prefer and the one they actually live under are still worlds apart. Survey: Norton & Ariely (2011), the data behind the viral "Wealth Inequality in America" video (Dec 2005); 2024 actual from WID (see chart 1).

7 · The video view — 100 people, poorest to richest

The same Norton & Ariely survey as chart 6, redrawn the way the viral video did it: line up the country as 100 equal columns, poorest on the left — each column is one percentile, 1% of people — and column height = how much wealth that percentile holds, built from stacked "bricks." Buttons switch which distribution is drawn: Ideal (the country-wide split people said they'd prefer), Estimated (the split they guessed was real), Actual (the real 2024 distribution). Wealth follows a power law — most columns stay low and flat, then rise in a steep, accelerating climb at the very top. Switch to Actual: the climb reaches the top of the chart's frame by the 98th percentile, and the richest 1% (the 100th percentile, red) is so much taller than everything else it can't be drawn to the same scale — it's set aside in its own lane on the right instead. Same Scale keeps that real-world proportion (and the separate lane); Fit shrinks everything down so the top 1% fits back in line with the rest, no lane needed — useful for comparing the overall shape.

8 · Average wealth per household, by race

All the wealth held by each group, divided by that group's number of households — the standard way researchers compare groups of different sizes, so a smaller group isn't penalized just for having fewer people. Toggle to log scale (each gridline is 10× the last) to compare growth rates fairly. Dollars are not inflation-adjusted — $1 in 1989 took about $2.70 in 2026 dollars to buy the same thing, so part of every line's rise is just inflation, not real gains. Fed groups: White, Black, Hispanic/Latino, and Other (Asian, American Indian/Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, other/multiple races). Source: Federal Reserve Distributional Financial Accounts, 1989–present.

Key points

This is an average, which a few very wealthy households can pull upward — economists' preferred median figure runs lower for every group, but isn't in the Fed's quarterly series.
The gap has widened, not narrowed: in 1989 the average white household had 3.8× the average Black household's wealth; by 2026 that's grown to 4.5×.
The 2008 housing crash hit Hispanic households hardest: their average net worth kept sliding for five years, down about 37% from its 2007 peak by 2012 — versus roughly 15% for white and Black households, both of which had already bottomed out by 2009.
In raw dollars the gap has grown even faster than the ratio suggests: white household wealth is up roughly $1.4M since 1989, versus about $300K for Black households and $240K for Hispanic households.

9 · What does each level mean? — net worth by percentile

Slide from the poorest to the richest percentile and see what net worth it takes to get there — and a real example of who lives at that level. Past the 99.9th percentile the display switches to naming individual billionaires instead, since by then even a normal zoomed-out scale can't keep up: each of them is worth millions of median households put together. Net-worth thresholds: Fed's Survey of Consumer Finances; billionaires: Bloomberg/Forbes, 2025–26.

poorestmediantop 10%top 1%top 0.1%billionaires →

50th percentile

$190,000

median U.S. household — a typical family

Key points

The bottom ~15% of households have zero or negative net worth.
It takes about $1.9M to crack the top 10%, $13.7M for the top 1%, $62M for the top 0.1%.
The jump from "comfortable" to "rich" is gentle; the jump from rich to billionaire is a cliff — Musk is ~6.5 million median households.
Net worth ≠ income: a high-earning dentist may sit top-few-percent on pay but nowhere near the top 1% in wealth.

What can we do?

We're living through a new Gilded Age — an era where the rich keep getting richer while everyone else falls further behind. The last time the country faced this kind of concentration, it took big structural changes to turn it around: new taxes on the wealthy, new anti-corruption laws, new leadership willing to enact them. We need that again.

What you can do

Elect new progressive leadership at the state and federal level who will enact policies to make the wealthy and corporations pay their fair share. Check out ProgressiveCongress.net (a project by the creator of this site) and the Integrity Index.
In California, support Proposition 40, the Billionaire Tax — and skip the other propositions designed to confuse voters away from the real deal.
Push Congress to pass the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act (Sen. Warren, Rep. Jayapal, Rep. Boyle) — a 2% annual tax on fortunes over $50M, 3% above $1B, projected to raise $6.2 trillion over a decade without touching 99.85% of households. Endorsed by nearly 40 unions and advocacy groups, including SEIU, AFT, AFL-CIO, and Americans for Tax Fairness.
Back Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna's Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act, a 5% annual wealth tax on the roughly 938 U.S. billionaires, and Sanders's For the 99.8% Act, which raises estate taxes on fortunes over $3.5M — both aimed squarely at the ultra-rich, not the middle class.
Join Patriotic Millionaires or the Open Markets Institute — advocacy groups organizing everyday people (not just millionaires) around tax-the-rich legislation and breaking up corporate monopolies.

WIDFed1 · Top vs. bottom over time