The super rich got super richer in 2024 – and that process is only speeding up.
The 19 richest US households – which include titans of industry like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett – saw their wealth grow by $1 trillion last year, according to new data released Wednesday.
These superbillionaires’ gains was more than Switzerland’s entire economy is worth, according to The Wall Street Journal, which cited the analysis by Gabriel Zucman, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley and the Paris School of Economics.
And the pace at which these uber-rich households grow their share of the country’s wealth is significantly increasing.
In 1982, the top 0.00001% of Americans controlled 0.1% of total US wealth. It took four decades to grow that share to 1.2% in 2023, according to Zucman.
That piece of the pie jumped to 1.8%, or about $2.6 trillion, by the end of 2024 – the largest single-year increase ever, the data show.
“You see this gradual rise and then, very recently, dramatic acceleration in the rise of the shares of wealth owned by the truly superwealthy,” Zucman told the Journal.
The acceleration was boosted by last year’s stock market surge, partly aided by the “Trump Bump” following Donald Trump’s presidential victory in November. Overall, the broad-based S&P 500 soared 23%, the tech-heavy Nasdaq skyrocketed 28% and the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average increased 13%.
The number of billionaires has grown as well.
There were nearly 1,990 billionaires last year, up from 1,370 in 2021, according to JPMorgan Chase’s private bank estimates.
The increase in wealth among the richest Americans has far outpaced all other groups.
Households in the top 0.1%, or worth $46.3 billion, have grown their fortunes by about $3.4 million annually since 1990, according to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by Steven Fazzari, economist at Washington University in St. Louis.
The rest of the top 1%, worth at least $11.2 million, grew their fortunes by about $450,000 each year over the same span.
By 2023, the top 1% had expanded its share of total US household wealth to 34.8%, according to the World Inequality Database.
The top 1% in the UK, meanwhile, held 21.3% of the wealth; in France, they controlled 27.2%; and in Germany, 27.6%.
All other wealth groups in the US have seen their shares of total wealth shrink over time.
