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The wealth of the top 1% reaches a record $52T (2025)
- seydor 10mo agoIt still has ways to go before it reaches Bastille levels
- lostlogin 10mo agoIt’s almost flat lining. I’m pleasantly surprised. Despite the recent faster growth at the top, the total shares of wealth held by the upper echelon has remained fairly stable for decades. The top 1% held 29% of total household wealth in the second quarter, compared with 28% in 2000. The top 10% held 67% of total household wealth in the quarter while the bottom 90% held 33%.
- grunder_advice 10mo agoI think this is just because wealth distribution is a powerlaw with extreme concentration at the far end. For example in this graph you can see a trend, the closer to the top, the steeper the line. https://imgur.com/a/6omRYu3 https://imgur.com/a/6omRYu3 As an extreme case, let's look at the top 3 billionaires in 2000 and 2025 respectively. 2000 Gates, Ellison, Allen $135 billion vs. $42.0 trillion ≈0.32 % 2025 Musk, Ellison, Zuckerberg $957 billion vs. $172.9 trillion ≈0.55 %
- an0malous 10mo agoI didn’t know that, I would’ve guessed we’re pretty close already. What would that level be?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- michaelmarkell 10mo agoThat's approximately ~15.3M USD per person in the top 1% assuming 340 million americans
- scottious 10mo agocorrect me if I'm wrong but isn't it just 1% of Americans, not globally?
- michaelmarkell 10mo agoYou're 100% right, thanks! Updated my comment.
- rayiner 10mo agoEDIT: Sorry, thought that was $15 million per American.
- floxy 10mo agotop 1%. So 52e12 / (0.01 * 340e6). I'm betting the mean and median are quite different.
- quaintdev 10mo agoThis world has enough for everyone's need but not enough for everyone's greed - Mahatma Gandhi
- anon291 10mo agoThese sorts of quotes from Gandhi and other INC leaders would be more meaningful had the INC not embraced the economic system that kept a majority of Indians in destitute poverty for decades post independence. Meanwhile they castigated the system whose even partial adoption has managed to lift more indians from desperation.
- megaman821 10mo agoFor things like food and building materials for shelter, the world does produce enough for everyone with the willingness to give, only political dysfunction prevents the needy from receiving.
- simianwords 10mo agoIts okay for people's wealth to increase as long as everyone else's is also increasing. Zero sum game mindset is tiring.
- Terr_ 10mo agoThe hopeful/depressing thing is that it's not necessarily greed. Or at least, not only greed. It's easy to construct simple economic models that lead to the same outcome, even where all entities are equal in every way except their balance amount. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-inevitable/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-ine... I say "hopeful" because it suggests we can develop new arrangements that are an improvement on the old ones, without the tougher-problem of eliminating greed.
- ThrowawayR2 10mo ago"The wealth of the top 1% reaches a record $52 trillion ... The total wealth of the top 10% ... reached a record $113 trillion", so subtracting, the other 9% has $61 trillion. "The top 1% held 29% of total household wealth in the second quarter ... The top 10% held 67% of total household wealth in the quarter...", so subtracting again, the other 9% has has 38% of total household wealth. When the SV techbros in the top 10% say "eat the rich", they're volunteering themselves to be on the menu too. Don't let 'em say otherwise.
- seattle_spring 10mo agoA $300k/yr "tech bro" lives a life much closer to someone making $50k than someone making $50m
- ThrowawayR2 10mo agoPerhaps but that $300k/yr tech bro is still making 6 times the median US individual income. It's actually ~$400k/yr for an ordinary L5 SWE at Google or SDE III at Amazon, or 8x the median US individual income. Surely they will be willing to contribute their fair share out of solidarity and, if not, the proletariat can knock on their door to remind them.
- seattle_spring 10mo agoW2 employees do already contribute far more of their income vs the ownership class that has an array of loans, loopholes, and tax-advantaged accounts (all cap gains, for example) at their disposal.
- commandlinefan 10mo agoIf somebody is making $400,000/year, they're contributing a little over $100,000 in income taxes. You don't think that's a fair share?
- ThrowawayR2 10mo ago
- akomtu 10mo agoIt seems there is a rule of thumb: the top 10% holds half of the assets. top 0.1% $23T (those with $46M) top 1% $52T top 10% $113T (those with $2M) It also seems to apply to spending too: "Consumers in the top 10% of the income distribution accounted for 49.2%"
- etyhhgfff 10mo agoBetter calculate the mean not avg.
- wrsh07 10mo ago> All wealth groups saw gains over the past year, with the net worth of the bottom half of Americans increasing 6% over the past 12 months, according to the Fed data. Yet the growth has been fastest for those at the very top. The top 1% have seen their wealth increase by $4 trillion over the past year, an increase of 7% I think the excessive use of absolute numbers in this article does the author and readers a disservice. It's like describing a chess game and saying "after five moves and fifty million possible games,..." Yes, it's worth noting that the wealth at the top increased faster than the wealth at the bottom (7% > 6%). And it compounds so that alone can increase the wealth gap.
- Terr_ 10mo ago> excessive use of absolute numbers in this article Especially as a "new record" threshold in nominal dollars. "January 1st: Record for highest Gregorian calendar year smashed, with upstart 2026 snatching the title from former champ 2025! Our panel of experts analyzes what this completely unexpected shakeup means for Time, and how it may impact you and your family."
- Terr_ 10mo agoThis headline formulation is statistical malpractice that news companies do to get clicks. It's defines a "record" that will get regularly broken by default even when nothing interesting changes. What we should be tracking and concerned-about is the proportional distribution of the total wealth among groups, which the article touches upon here: > The top 1% held 29% of total household wealth in the second quarter, compared with 28% in 2000. > The top 10% held 67% of total household wealth in the quarter while the bottom 90% held 33%.
- grunder_advice 10mo agoThat's only because you're using broad strokes. If you look at the top 0.1% and the top 0.01% and the top 0.001% you'll see that as you go to the extreme end the share of the total household wealth does tend upwards. Please see my other post for some numbers.
- m463 10mo agoI wonder if there could be a way to measure things like prosperity or civilization level. like % of people with: - a washing machine - access to clean water - more than one car or house - measures of access to health care, mental health care, etc I think there might be increases or declines most people don't realize
- anon291 10mo agoIsn't this HDI?
- philipkglass 10mo agoHDI captures some of these attributes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index The Human Development Index (HDI) is a statistical composite index of life expectancy, education (mean years of schooling completed and expected years of schooling upon entering the education system), and per capita income indicators, which is used to rank countries into four tiers of human development. A lot of the time I'd prefer to see "HDI recalculated without income" because income per capita doesn't seem like a direct indicator of human development. It's more of a proxy measure. Of course, I could say the same thing about how it measures education. Educational outcomes (like highly developed literacy) are better than how many years of schooling someone has. But these better measurements are also probably harder to collect across a broad group of countries.
- kelseyfrog 10mo agoWell of course. Their wealth is a product of multiplication while mine is a sum of addition. Can we reach the end state where they just have 100% and society collapses? It's just painful and frankly inhumane, to let this last part drag out for so long.
- anon291 10mo agoThe dollar is devaluing and the rich keep hard assets.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- rayiner 10mo agoI wonder what the numbers look like without stocks. On that front, the cognitive dissonance is kind of interesting. On one hand, people say that Elon Musk has 700 billion dollars and we should tax it to pay for free healthcare. On the other hand, people say that Tesla isn’t worth that much, and Elon didn’t create much value. Like, both of those things can’t be true. If it’s fake money, why do we care that some people have a ton of it? If Tesla is only worth as much as GM, Musk’s share of it is only worth $11 billion, not $200 billion+. Even if you confiscate that it’ll run the federal government for less than a day.
- a_ba 10mo agoOne reason you may want to care about this "fake money" is the buy, borrow, die tax avoidance scheme you can run if you're asset rich [1] [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyBorrowDieExplained/comments/1f26rsf/buy_borrow_die_explained/ https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyBorrowDieExplained/comments/1f26...
- rayiner 10mo agoIn that case, isn't the correct analysis how much money is borrowed? If Musk is borrowing $500 million, that won't fund the government very long.
- xyzzyz 10mo ago"Buy, borrow, die" is simply not a thing. It's a half-baked idea invented by academics, who don't realize that it's just not viable in practice. Billionaires do not actually utilize it[1]. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047272725002178 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
- ChrisArchitect 10mo agoRelated: Just 0.001% hold 3 times the wealth of poorest half of humanity, report finds https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46229346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46229346
- thelastgallon 10mo agoThis is the more important statistic!
- floxy 10mo agoIs that really saying much? Anyone have the shape of the distribution? I'm thinking many people have negative or close to zero net worth. If you have a dollar to your name, you might be richer than the bottom 48% of humanity combined.
- B-Con 10mo agoSo if the top 10% is $2m net worth, then what's the 1%? Are we supposed to mentally extrapolate? I hate when only part of the criteria are provided. Arrives like this need a table. If they don't have it, it calls into question whether they should be writing the article.
- rpdillon 10mo agoReminds me of one of my favorite resources that explains wealth distribution. Not sure when it was last updated, but the visualization using stacks of bills is nice. https://lcurve.org/ https://lcurve.org/
- mlsu 10mo agoIMO, the issue of 1% wealth is not an ethical one. I don't care how much money anyone makes, I don't think it's unethical for some people to have more and some people to have less. But, when we get to these scales, where a very small number of individuals controls large amounts of social resources, it becomes a society-wide efficiency issue. Solitary individuals cannot allocate capital as well as large collections of people can. A thriving startup ecosystem is better than a single person picking winners and losers. When you have individuals controlling huge swathes of resources, you get weird outcomes, like the Metaverse or WeWork or the Line. These things are monumental wastes of human effort, and they naturally arise when the distribution of wealth becomes too extreme. And it gets worse and worse when they begin suppressing private enterprise by leveraging the state, which is certainly already happening (see: tech execs paying $1m to stand behind DJT at the inauguration). I don't care about the individual "The 1%". I don't care who they are, how craven and greedy, how creepy, how ugly, how disgusting. I don't care whether they are going to heaven or hell. What I care about is that they are burning vast amounts of human potential on things that don't benefit anyone at all. They're wasting huge amounts of time. I think about this every time I have to wait 3h on hold with a huge, bloated, inefficient corporation, whose owner spends a quarter of their time schmoozing in Washington D.C: a startup should be there competing, preventing me from wasting my time!
- Kon5ole 10mo agoWealth reporting in the press is so bad it seems like WWE-style entertainment for people who like money more than they like men in tights.