Forbes recently published the Forbes 400 List for 2024, listing the 400 richest people in the United States. This inspired me to make a histogram to show the distribution of wealth in the United States. It turns out that if you put Elon Musk on the graph, almost the entire US population is crammed into a vertical bar, one pixel wide. Each pixel is $500 million wide, illustrating that $500 million essentially rounds to zero from the perspective of the wealthiest Americans.
The histogram above shows the wealth distribution in red. Note that the visible red line is one pixel wide at the left and disappears everywhere else—this is the important point: essentially the entire US population is in that first bar. The graph is drawn with the scale of 1 pixel = $500 million in the X axis, and 1 pixel = 1 million people in the Y axis. Away from the origin, the red line is invisible—a tiny fraction of a pixel tall since so few people have more than 500 million dollars.
Since the median US household wealth is about $190,000, half the population would be crammed into a microscopic red line 1/2500 of a pixel wide using the scale above. (The line would be much narrower than the wavelength of light so it would be literally invisible). The very rich are so rich that you could take someone with a thousand times the median amount of money, and they would still have almost nothing compared to the richest Americans. If you increased their money by a factor of a thousand yet again, you'd be at Bezos' level, but still well short of Elon Musk.
Another way to visualize the extreme distribution of wealth in the US is to imagine everyone in the US standing up while someone counts off millions of dollars, once per second. When your net worth is reached, you sit down. At the first count of $1 million, most people sit down, with 22 million people left standing. As the count continues—$2 million, $3 million, $4 million—more people sit down. After 6 seconds, everyone except the "1%" has taken their seat. As the counting approaches the 17-minute mark, only billionaires are left standing, but there are still days of counting ahead. Bill Gates sits down after a bit over one day, leaving 8 people, but the process is nowhere near the end. After about two days and 20 hours of counting, Elon Musk finally sits down.
Sources
The main source of data is the Forbes 400 List for 2024. Forbes claims there are 813 billionaires in the US here. Median wealth data is from the Federal Reserve; note that it is from 2022 and household rather than personal. The current US population estimate is from Worldometer. I estimated wealth above $500 million, extrapolating from 2019 data.
I made a similar graph in 2013; you can see my post here for comparison.
Disclaimers: Wealth data has a lot of sources of error including people vs households, what gets counted, and changing time periods, but I've tried to make this graph as accurate as possible. I'm not making any prescriptive judgements here, just presenting the data. Obviously, if you want to see the details of the curve, a logarithmic scale makes more sense, but I want to show the "true" shape of the curve. I should also mention that wealth and income are very different things; this post looks strictly at wealth.
21 comments:
I notice that at least seven of the top ten billionaires are Democrats. I guess Democrats are now the party of the rich.
Both sides of the aisle embraced neoliberalism a long time ago.
I agree, we desperately need a wealth tax.
Those are the only billionaires listed, there are a lot ore, and about 75 percent support republicans
Fascinating that the diagram will look almost the same for the world population.
I wonder what the chart looks like when we correct their Dollar-equivalent worth by some sort of relative value to society. Say one of them single-handedly achieves world peace, reverses climate change, unlocks immortality, that sort of thing: I would argue that they have earned their billions. But from a true 35,000ft perspective, all of those billionaires had a good idea, got lucky, and ran with it.
Here's another way to visualize this level of extreme wealth, interactive website with lots of scrolling: https://engaging-data.com/how-rich-is-elon-musk/
Great graphic thank you Ken. Something is going wrong with it all. Needs a wee reset to stop astonishing wealth that really isn't deserved.
Whatever party they are, if they are rich, they are exploiting people. But there is one party that desperately wants to keep the rich, rich and that's the republicans
It's surprising to us if we focus on the dollar amounts. If we look at it in terms of something akin to "kingships", then this kind of disparity is not unusual during the span of time that we have populated the earth. Take a look at the great empires of the past. All governed by kings and everything in their kingdom was theirs. There were rich underlings also, but only because the king promoted it, i.e. prefects or local rulers. And if they rebelled, well you know what happened. With Greece being the exception, it's only because in the past 400 years or so did we develop the idea of governance by the population which allowed many more people to retain wealth.
Ken, what point are you trying to make? That if you start a company that successfully delivers almost any product to your door in one day, lets you share email, vacation photos, chat with your extended family and friends at no cost, an electric car and inexpensive space launches, all the while employing hundreds of thousands of people in lucrative jobs, and allow any person to invest in your business and profit along with you - you can be become extraordinarily wealthy? Or are you trying to say people don't change and are jealous of success even if they benefit greatly from it?
For the love of god, could you at least put a little bit of effort in? I'm not even hard yet. -elon
good lord. those are my only 2 options?
if you profit beyond reason from the labor of others, or start a society-crushing social media data-mine sewer, or, best of all, a labor law, workplace safety law, rampant workplace racial abuse law violating company engaged in multiple frauds charging for technology you will never deliver, or promising to reinvent transportation with,(checks notes), a bus, or tunnel for single vehicles in a world where china already has 25000 miles of high speed rail working, then you aren't doing humanity any favors. you're just another greedy monster in a long line of kings and oligarchs. it is good to know that they will always have their lickspittle defenders, hoping for crumbs.
really, last commenter put it better..wipe your chin.
No crumbs or envy here. Plenty of thick loaves on the table and wiping my chin after drinking the exact same Cherry Coke my Uncle Warren drinks and helped me buy via allowing me to invest in his company. BTW, I just was riding on a high speed rail train in China a few weeks ago on vacation. So glad I have the money to travel and experience the world with my family thanks to Paul A. & Bill G. letting me invest along with them. Imagine me, a person who started out at minimum wage in a factory doing manual labor now lives a life of accomplishment, wonder, and plenty - all the while being deeply appreciative of the benefits of free enterprise.
Thanks for a post, very brave. In my opinion, the deepest problem with extreme wealth inequality is that it's a question of brain-cells. As power is concentrated in the wealthy, regardless of their good intentions, more relative power is concentrated in relatively fewer brain cells. This inevitably means greater instability, because although we all have flaws, their flaws get amplified a million more times than most of us.
Repost of the same comment (but this time with me logged in, feel free to delete the first one): Thanks for a post, very brave. In my opinion, the deepest problem with extreme wealth inequality is that it's a question of brain-cells. As power is concentrated in the wealthy, regardless of their good intentions, more relative power is concentrated in relatively fewer brain cells. This inevitably means greater instability, because although we all have flaws, their flaws get amplified a million more times than most of us.
Thank you Ken for this post, an interesting society-related follow-up to your Navajo rug & semiconductor post. The tension that we techno-nerds have to live with is that the gizmos we love so much (am looking at you Minuteman Stabilized Platform! B-36! Apollo Guidance Computer!) are born out of these great wealth "disparities" as largely created by the United States. Flatten the income distribution; flatten ambition; flatten intellectual drive - these are genuine concerns (or, to the Bolshevicks, cherished goals!) and, as the Kulaks learned, can lead to the sort of fatal tyranny we've so far avoided in the USA. Perhaps this graph would play better on an Atari 800 display, all of us congealed in a single raster column. As always, very much appreciate your work, and applaud your expansion of subject matter! Best, David G.
Both the examples you've given are a product of government-funded innovation. The AGC in particular by software engineers at MIT. The problem isn't that you can't accelerate technological development without wealth disparity, but that massive wealth inequality is an unstable positive feedback loop (as proved by WW1 and WW2 following the gilded-age).
i'd like to see a similar graph that takes the entire world's population into account... i wonder how musk, et al, compare with saudi arabian royalty or russian mobsters, for example...
Fascinating post on wealth distribution. Can you extend the same effort to a post regarding wealth creation?
Free enterprise with profits for some, but ruin and threat to their businesses and lives for many others.
Indeed, the richest do not just be rich and enjoy it, they also rule the world, crush others, behave like predators – while making sure to present a good image of themselves. Remember all the harm that Paul A. & Bill G.'s company ended up doing. Was it worth a little money to allow you to have fun?
Little or no freedom for almost everyone, in the end.
Fortunately, I had time to travel the world before big corporations plundered and destroyed my country.
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