Understanding Extreme Wealth Today
📷 credit: StockCake
The following was originally published in Mike Gast's Organize the Rich Substack in a post entitled “Who are the wealthy in the US today?”. Mike is a longtime friend and colleague of our founder Jason Franklin since their organizing time together in Resource Generation in the early 2000s through to today.
I loved your latest article (A six pack of election related reflections) and the ideas behind it and agree 100% with your fourth point about the need for some serious and thoughtful power mapping…but just a note that the Street Insider article of "25 wealthiest heirs" was out of date and frankly badly done and deceptive in its framing. It came from Investing.com which often publishes spammy "articles" built by AI scraping of other data and click-baity combinations of publicly available or Wikipedia information. Even the “author” of the article, credited as Audrey Kyanova, seems to be a fake account/name.
So, the idea to map wealthy heirs is needed but, while all of the people in that Street Insider article are wealthy, none of them are among the richest heirs and only two would make it to most thoughtful people's list of possible wealthiest heirs.
Who are the wealthy in the US today?
It's hard for people to wrap their heads around the extreme wealth concentration in the US right now. As noted by the New York Times, we’re facing the greatest wealth transfer in American history. A projected $84 trillion in assets is set to change hands over the next 20 years, and the top 10% wealthiest Americans control over 50% of those assets.
The Forbes 400, while imperfect, is the most accurate and publicly available list of the wealthiest people in the US today. Forbes spends a lot of time trying to estimate the wealth of people who are constantly trying to hide or exaggerate their assets, not an easy task.
From Mapped: Where do the wealthiest people in the world live? by Omri Wallach
The current intro to the Forbes 400 notes: "The wealthiest people in America have never been wealthier. The 400 richest people in America are having a rollicking time in the roaring 2020s. In all, they are worth a record $5.4 trillion, up nearly $1 trillion from last year. A dozen have $100 billion-plus fortunes, also a record. And admission to this elite club is pricier than ever: A minimum net worth of $3.3 billion is required, up $400 million since 2023."
Right now, the Forbes Real Time Billionaire List counts 762 Americans among the world’s 2,740 billionaires, meaning 362 billionaires don't even make the Forbes 400 list. This is mind boggling and such a reminder of how skewed the wealth concentration in this country has become.
Additionally, talking about millionaires as wealthy these days is almost no longer useful. It is true but it can skew our thinking. The 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances from the Federal Reserve found that approximately 18% of U.S. households had at least a seven figure net worth which translates to roughly 23.7 million millionaire households across the country.
From Mapped: The Richest Billionaires in US States by Avery Koop
The average net worth of Americans has exceeded $1M because the wealthiest people skew the average up, although median net worth also rose to $192,900 because of surging housing and stock prices. However, averages and medians hide extreme inequality. Over 25% of the American population have a negative net worth (debts exceed assets). And for almost all wealthy Americans, their home plus retirement savings represent the vast majority of their wealth, while for the extremely wealthy those represent a tiny slice of their assets. (Check out the chart at the bottom of this post for details.)
Talking about the top 1% of wealth holders in the US (1.27 million households) is a better frame to truly understand extreme wealth today. Estimates to be in the top 1% hover around $13-14M+ so we'd need to talk about "deca-millionaires to billionaires" to have a more accurate framing for extreme wealth in the US, but "millionaires & billionaires" rolls off the tongue better so our language keeps obscuring true inequality.
What wealthy means continues to change, but our society’s language and understanding have failed to keep up with the extreme wealth accumulation and concentration of the past quarter century.
From What assets make up wealth? by Jeff Desjardins
Who are the wealthiest heirs in the US?
Back to the question of heirs. If we want to talk about the 25 richest heirs in the US, are we talking about those who have inherited or those who will inherit?
In terms of those who will inherit, shockingly, Elon Musk's children probably account for a third of the wealthiest 25 heirs. He has 11 children, some likely won't inherit at all given the way he has treated them, but the rest will all count among the wealthiest heirs.
You'd likely round out the rest of a 25 person list with a subset of the 32 kids of the other eleven people with net assets over $100B - Bezos (4), Zuckerberg (3), Ellison (4), Buffet (3), Page (1), Brinn (3), Ballmer (3), Gates (3), Bloomberg (2), Huang (2), and Dell (4). However, five of these twelve people have signed the Giving Pledge (Bloomberg, Buffet, Ellison, Gates, and Zuckerberg) so if they fulfill their pledges some of their 15 kids may be excluded from this list.
Wealth inequality is so extreme in this country, it's hard for any of us to wrap our mind around the fact that even the two wealthiest heirs from that Street Insider article - Alex Soros (one of George Soros’ five children) or Eve Jobs (one of Steve Jobs’ four children) - wouldn't be among the 25 wealthiest heirs in the country.
From Breaking Down the Wealth of America’s Top 20 Billionaires by Marcus Lu. Graphic by Miranda Smith
If we want to think about the wealthiest people who have already inherited, it gets complicated. If we just think about the current wealthiest people in the US who mostly inherited their wealth, you could consider the 28 people who had a score of 1 (the lowest score) on the Forbes "Self Made Index".
According to a 2020 Forbes article on the self made index, that includes 75-year-old Christy Walton, who married Walton heir John T. Walton; brothers James and Austen Cargill (76 & 74 respectively); Daniel Pritzker (66); and others.
Or if we're talking just about wealthiest young inheritors, there are eight Americans under 50 on the Forbes real time billionaire list whose primary wealth came from inheritance.
Lukas Walton (youngest member of the Forbes 400, $34B), the wealthiest by far.
Scott Duncan ($8.3B, oil & gas company Enterprise Products).
Brothers Mat ($9B) & Justin ($4.8B) Ishbia whose wealth mostly comes from mortgage lender United Wholesale Mortgage founded by their father Jeff Ishbia.
Lynsi Snyder ($7.3B) who inherited ownership of and now runs In-n-Out Burger.
Brothers Alejandro ($2.5B) and Andres ($1.5B) Santo Domingo who are heirs to the SABMiller company which was sold to Anheuser-Busch InBev.
Stefan Soloviev ($2.3B) whose billionaire real estate developer father Sheldon Soloviev passed in 2020.
We’d need to spend more time to build a list of 25, but to round out a Top 10 I would add two other young (under 50) billionaires who earned significant wealth built on big inheritances:
Josh Kushner ($3.8B, brother to Trump son-in-law Jared) backed some of the decade's biggest startups through his VC firm including Instagram, Spotify, and OpenAI with wealth he inherited from his father, real estate tycoon Charles Kushner.
Ernest Garcia III ($4.2B) founded online automobile dealer Carvana in 2012 with funding from his billionaire father, Ernest Garcia II.
Anyway, none of this invalidates your arguments nor the need for mapping. It’s just a reminder that we need to make sure to map the right things, grounded in real understanding of what extreme wealth (and wealth inequality) looks like in American society today.
I have to add what is arguably the best graphic video explaining American wealth inequality produced in the last twenty years. Created by an anonymous freelance filmmaker, “Politizane” is based largely on reporting from Mother Jones. This video’s underlying assertions still hold true although American inequality is even greater today than it was in 2012, when it was made.