As of April 2025, Elon Musk was estimated as the wealthiest person in the United States with a net worth of around 342 billion dollars. Richest people in the United States - additional information Every year since 1982, the American business magazine Forbes has been compiling lists of the 400 richest people in the United States, known as the “Forbes 400.” In addition to that, since 1987, the publication has also been compiling a ranking of the 500 richest people in the world (excluding royalty and dictators), as well as more specialized tops, such as “World's Most Powerful Women,” “America's Richest Families,” “Most Valuable Brands” or “30 Under 30,” which focuses on young entrepreneurs from various fields which have gained millions in the past year by the use of social media, technical innovations and generally new and fresh approaches to business.

This statistic presents the American states with highest ratio of millionaire households per capita in 2020. In that year, New Jersey had the highest ratio of millionaire households per capita in the country, with 9.76 percent of households holding over one million U.S. dollars in assets.

The Gilded Age, taking place roughly from the 1870s until the outbreak of World War I (1914-1918), was a period of unprecedented rapid economic growth in the United States. The economy of the U.S. was dominated in many sectors by large industrial monopolies, such as Standard Oil, Carnegie Steel, and American Tobacco. The owner-managers of these firms came to be known as the 'robber barons', as they were seen as exploiting their companies' dominant market positions in order to enrich themselves. To this day, they remain some of the wealthiest people in American history - when the historical fortunes are adjusted to 2006 U.S. dollars, the current fortunes of today's richest U.S. residents such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are still less than those of Rockefeller and Carnegie. The Sherman Act, passed by congress in 1890, banned monopolies that put unreasonable restrictions on trade. Combined with the end of the first era of globalization, brought on by the events of World War I, this marked the end of the era of dominance by large monopolies in the United States.

Graph and download economic data for Share of Net Worth Held by the Top 0.1% (99.9th to 100th Wealth Percentiles) (WFRBSTP1300) from Q3 1989 to Q1 2025 about shares, net worth, wealth, percentile, Net, and USA.

In the first quarter of 2024, almost two-thirds percent of the total wealth in the United States was owned by the top 10 percent of earners. In comparison, the lowest 50 percent of earners only owned 2.5 percent of the total wealth. Income inequality in the U.S. Despite the idea that the United States is a country where hard work and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps will inevitably lead to success, this is often not the case. In 2023, 7.4 percent of U.S. households had an annual income under 15,000 U.S. dollars. With such a small percentage of people in the United States owning such a vast majority of the country’s wealth, the gap between the rich and poor in America remains stark. The top one percent The United States follows closely behind China as the country with the most billionaires in the world. Elon Musk alone held around 219 billion U.S. dollars in 2022. Over the past 50 years, the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio has exploded, causing the gap between rich and poor to grow, with some economists theorizing that this gap is the largest it has been since right before the Great Depression.

In the third quarter of 2024, the top ten percent of earners in the United States held over ** percent of total wealth. This is fairly consistent with the second quarter of 2024. Comparatively, the wealth of the bottom ** percent of earners has been slowly increasing since the start of the *****, though remains low. Wealth distribution in the United States by generation can be found here.

Residents of the District of Columbia had the highest personal income per capita in 2023, at ******* U.S. dollars. Mississippi residents, on the other hand, had the lowest personal income per capita, at ****** U.S. dollars. What is personal income? Personal income is the income that a worker receives from all sources, including salary, wages, bonuses, income from self-employment, dividends from investments, and receipts from real estate investments. Because of this, total personal income is different from the average wage, as personal income takes more factors into account than just salary and compensation. Income in the United States Wages and salaries in the United States can vary greatly depending on the profession a person is in, and the rise (or fall) of wages is seen as a key economic indicator as to the financial health of the country’s residents. In recent years, the increasing gap between CEO compensation and the compensation of the average worker has brought the issue of stagnating wages to the forefront of the national conversation.

Graph and download economic data for Net Worth Held by the Bottom 50% (1st to 50th Wealth Percentiles) (WFRBLB50107) from Q3 1989 to Q1 2025 about net worth, wealth, percentile, Net, and USA.

Dataset Card for 100 Richest People In World

  Dataset Summary

This dataset contains the list of Top 100 Richest People in the World Column Information:-

Name - Person Name NetWorth - His/Her Networth Age - Person Age Country - The country person belongs to Source - Information Source Industry - Expertise Domain

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[More Information Needed]… See the full description on the dataset page: https://huggingface.co/datasets/nateraw/100-richest-people-in-world.

As of March 2024, California was the U.S. state with most billionaires, with *** billionaires calling the state home. New York was second, with *** resident billionaires.

A dataset listing the 20 richest counties in Maryland for 2024, including information on rank, county, population, average income, and median income.

Why do the rich and poor support different parties in some places? We argue that voting along class lines is more likely to occur where states can tax the income and assets of the wealthy. In low bureaucratic capacity states, the rich are less likely to participate in electoral politics because they have less to fear from redistributive policy. When wealthy citizens abstain from voting, politicians face a more impoverished electorate. Because politicians cannot credibly campaign on anti-tax platforms, they are less likely to emphasize redistribution and partisan preferences are less likely to diverge across income groups. Using cross-national survey data, we show there is more class voting in countries with greater bureaucratic capacity. We also show that class voting and fiscal capacity were correlated in the United States in the mid-1930s when state-level revenue collection and party systems were less dependent on national economic policy.

The university in the United States with the largest endowment market value in 2024 was Harvard University, with an endowment fund value of about 51.98 billion U.S. dollars. U.S. higher education Colleges and universities in the United States rank highly among the world’s most prestigious institutions of higher education. Many universities are particularly well known for their strong research capabilities and their connections to many Nobel Prize winning laureates.The U.S. university system is largely decentralized. Except for service academies and staff colleges, the federal government does not directly regulate universities; public universities are administered solely by the individual states. Besides the state administered public universities, there are many private universities in the United States, most are non-profit institutions, similar to the public universities, but there are also a number of institutions that rely on profit (Walden University in Minnesota, for example).In general, tuition fees are required to be paid by students at American universities. Public universities generally charge lower tuition rates to in-state students, than to out-of-state students. Private universities are often much more expensive than public ones because they do not receive funding from state governments.American students are often required to take out student loans to supplement scholarships and grants provided by diverse sources to be able to pay for tuition. Student debt has become a major issue in the United States in recent years, with many Americans unsure if they can even afford to pay off their student loans in the future.

About 50.4 percent of the household income of private households in the U.S. were earned by the highest quintile in 2023, which are the upper 20 percent of the workers. In contrast to that, in the same year, only 3.5 percent of the household income was earned by the lowest quintile. This relation between the quintiles is indicative of the level of income inequality in the United States. Income inequalityIncome inequality is a big topic for public discussion in the United States. About 65 percent of U.S. Americans think that the gap between the rich and the poor has gotten larger in the past ten years. This impression is backed up by U.S. census data showing that the Gini-coefficient for income distribution in the United States has been increasing constantly over the past decades for individuals and households. The Gini coefficient for individual earnings of full-time, year round workers has increased between 1990 and 2020 from 0.36 to 0.42, for example. This indicates an increase in concentration of income. In general, the Gini coefficient is calculated by looking at average income rates. A score of zero would reflect perfect income equality and a score of one indicates a society where one person would have all the money and all other people have nothing. Income distribution is also affected by region. The state of New York had the widest gap between rich and poor people in the United States, with a Gini coefficient of 0.51, as of 2019. In global comparison, South Africa led the ranking of the 20 countries with the biggest inequality in income distribution in 2018. South Africa had a score of 63 points, based on the Gini coefficient. On the other hand, the Gini coefficient stood at 16.6 in Azerbaijan, indicating that income is widely spread among the population and not concentrated on a few rich individuals or families. Slovenia led the ranking of the 20 countries with the greatest income distribution equality in 2018.

While most Americans appear to acknowledge the large gap between the rich and the poor in the U.S., it is not clear if the public is aware of recent changes in income inequality. Even though economic inequality has grown substantially in recent decades, studies have shown that the public's perception of growing income disparities has remained mostly unchanged since the 1980s. This research offers an alternative approach to evaluating how public perceptions of inequality are developed. Centrally, it conceptualizes the public's response to growing economic disparities by applying theories of macro-political behavior and place-based contextual effects to the formation of aggregate perceptions about income inequality. It is argued that most of the public relies on basic information about the economy to form attitudes about inequality and that geographic context---in this case, the American states---plays a role in how views of income disparities are produced. A new measure of state perceptions of growing economic inequality over a 25-year period is used to examine whether the public is responsive to objective changes in economic inequality. Time-series cross-sectional analyses suggest that the public's perceptions of growing inequality are largely influenced by objective state economic indicators and state political ideology. This research has implications for how knowledgeable the public is of disparities between the rich and the poor, whether state context influences attitudes about inequality, and what role the public will have in determining how expanding income differences are addressed through government policy.

As of August 2024, a combined value of 856 billion U.S. dollars was held by the top five wealthiest billionaires in the United States. According to the source, the five wealthiest billionaires were Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, and Warren Buffett.

Graph and download economic data for Share of Corporate Equities and Mutual Fund Shares Held by the Top 1% (99th to 100th Wealth Percentiles) (WFRBST01122) from Q3 1989 to Q1 2025 about mutual funds, wealth, equity, percentile, corporate, and USA.

A dataset listing the richest zip codes in New York per the most current US Census data, including information on rank and average income.

Some argue that the right kinds of institutions mitigate, or even prevent, the development of “natural resource curses.” Rulers with access to resource wealth, however, are unlikely to adopt such institutions, because doing so would undermine their discretionary power. We examine this proposition by testing whether countries with access to natural resource wealth prove less likely to adopt transparency-promoting Freedom of Information (FOI) laws. Using panel data on 139 countries between 1980 and 2012 (33 years), we find that, after accounting for current levels of democracy and the quality of institutions, countries deriving rents from natural resource are, indeed, less likely to adopt FOI laws. We also find that oil, but not other kinds of resources, is robustly related to a lower probability of adopting FOI laws. However, in countries with strong democracy and high institutional quality, higher income from resources is positively associated with the chance of adopting FOI laws. This suggests that rulers of countries with high resource wealth need to face high political constraints already before they adopt institutional changes. It follows that global policy aimed at increasing transparency within resource-wealthy states should focus efforts on strengthening democracy in ways that increase political competition.

This survey represents the thoughts of the U.S. population concerning the income gap between the rich and the poor in 2012. In 2012, 65 percent of the respondents thought that the income gap between the rich and the poor in the United States has gotten larger in the past ten years. The number of ultra high net worth individuals in each region worldwide can be accessed here.