How Wealthy Was the 1% Each Year Since 1976

Oil magnate John D. Rockefeller is said to have become America’s first billionaire in 1916. Now, there are 2,755 billionaires in the world, with around 724 in the United States, according to Forbes. And there are predictions that Elon Musk could become the first trillionaire in the near future. (Here are countries with the richest rich people.)

It is no secret that the world’s rich are getting richer. In order to be considered a top one percenter, a U.S. household needs to make around $550,000 annually. This is the minimum. The average income for Americans in the top 1% is nearly $1.7 million, according to IRS data. The top 1%, which comprised 1.85 million U.S. households in 2021, currently hold over $50 trillion in wealth.

To identify the wealth of the top 1% the year you were born, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed the total wealth of the top 1% of households for each year going back to 1976 from Real Time Inequality. which provides statistics on how economic growth is distributed across groups.

An average household in the top 1% in 1976 had $4.3 million in wealth (adjusted for inflation), a figure that increased to $27.3 million per household in 2021. 

Total wealth among the 1% has risen from $4.24 trillion in 1976 to $50.55 trillion in 2021. During that time, the share of wealth the 1% captured increased from 23.9% to 38.9%. Meanwhile, according to the same source, the bottom 50% went from owning 0.2% of total wealth in 1976 to having a negative net wealth at -0.1% in 2021 – that’s negative $180.49 billion. (Here are the countries with the worst wealth inequality.)

The total wealth of the 1%, which was rising recently at about $2.5 trillion per year, skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Total wealth holdings of the 1% rose a whopping $5.6 trillion from 2020 to 2021 alone – the single highest annual wealth increase over the 45 years reviewed. From 2019 to 2020, wealth of the 1% increased by the second largest amount, at $5.5 trillion, while the third largest annual increase was from 2018 to 2019, at $4.4 trillion.

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