America’s 19 Richest Households Gain $1 Trillion

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Apr 24, 9:15AM EDT

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New research shows that America’s 19 richest households gained $1 trillion apiece last year.
The rise in the stock market accounted for much of their gains.

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America’s 19 Richest Households Gain $1 Trillion — © Alex Wong / Getty Images News via Getty Images

According to researcher Gabriel Zucman of the University of California, Berkeley, America’s 19 richest households gained $1 trillion last year. He used Federal Reserve data for part of his calculation. Based on the same metric, the total wealth of all Americans reached $148 trillion at the end of last year.

The group of 19 is 0.00001% of American households. According to The Wall Street Journal, “Those in Zucman’s research on the top 0.00001% in the U.S. are worth at least $45 billion per household and include Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and private-equity investor Stephen Schwarzman.”

The rise in the stock market accounted for a large part of their gains.

The figure should be no surprise. Even with a market sell-off in the early part of 2025, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index puts Musk’s net worth at $310 billion, followed by Bezos at $202 billion, Zuckerberg at $185 billion, Buffett at $164 billion, and Gates at $157 billion. That puts the top five people on the list with a net worth of $1.02 trillion.

None of the 500 billionaires on Bloomberg’s list has a net worth below $6.02 billion. According to J.P. Morgan, the total number of billionaires in the United States has reached 1,990.

At this point, the 2025 increase may be less than in 2024. So far this year, the net worth of top five billionaires has dropped to $161 billion.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.