Who are the wealthy in the US today?
And who are the top 25 wealthiest heirs? A response from Jason Franklin.
After my last post, I received an email response from my friend Jason Franklin, who these days runs a justice-centered philanthropic advising practice called Ktisis Capital. I immediately wanted to share it with you.
Through up-to-date statistics, names and visuals, Jason shares a picture of the top of the class pyramid in the US. I was blown away, both by the increase in so many of these numbers in the last 5-10 years, and by the mental map Jason has of the rich and their heirs, especially in the US.
I’m not surprised though. Jason is one of the most connected, widely engaged leaders and organizers in the field. I met him through Resource Generation (RG) in the mid 2000’s, when we were both in our twenties, and since then he has been board co-chair of RG, co-founded Solidaire, was the Executive Director of Bolder Giving, and much more.
The massive inequality detailed below is hard to wrap my mind around, infuriating and heartbreaking to really consider, and important to understand if we are to effectively organize even a small slice of the rich towards the common good.1
Note: I had a few thoughts that initially slowed me down in posting this reply. They are in the footnotes below.2
Thank you Jason for sharing this with us.
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From Jason:
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some serious and thoughtful power mapping…but just a note that the Street Insider article of "25 wealthiest heirs" was out of date and frankly badly done and deceptive in its framing.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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Below are images Jason sent me that visualize some of the data above and are examples of what mapping the rich, and understanding wealth and inequality today, can look like.
Enough Wealth to Warp the Universe by Hamilton Nolan is a great piece of writing helping us all understand just how much wealth is being consolidated in the hands of the few, and why it’s so vital that billionaires not exist and we hospice the rich (as a class of people not as humans) asap.
My first concern in sharing this piece is the way that my people, the single digit millionaires, the well-paid professionals making buckets investing in Wall Street, owning homes, and working for people farther up the class ladder, can use this information to distance ourselves from those ‘really rich people’ and evade taking responsibility for our role in the class system. We might not be part of the US 1% but we are a part of the global owning class, certainly part of the global 1%, and have an important role to play in going after and organizing wealthy people we’re connected to, including those above us on the class ladder. Looking at wealth is different from looking at class (one’s relationship to the means of production), and can be demobilizing if we’re not careful. More on this in my recent post, Always Compare Up.
My second concern is that the heirs mentioned in Jason’s list are my people, and lists like this can be used in dehumanizing ways. I want you to know that people like the heirs mentioned have been my classmates and are my friends. They are dear to me (as I know they are to Jason as well). Being on this list and in this article is a horrible thing. The wealth in these families, and the distance and distrust it breeds, has diminished their lives. I am furious and heartbroken at what it means to have or be born into this type of wealth…for the world, our collective well-being and for them. It is a curse that maims and distorts people’s humanity, while almost everyone says how lucky (or deserving of blame) they are. It is not worse than being born poor or working or middle class…though it can be. It is deeply misunderstood. I want every one of the people mentioned in this article to be organized and supported, mandated and enabled, to give back their wealth and rejoin the messy majority (ie the working class) in setting the world to right.
Jason's data and understandings are powerful. Can we bifurcate the list into 2 - those who are using the money to genuinely create important, at scale positive impact and those who seek financial gain at the expense of the rest of us, the planet, the universe?
So disturbing to think about the wealth gap, to look around and see the incredible harm it does. I really appreciated your points 1 and 2.