Here are some updated statistics on wealth:
Fidelity now has nearly 800,000 people with $1 million or more in their 401k plan. Fidelity also has 684,000 customers with $1 million or more in an IRA.
The Wall Street Journal says nearly 12,000 taxpayers had an IRA balance of $10 million or more in 2024. That’s up from 3,625 in 2019.
UBS data shows there are well over 23 million millionaires in the United States alone. Almost half a million new millionaires were created in 2025. Around the world there were one million entrants into the two-comma club last year.
This decade has seen an extraordinary increase in the wealth of Americans.
At the end of 2019 heading into the pandemic the net worth of American households was just shy of $109 trillion. Now it’s $174 trillion and counting.
Of course, that wealth still isn’t even distributed:
The top 1% controls one-third of the wealth in America. The top 10% has a 68% share of total wealth.
But the growth in each cohort this decade is impressive.
Wealth inequality still exists and will likely always exist but it’s good to see wealth grow across household demographics.
It’s also true that one million dollars doesn’t get you quite as far as it once did. Here’s what I wrote in Risk & Reward:
A million dollars doesn’t go nearly as far as it used to. One million dollars in 1993 was worth just $475,000 by the end of 2024. Said another way, it would take more than $2 million in 2024 to be on equal footing with $1 million in 1993 in terms of spending power. A 3% inflation rate cuts the value of a dollar in half in 23 years. At 4%, inflation cuts your money in half in 17 years.
There are a lot of rich people who will tell you a million dollars isn’t rich anymore.
According to the Schwab Modern Wealth Survey, Americans believe you need more than $830,000 to be “financial comfortable.” But to be considered wealthy, that number shoots up to $2.3 million:
Maybe it’s now the $2.3 millionaire next door.
But it’s important to recognize that millionaires are still a relatively small piece of the global pie. There’s a big number of millionaires in the United States but the millionaire class makes up just 1.5% of the global population:
And I know it’s easy to get mad at the wealthy class right now because inequality makes it feel like the game is rigged.
But I don’t subscribe to the idea that the American Dream is dead.
The Wall Street Journal published an excerpt from the upcoming book The Everywhere Millionaire, which chronicles the the hidden 1% who made their fortune outside of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
I love this story about Dick Portillo1:
Dick Portillo opened a hot-dog stand in 1963 without knowing how to cook a hot dog. Half a century later he sold the company for $1 billion. The proceeds bought a Chicago-area mansion, a private jet and a 12,000-square-foot waterfront home in Naples, Fla., with its own dock to moor his 130-foot yacht, Top Dog.
“I came from a poor family and at one time thought I didn’t have anything to offer the world,” Portillo wrote in a memoir. The youngest of three children, he was born in Chicago to immigrants from Mexico and Greece and raised partly in one of the city’s most notorious housing projects.
By 2014, the stand he’d built with $1,100 had become the Midwest’s largest privately owned restaurant company with 4,000 employees and no franchises or outside investors. A single Portillo’s could bring in $9 million a year, roughly three times a typical McDonald’s.
Rich families have a lot of built in advantages these days but it’s not just the rich getting richer:
Yet, the typical star founder is not a rich kid. Most come from poor or middle-class families, simply because there are 99 times as many people in the bottom 99% as in the top 1%. Among star founders, there are 2.5 times as many from poor backgrounds as from the top 1%. Only about a quarter of business owners worth $5 million or more inherited their companies.
Sure there are a lot of rich kids who will get a free pass in life because of their parent’s extreme wealth. But around 40% of the children born into the top 1% fall out of the top fifth of income entirely.
If you are rich you should consider yourself lucky. There are more rich people than ever today but it’s still a tiny fraction of the world’s population.
Two things can be true at the same time.
Wealth inequality is a real problem as the rich keep getting richer because they own the majority of the financial assets.
It’s also true that far more ordinary Americans are building wealth than ever before.
And it’s not just inheriting money from their rich parents.
People are building wealth by saving and investing wisely in their tax deferred retirement accounts, building equity in a business and investing in the stock market.
Michael and I talked about Everywhere Millionaires and more on this week’s Animal Spirits video:
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Further Reading:
How Rich Are You?
Now here’s what I’ve been reading lately:
Books:
1Portillo’s is one of my all-time favorite restaurants in Chicago.