Editor’s note: This article was first published in September 2013. All figures are from the 2013 Forbes 400 list ($2 trillion in total, up $300 billion on 2012, and a record average net worth of $5 billion) and from 2013 reports on inequality.
The 400 richest Americans are worth $2 trillion (with a “t”), a new all-time record that highlights the huge gap between the richest and the poorest. The combined wealth of the members of the Forbes 400 list has grown by $300 billion compared with last year.
The average net worth of a Forbes 400 member is now $5 billion, the highest ever. To put that in perspective, these 400 people own more wealth than the annual GDP of Italy, Mexico, Spain or Canada.
(Read: The rich are now investing less and saving more)
These 400 people own more wealth than half of all other Americans combined.
For them there’s been no crisis; quite the opposite. According to CNBC, the gap between the richest 1% and the rest of the US population is the widest since 1928. Income inequality in the US has been rising for the last 30 years, but it’s in these last five years, since the crisis broke out, that the rich have become far too rich and the poor have become extremely poor.
Globally, the richest 1% of the world’s population controls 39% of global wealth.
Further reading
Featured image: Beyond My Ken, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
