The wealthiest American, Jeff Bezos, passed that milestone a few years back. A $10-billion fortune today merely gets its holder into America’s wealthiest top 50.Įxtreme wealth in America now starts at a $100-billion net-worth mark.
By 1998, five Americans boasted $12 billion or more in wealth.ĭecabillionaire status, back in the 1990s, put you at America’s wealth pinnacle.
At the time, the pair rated as America’s only decabillionaires. Bill Gates topped the 1996 Forbes 400 list with a net worth reported at $18.5 billion, with Warren Buffett close behind at $15 billion.
You need to become a decabillionaire and sit on a fortune worth $10 billion.Īmericans first reached the decabillionaire milestone in the mid-1990s. You need to graduate to a higher wealth class. To gain today’s super-rich status, a $1-billion fortune will simply not do. A mere $1 billion no longer brings the status that the term billionaire once bestowed. But Tiger, culturally speaking, hasn’t yet entered the ranks of the super rich. Tiger, statistically speaking, has almost become a billionaire.
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Tiger Woods has earned over $1.4 billion since turning pro and at last count sported a net worth of $800 million. How zany has our reality become? A billion dollars won’t get you a PGA tour card, but a PGA tour card might get you a billion dollars.
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That person, if alive and still saving here in the 21st century, would not yet have put away a billion dollars.ĭespite this enormity of billion-dollar-fortunes, we have more billionaires in the United States today than professional golfers with PGA tour cards. Suppose someone who sailed with Columbus over 500 years ago had started saving $5,000 per day on the way to the New World. A billion dollars, we need to remind ourselves, amounts to an almost unimaginable level of fortune. Billionaire status will have almost become ho-hum.Īnd that rates as a remarkable development. If that line continues, America will soon be home to 1,000 billionaires. This billionaire total does bounce a bit daily as the stock market fluctuates, but the trend line has been consistent. Our current billionaire population? A recent Institute for Policy Studies report counted 643 American billionaires. In a country of 200 million, these 13 deep pockets made for an ultra-exclusive club. Back in 1982, the debut year of the annual Forbes 400 list of America’s richest, the United States hosted just 13 billionaires. Millionaires in the United States clearly no longer belong to an exclusive club. Over 10 million American households currently hold net worths over $1 million. But not all that much out of the ordinary. So millionaires, overall, still rate as something out of the ordinary. Many millions of households have no wealth at all. Roughly half our households have no more than $100,000 in net worth, and most of these households have considerably less. At that average, a family of three worth a million dollars turns out to be barely better off than any family of three would be if our country’s wealth were spread perfectly even.Īmerica’s wealth, of course, doesn’t spread anything close to even. Add up all our nation’s personal wealth, divide by our number of people, and we have an average wealth per person in the United States today of about $300,000. You don’t hear much about millionaires these days in America.