There’s a billionaire in nearly every state.
Some have several – 189 people in California have a combined net worth of more than $1 trillion, nearly the equivalent of Canada’s GDP.
New York has 126 billionaires, with a combined net worth of $672.2bn.
In all, America is home to 724 billionaires, according to a 2021 assessment from Forbes. Their combined net worth is more than $4.4 trillion.
Eight of the top 10 wealthiest people in the world all live in the US.
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Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Tesla’s Elon Musk, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, and Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin have amassed a combined wealth of more than $728.5 billion.
Forbes added more than 600 people to its global billionaires list for 2021, now totalling 2,755 people. Eighty-six percent are much wealthier today than they were one year ago, with $5 trillion added to their combined wealth over the last year. Those 2,755 people have a combined net worth of $13 trillion.
Mr Bezos, whose estimated wealth tops $177bn, is once again at the top of the list, followed by Mr Musk, whose net worth is $151bn.
The latter’s recent move to Texas makes him the state’s wealthiest man, while Mr Bezos remains the richest person in Washington state.
Former New York mayor and also-ran Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, with a net worth of $59bn, is the state’s richest person.
The Walton family of Arkansas, behind the global retail-giant Walmart, remain one of the nation’s wealthiest dynasties, with more than $200bn among its members.
In California, the top five wealthiest people in the state made their fortunes from Big Tech and social media – a combined $336.9bn.
Explosive wealth among the richest people in the US followed a destructive year of mass unemployment and lost income for nearly half of all American households.
More than 40 million Americans were unemployed within the early months of the pandemic, and roughly 4 in 10 Americans reported financial impacts from the loss of a job or income during the public health crisis, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center poll.
Last month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that nearly 2.4 million Americans – roughly a quarter of all jobless Americans – have been without work for 52 weeks or longer.
That figure is likely to grow – the latest snapshot does not capture certain workers, or people who quit their jobs for health or other reasons, or the surge of unemployment claims from late March and April 2020.
