The Forbes 400, 1982–2026
In 1982, when Forbes published its first list of the 400 richest Americans, the people on it owned of all household wealth in the United States. In 2026 they own , a fivefold increase.
Share of U.S. household wealth owned by the Forbes 400
Total net worth of the list divided by U.S. household net worth
The usual explanation is that the rich own stocks, stocks outpace the rest of the economy, and so the rich pull ahead. That is part of the story. But the other part is that the list keeps changing. Very few of the people who were at the top in 1982 are still there. This page shows how much each part contributes, following Gomez (2023), with the data updated through 2026.
The 400 richest Americans of 1982
Each square is one person, ranked from No. 1 (top left).
This is the first Forbes 400. At No. 1 is the shipping magnate Daniel Ludwig, worth $2 billion. It took $75 million to make the list.
Ten years later, only of these 400 people were still on the list.
By 2002, .
In 2026, remain: .
Everyone else died, split their fortune among heirs, or was overtaken by someone richer.
Turnover happens every year, not just over decades. To see how, zoom in on the 40 richest Americans and follow them from the 2020 list to the 2021 list.
The top 40, 2020 to 2021
These are the 40 richest Americans in September 2020, on the left, and a year later, on the right. 33 people were in the top 40 both years. The gray lines connect their ranks. Jeff Bezos was first both times.
One of the 2020 top 40 died before the next list: the casino owner Sheldon Adelson, in January 2021. His fortune leaves the top 40.
Six fell below the top 40, including the investor Carl Icahn, the hedge fund founders Ken Griffin and Steve Cohen, and the real estate developer Donald Bren. Their fortunes did not collapse. Others simply grew faster.
Six others took their seats. Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the crypto exchange FTX, was not on the list at all in 2020. A year later he was No. 32, with $22.5 billion. Nvidia's Jensen Huang rose from No. 51 to No. 34.
Adelson's fortune passed to his widow, Miriam Adelson, who enters the top 40 by inheritance. Deaths, heirs and population growth are what economists call demography.
Pick any pair of years:
These changes in composition affect the growth of top wealth shares every year. In fact, every year, we can decompose the growth of top wealth shares into three terms: drift, displacement and demography. (The paper calls the first two the within and between terms.) We can visualize them with the following example.
An illustration: the top 40 among 420 fortunes
Height is wealth (log scale); dots above the dashed line are the top 40.
Change in the top average
Each dot is a fortune. The richer it is, the higher it sits. The 40 dots above the dashed line are the top.
Now let one year pass, one step at a time.
First, some people die: here two people at the top die. Their fortunes leave the top, and the average is now computed over those still alive. This is the exit term, the first part of demography. Here it raises the average slightly, because the two who died were poorer than the top's average.
Follow only the people who started the year in the top and are still alive, shown in blue.
Over the year, each of their fortunes grows at its own rate. Some rise a lot, some fall, some slip below the line. Each bar shows how far one fortune moved. The change in their average wealth is the drift: the average of these moves, with the biggest fortunes counting the most.
Drift is what most people have in mind: the rich own stocks, and stocks do well.
Now turn to everyone who was not in the top. They are highlighted, and the people we just followed are faded.
Their fortunes moved during the year too. Many of them also rose above the initial cutoff.
Now rank everyone still alive again and select the richest 38—the same number as the surviving members of the original top 40. Some who started below the top are now above the new cutoff. Conversely, some who started in the top are now below it. Replace those who fell out with those who broke in.
This is the displacement term, which contributes to the growth of top wealth shares. It is always positive when people swap places. The bars show why: everyone who broke in sits above the new cutoff, and everyone who fell out sits below it. So the newcomers are always richer than the people they replace, and the average of the top rises again. The displacement term is larger when fortunes diverge more.
Last, new people join. The fortunes of those who died pass to their heirs, who are new to the top: here two children split one fortune and a widow inherits the other. And because the population grew, the top also grows, from 40 to 41 seats.
Opening the top to these newcomers and bringing it to its new size is the entry term. Heirs usually hold less than the person they replace, so entry tends to pull the average down. Exit and entry together make up demography.
Because Forbes has published the list every year, the growth of the top's share can be split into drift, displacement and demography year by year. Here the top is the 350 richest Americans, adjusted for population growth.
Annual growth of the Forbes 400's share of U.S. wealth
Each dot is one year. It shows how fast the top's share of wealth grew between two lists. On average it grew a year.
Drift is the growth of the fortunes already at the top. It accounts for most of the ups and downs.
Displacement is never negative. It adds a year on average, almost half of the total. Without turnover at the top, the top's share would have grown half as fast.
Demography is a small, steady drag: a year on average. It barely changes over four decades.
Now gather each line's years into a column. Each cloud shows how much that force varies from year to year: drift swings widely, while displacement and demography barely move.
Average each cloud over all the years since 1983. The top's share grew a year. Drift added , displacement , and demography .
Turnover at the top accounts for almost half of the rise.
Let's now zoom in on the year-to-year variations of each term, starting with drift.
Drift follows the stock market, because the fortunes at the top are mostly stock: in the dot-com boom, in the bust, in the financial crisis, in the rally after COVID.
Booms and busts mostly cancel out. On average, drift adds a year: the fortunes at the top grow faster than the economy as a whole.
Now displacement up close. It comes in waves. It is high when a new technology or a new kind of finance lets fortunes grow very fast, and low when the existing fortunes consolidate.
Below the chart are the five biggest newcomers of each wave, ranked by their wealth relative to the average American household.
The 1980s: corporate raiders like Saul Steinberg, and the first personal-computer fortunes, such as TeleVideo's Kyupin Hwang and ComputerLand's William Millard. Displacement averaged a year.
The dot-com boom: the fiber-optics founders David Huber and Gururaj Deshpande, eBay's Pierre Omidyar, and Ty Warner, the maker of Beanie Babies. Displacement averaged a year.
After a very calm period, displacement came back. Crypto, SPACs and pandemic stocks brought in Sam Bankman-Fried, the trader Jeff Yass and Coinbase's Brian Armstrong. Displacement reached in 2021, its highest level since 2001.
The AI boom starts where crypto stops: OpenAI's Greg Brockman, the robotics founder Brett Adcock, Surge AI's Edwin Chen and AppLovin's Adam Foroughi. Six co-founders of Anthropic also entered in 2026. Displacement rose from in 2023 to in 2026.
Across these waves, displacement has declined. Before 2000, it added a year on average. Since 2000, it has added only , even with the crypto and AI booms.
Why did it fall? Displacement depends on the ratio of two forces.
The first is the volatility of fortunes: how much they move in a year. The more they move, the more people swap places at the cutoff, and the bigger each swap.
The second is inequality within the top, and it matters in two ways. When the top is more unequal, fewer people sit close to the cutoff, so there are fewer swaps. And the cutoff sits far below the average fortune in the top, so each swap moves the average less.
To understand the role of each force, let's first look only at the effect of changes in inequality within the top. Suppose fortunes had moved every year exactly as much as they did in 1984–88, and only inequality within the top had risen. The green line shows what displacement would have been.
It falls from to about a year since 2020. Rising inequality within the top, on its own, cut the displacement term by about half.
The green line uses the model in the paper: it keeps the volatility of fortunes at its 1984–88 level and lets only inequality within the top change.
The difference between the two lines, shaded in orange, corresponds to the effect of changes in the volatility of fortunes. In the dot-com and crypto booms, fortunes were more volatile than in the 1980s and displacement rose above the line. In the calm 2010s, it fell below.
Since 2020, volatility has been about where it was in the 1980s. The actual term, a year, sits close to the green line. The decline since the 1980s comes from rising inequality within the top: high inequality within the top makes each new fortune count for less.
The gap also includes jumps from far below the list, which the model does not capture.
Since 2023, the top's share has grown a year, faster than in the dot-com boom. AI drives both forces.
Most of it is drift. The stock market has returned a year after inflation, well above its long-run average of , driving up existing fortunes.
AI is also minting new fortunes, and their contribution, displacement, rose from in 2023 to in 2026. But because the top is now already so unequal, even a wave of new fortunes adds less than the dot-com wave did.
Sources
Everything on this page comes from public data and code.