The richest Americans now hoard a bigger wealth share than the robber barons — a 100-year high, economists say. And the gap is still growing

“In 1910, the richest 0.00001 percent of Americans owned wealth equivalent to 4 percent of U.S. national income,” said Gabriel Zucman, professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics, in a recent Substack post, and subsequent interview with economist Paul Krugman. “Today, that number has risen to 12 percent. The wealth and power of oligarchs far exceed their Gilded Age peak.”

The U.S. holds the highest number of billionaires in 2026, at 979, according to Forbes latest World’s Billionaires List, claiming 15 of the world’s top 20 highest-earning individuals. All told, U.S. billionaires have $5.7 trillion in assets.

The gap between the wealthy and the lowest-income earners in the U.S. has expanded significantly

In Zucman’s interview with Krugman, the economists noted that the wealth gap is one of the biggest risks the U.S. economy has faced in decades. These issues are at the top of that challenge list.

The top of the wealth gap is not a “tiny number”

Responding to a Krugman query on the severity of the U.S. inequality gap, Zucman didn’t miss words. “The focus is on the really narrow, very, very top of the distribution, the top 0.0001% that’s really a tiny number of individuals,” Zucman noted. “That’s about 19 households today. It was four households in 1913. But this is where a lot of the action is taking place today.”

While Zucman noted the similarities between the Gilded Age and the current American high-wealth class, he also told Krugman the rate of income disparity has accelerated in the last five decades, and it’s all in favor of the upper 1%.

In particular, the super-rich owed wealth the equivalent of 0.3% of the total income of all Americans. Today, it’s 12%, increasing the wealth gap by a factor of almost 40. “That means if the 19 wealthiest people in the U.S. spent all their wealth, they could buy the equivalent of 10% of the value of all the goods and services that are produced in a given year in the U.S.,” Zucman said

Zucman also pointed out how the ultra-rich aren’t spending down their wealth, a long-debated economic factor known as the trickle-down effect. “It’s just an illustration of the overwhelming economic power that the rich have and the power that they have to buy elections, to buy media, to buy influence, to buy competitors,” Zucman added.

The U.S. economy is tracking the French model

The accelerated concentration of wealth in the highest of the upper-class tier has similarities with one of America’s allies.

**“**Look at what happened in France, where France in many ways is sadly more advanced than the U.S. down that road of oligarchic control of the media,” Zuchman said. “Eighty percent of the private press belongs to billionaires. There’s been massive investment. They’ve bought all the TV channels, everything that can be bought, essentially, in terms of media over the last few years.”

Zucman said France’s wealth class is using its cash load as a machine to fight any kind of policy, especially tax policy, that makes them pay higher taxes. Now he says France has very serious public finance problems, including a public deficit of 5% of GDP per year.

“(France) is completely unable to pass any kind of legislation that would increase taxes paid by the super-rich by one cent,” Zucman noted. “It’s in large part because of such tremendous control of the media and hence over the public conversation on these issues by the super-rich.

America’s ultra-rich may not have the hordes of cash, at least measured by income terms

Professional finance experts say that while America’s uber-rich aren’t looking for quarters in the couch cushions, they’re not quite as wealthy as economists, and it all comes down to taxes.

“There’s a simple reason for this,” George Dimov, CPA and founder at Boston-based Dimov Tax and Accounting, told Moneywise. “Most of that wealth has never been taxed, because the people who have it have never sold it.”

The chief issue is that if a wealthy individual’s wealth rises from ten million dollars to ten billion dollars and if the individual doesn’t sell that gain, it’s not considered income under United States law.

“It’s wealth on paper and wealth on paper is not taxed,” Dimov said. “You can borrow money against it to live on because loans are not considered income either.”

That’s one way affluent Americans keep wealth in the family. When a wealthy individual passes away, the value of the stock resets to its current value, so the entire gain the wealthy individual gains over a lifetime disappears and the people who inherit your wealth don’t owe any income tax on it. “People call this strategy ‘buy, borrow, die,” Dimov said. “It’s not a loophole that someone found; it’s how the tax code works.”

Under the U.S. tax system, it’s difficult to tax wealth, but here’s one way out

While the rich, as the saying goes, only get richer, their wealth isn’t trickling down to the rest of the country, and that’s partly by an unevenly designed tax structure.