Most writing about the very rich runs on the same handful of numbers, recycled from the same annual press releases. The pages below are the opposite: original analysis built from primary data, published as charts and tables you can look at yourself rather than as a figure buried in a paragraph.
Everything here follows the same rules as the rest of the site. Sources are named. Figures carry the year they belong to. Where a measurement is uncertain or a dataset has holes, the page says so out loud instead of smoothing over it.
The Forbes 400, 1982–2025
Forty-four years of the same list treated as a dataset rather than as an annual news event. What the price of admission actually was once inflation is taken out, how quickly the names turn over, and how the geography of American wealth has shifted.
Three findings worth the click. The entry threshold rose 15.2× in constant dollars — from $250M in 1982 money to $3.8B — which is a far steeper climb than the nominal figures suggest. Of the 436 people on the 1982 list, 8% were still on it thirty years later; that is the empirical version of the “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves” folklore, which is usually asserted and almost never measured. And New York’s share of the list fell from 22.5% to 13.5% while Florida’s rose from 5.4% to 13.5% — the two states crossed over.
The panel covers 1982–2017 and 2025, with a gap in between that every chart on the page breaks across rather than interpolating.
Anatomy of the Forbes 400 (2025)
The current list in cross-section: all 400 members broken down by industry, state, age, gender, and how the fortune was actually made. Finance supplies the most members; technology supplies the most money. Of 400 people, 263 are counted as self-made — but only 49 came from genuinely working-class backgrounds.
Paired with the written analysis in Anatomy of the Forbes 400.
A note on sources and reuse
These pages publish aggregate statistics and derived series — distributions, thresholds, survival rates, counts by category. They do not reproduce any year’s list, and there is no downloadable roster of names and net worths here.
The 1982–2017 panel derives from the replication data for Moretti and Wilson, Taxing Billionaires: Estate Taxes and the Geographical Location of the Ultra-Wealthy (2023), deposited at openICPSR. The 2025 cross-section is compiled from the published Forbes 400. Inflation adjustment uses CPI-U, US city average, annual average, not seasonally adjusted, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
If you want to cite a figure from either page, cite Forbes for the underlying list and the research paper where the historical panel is doing the work. Corrections are welcome and get fixed rather than argued about.
Looking for definitions rather than numbers? The Millionaire Glossary explains the terms.