Everyone In America Is Even More Broke Than You Think

[elljay]

106. Top 1%

What is really amazing is that you hit the top 1% with an income of $250,000, putting you in the same percentile as Zuckerberg, Gates, Buffett, Adelson, et al. Here in Silicon Valley where I live, $250,000 will get you into the slightly upper middle class, but you are not at all wealthy. I imagine it is the same for places like NYC - once you factor in housing and other living costs, you are certainly not skiing in Gstaad with the upper crust. The difference between a suburban family in my town earning 250k and the Wall Street or Silicon Valley titans earning hundreds of millions, even billions per year is staggering. It is like the old joke that when you put a poor person together with Bill Gates, the average net worth of the people in that room is 40 billion. It is reflective of how bad the situation is for the bottom 99% of Americans to have a scale that skewed.