Sources & method
The Climb and the printable graph follow the data and calculations in Inequality in America: Companion by politizane (September 2026, v9.25.26), which documents every source, table, and adjustment behind the videos.
What each bar shows
The graph lines up U.S. households from poorest to richest in 100 groups of about 1.36 million households each. The little figures under the bars stand for households, not individual people.
- Bars 1 to 99 are estimated net worth at each percentile from the Federal Reserve’s 2023 Survey of Consumer Finances (via Don’t Quit Your Day Job’s percentile analysis), adjusted to 2026 dollars with a single factor of ×1.1 (Companion, Table 9 and Appendix 2). A percentile value estimates where households in that slice sit; it is not an exact count or the average of each group. The adjustment assumes wealth kept pace with prices, which it may not have.
- Bar 100, the top 1%, is an average: $55.03 trillion in net worth divided by 1,360,950 households, from the Federal Reserve’s Distributional Financial Accounts, Q1 2026 (Companion, Appendix 1).
- The top 0.1% ($184.2 million) is the same kind of average: $25.07 trillion over 136,095 households (DFA, Q1 2026).
- The 0.01% and 0.001% ($971.1 million and $5.1 billion) are estimates: the Companion applies World Inequality Database 2024 wealth shares to the 2026 DFA total. Treat them as approximations.
- Elon Musk (about $800 billion) is from the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires list as cited in the Companion, September 2026. Fortunes like this move with stock prices every day.
Debt below $0
The Companion’s chart (Table 9) shows the poorest 8% of households at $0 and notes they actually have less than nothing. This site plots their reported negative net worth instead, using the 2023 values in the Companion’s Appendix 2 with the same ×1.1 adjustment: from −$84,119 for the poorest 1% to $1 at the 8th percentile.
“What we think” and “Ideal”
In 2011, Michael Norton and Dan Ariely asked more than 5,000 Americans how they thought wealth was split between the five fifths of households, and how they would ideally split it. The Companion spreads those five shares smoothly across all 100 percentiles of the 2026 wealth total (Appendix 3). Many different curves fit five numbers, so these two shapes are illustrative. The actual distribution has much more claim to percentile-level detail.
“Who owns America?” shares
The “Actual” row is each fifth’s share of the total in the Companion’s Table 10 (calculated with the poorest 8% at $0): 0.06%, 0.99%, 3.61%, 9.69%, and 85.65%. “Think” and “Ideal” are Norton and Ariely’s survey shares. Labels on the bars are rounded, so they may not add to exactly 100%.
Scale and stacks of bills
- On screen, one pixel is $5,000.
- In the home-printer PDFs, one inch is $250,000; the banner uses its own scale, printed on it.
- Stack heights assume a U.S. $100 bill is 0.0043 inches thick.
Sources
- Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Distributional Financial Accounts, Q1 2026.
- Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Survey of Consumer Finances, 2023, via Don’t Quit Your Day Job, net worth percentiles.
- Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, household count in the top 0.1%, 2026 Q1.
- World Inequality Database, United States, 2024 wealth shares.
- Norton, Michael I., and Dan Ariely, “Building a Better America—One Wealth Quintile at a Time,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6, no. 1 (2011).
- Forbes, Real-Time Billionaires, as cited in the Companion, September 2026.
The Companion lists every source in full, chapter by chapter.