The Forbes 400 Wealthiest Americans
Forbes 400 List of Wealthiest Americans 2021
[Forbes 400 Total wealth = $4.5 trillion (2021) … The 56 women in the Forbes 400 own total wealth = $572 bn]
By gender: 56 out of 400 = 14%
By total wealth: $572 billion out of $4500 billion = 12.7%
The Forbes 400 and other US Billionaires - 2021
A billion dollars in assets won’t get you a spot on the Forbes 400 any longer. In fact, in 2021, entry to this rarified group requires $2.9 billion in net worth. This is up from $2bn before the pandemic. Donald J. Trump has fallen off the list, as have Oprah Winfrey (at $2.6bn) and Kylie Jenner, who had held the distinction of being the youngest self-made billionaire ever on the list.
Along with the Fortune 400, the United States is home to 745 billionaires in 2021 (up from 585 billionaires in 2017) with a combined net worth of $5 trillion – ‘over $1 trillion of which has been added since the beginning of the pandemic, according to The Institute for Policy Studies. This wealth is a dramatic increase from the $2.7 trillion held by US billionaires four years earlier, according to Forbes list of the richest Americans in 2017.
The $5 trillion in wealth held by 745 US billionaires compares with a total of $3 trillion in net worth held by the bottom half of US households.
Just two men – Jeff Bezos, worth $201 billion and Elon Musk, worth $190.5 billion – in 2021 own or control more wealth as the bottom half of all Americans. Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife MacKenzie Scott is worth $58.5 billion, up more than $19 bn during the pandemic, even after giving away $8.6 bn of her wealth to various charities during the same period.
[Note: This is up from just three men in 2018 – Jeff Bezos ($160 billion, Bill Gates ($97 billion) and Warren Buffet ($88.3 billion) – who had as much wealth as the bottom half of all Americans in 2018, according to Forbes Institute for Policy Studies.]
Forbes also identifies that the richest 1% of Americans own more than half of all stocks.
In 2018, the United States had 77 female billionaires, a larger number than Germany (32), China (30) or Hong Kong (11). (These 77 were out of a total 586 billionaires in the US in 2018.)
According to Fortune Magazine, “the gender gap among the ultra-wealthy appears to be getting wider,” not narrower, with women comprising just under 12% of the global total.
Of the Forbes 400 list of the 400 wealthiest people in the United States, just 56 of them are women. Two of these women are listed in conjunction with their husbands. The majority of these billionaire women owe their place on the Forbes list to inherited wealth in some of America’s best-known companies, including Amazon (via divorce), Walmart (4 women), Fidelity Investments, Koch Industries, Mars (5 women), Hyatt, Cargill, Estée Lauder, SC Johnson, Apple, Disney, Little Caesar’s, Campbell Soup, In-N-Out Burger, Chick-fil-A, Enterprise Products pipelines (3 women), as well as casinos, roofing, media, automotive, medical equipment, transportation, laboratories, biotech, IT, health care, hotels, real estate, self-storage, sports, cosmetics, chemicals and others.
The self-made female billionaires on the list are few (although some founded the business with husbands or other relatives, or significantly grew a family enterprise). They include Diane Hendricks of ABC supply (roofing and siding), Marian Ilitch of Little Ceasar’s, computer programmer Judy Faulkner of Epic Systems (medical records software), Meg Whitman (who grew eBay in a decade to an $8bn business), and Thai Lee (SHI International; software and IT).
What will it take to get women in the Power Percentage of being half of the wealthiest Americans?
What will it take for women to own or control half of the wealth in America?