Richest three men in USA have more wealth than the bottom 50%

A large fraction of the country has negative wealth (think recent graduates or just young households in debt). So if you have a net worth of $1.00 you have more wealth than a large % of the country combined.

This ^

The stat quoted by OP doesn't really say much of anything about the wealth of the top three individuals. It says a whole lot about the wealth (or lack thereof) of the bottom X %.

But the bottom X % are the ones most likely funneling their $ to the top 3.

Elon Musk is working hard right now to reduce his wealth.

Overpaid for Twitter, driving it into the ground and causing Tesla stock to drop as shareholders look at his erratic behavior.

So?

The tax structure needs to be changed to incentivize paying workers more than giving executives stock. Bonuses to execs do not correlate with corporate success.

Yeah, that's not how it works. The bottom X percent doesn't have any money to funnel to anyone.

He paid for Twitter with an inflated stock price. Which, technically, is a smart move. So when Tesla’s price right sizes, he ends up getting Twitter for a discount.

About 11% of households have negative net worth. About 12% are millionaires.

dqydj.com

Average, Median, Top 1%, and all United States Net Worth Percentiles

@https://twitter.com/datapk

Graph & table of net worth brackets and percentiles in the United States for recent data. See top one percent, top .5%, and .1%, median, and more.

Link:dqydj.com/average-median-top-net-worth...

Your stats are disinformation. Taxes are not removed from the wealth which falls far greater on those not in the top 2% and would reduce actual useful wealth. Along those lines is that for the bottom 90% their biggest asset is their home. That is not fully useful until end of life to utilize a significant portion of that wealth as it is tied up in one’s residence. That wealth increase has also placed many more in debt to eventually acquire wealth via housing. If you remove primary residence wealth from the equation the situation is far worse for the bottom 98%. Taxing the wealthy at a higher rate is the only solution to the inequality crisis in the US.

A short 6' video:

No, they are spending money on things that they can't afford. Living in an apartment that you can barely afford just because you didn't like the cheaper one that was available, having a car payment for an expensive car instead of a used $6k car or taking the bus. Eating out frequently instead of eating pasta that costs a few dollars to feed multiple people. Paying $150+ for a cable package every month instead of just viewing the channels you can get for free from an antenna. There are a lot of things that people spend a ton of money on that they don't actually 'need'. But they want all of these things, pay every cent they have on them, and don't save anything at all. A very large chunk of the population is 'pay check to pay check' yet they have all of the things I just mentioned. If they would cut some of these things out they could save a couple hundred dollars a month, which is a couple thousand dollars a year. They could use those savings to make other financial decisions in a couple years that would make/save them even more money. But not many people do this.

So if a lot of people have negative net worth, you need to eat away at a lot of the people with positive net worth to offset the negatives. Let’s also assume that children have no money.
You can easily imagine getting to 50% with these considerations.

It doesn’t really surprise me.

Running version:

75% of Americans can’t run one step at Ryan Hall’s AR Marathon pace.

or

Camile Heron runs more in 12 hours than 90% of Americans do in their entire life.

The world is mostly full of mostly average people. There will be massive disparities in anything. With money, it seems worse because you can go negative.

My “answer” to this is unionization.

Maybe they just worked really hard.

This is what the institution wants. This is how they planned it. About 50% of the population living check to check. That same demographic was begging for a pay raise and got it--but still lives check to check. Time to wake up.

OP asked about "wealth" which includes primary residence, and not "financial assets."

It's a meaningless stat. How many of the richest people in America would you desire to have wealth equal to or greater than the bottom 50%? 10? 20? 100? 1,000? 1,000,000? At what number would you say "Okay, now these numbers seem fair and equitable."? How would you come up with such a number?

It's an absolutely meaningless statistic since there is no context for the absolutely arbitrary and subjective idea of where the ratio should be. People who cite these things just seem to be begrudging the luck of others. Why get frustrated because someone else strikes it rich/wins the lotto?

This is thanks to capitalism, it is especially made worse due to trickle down economics, the middle class is now about extinct, owning a home is unrealistic for most Americans and it won't change till the workers of America unite as one.