‘'The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today' was a satirical novel written by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, which was first published in 1873. The book’s title became synonymous with graft, materialism, and corruption in American public life in the years after the end of the Civil War.
Here is the approximate percentage of total U.S. wealth held by different groups:
Top 1%: Held about 31% of the total net worth in Q2 2025.
Top 10%: Held approximately 69% to 70% of the total wealth (this includes the top 1%, the 90th-99th percentile, which holds about 36.4%, and the 50th-90th percentile, which holds 30.3% - the calculation is derived from combining data snippets for specific percentiles as the 10% figure isn't explicitly stated as a single data point in the 2025 results).
Older data from 2016 and 2022 suggest this figure has been consistently high, around 68% to 70%.
Bottom 50%: Held only about 2.5% of the total U.S. wealth in Q1 2025.
