23 million US millionaires have made $1 million a mass-market threshold

Sixty-five trillion dollars is the decade's increase in American household net worth, from just shy of $109 trillion at the end of 2019 to $174 trillion now ^[7][8][1]. That is a gain of about 60% in six years ^[2]. The distribution figures A Wealth of Common Sense cites alongside it are current ones: the top 1% holds a third of the total and the top 10% holds 68% ^[9][10].

The count grows about 2% a year at the base. UBS data shows well over 23 million millionaires in the United States and almost half a million created during 2025 ^[4], which is roughly 2% of the existing base ^[4]. Worldwide, the figure was about a million new millionaires last year ^[5].

The threshold itself moved the other way. One million dollars in 1993 was worth $475,000 by the end of 2024 ^[11], a loss of about 52% of its purchasing power ^[8]. It now takes more than $2 million to match what $1 million bought in 1993 ^[12]. Schwab's Modern Wealth Survey has Americans putting financial comfort at more than $830,000 and wealth at $2.3 million ^[14][15]. Deflate that $2.3 million on the same yardstick and it is about $1.15 million in 1993 dollars ^[6]. The bar people say they use has risen roughly 15% in real terms in three decades.

So the screen matters. A $1 million asset test selects from more than 23 million Americans ^[4]; a $2.3 million test selects the people who, in Schwab's own survey, would describe themselves as wealthy ^[15]. I would set the cut at $2.3 million and index it. The counter-argument is that these denominators are not the same population. UBS is counting millionaires; Fidelity is counting accounts, nearly 1.5 million of them at $1 million or more across 401(k)s and IRAs ^[1][2][5]. One household can hold several. The post deals in balances and survey perceptions. What advisers charge for them is not in it.

Growth above the line is faster than growth at it. The Wall Street Journal counted nearly 12,000 taxpayers with an IRA of $10 million or more in 2024, up from 3,625 in 2019 ^[3], a 3.3-fold increase in five years ^[3].

Millionaires are still 1.5% of the global population ^[16]. Dick Portillo opened a hot-dog stand in 1963 without knowing how to cook a hot dog, and sold the company for $1 billion half a century later ^[17]. The stand he built with $1,100 was, by 2014, the Midwest's largest privately owned restaurant company, with 4,000 employees and no franchises or outside investors ^[18]. A single Portillo's could bring in $9 million a year, roughly three times a typical McDonald's ^[19]. "I came from a poor family and at one time thought I didn't have anything to offer the world," Portillo wrote in a memoir ^[20].

The base rates are less glamorous than the story. There are 99 times as many people in the bottom 99% as in the top 1% ^[24]. Most star founders come from poor or middle-class families, and there are 2.5 times as many from poor backgrounds as from the top 1% ^[21]. Only about a quarter of business owners worth $5 million or more inherited their companies ^[22]. Around 40% of children born into the top 1% fall out of the top fifth of income entirely ^[23].