The U.S. wealth gap has grown so wide, even America’s billionaires can’t help but notice.
In the third quarter of 2025, the top 1% of U.S. households owned a whopping 31.7% of U.S. wealth, according to Federal Reserve data released in January. It’s more or less as much as what the bottom 90% of Americans hold, the widest the gap has been since the Fed started collecting data in 1989. And although headline figures are relatively strong, the U.S. economy doesn’t feel like it’s working for everyone, according to one person who has been treated very well by it.
“This is 100% completely unsustainable as a society,” Peter Mallouk, the CEO of Creative Planning, a wealth management firm overseeing around $700 billion in assets, wrote on X Monday.
The gap has manifested in everything from asset ownership to how different households spend money, with real repercussions for the economy and even national politics. Mallouk even posted a graph from a December Financial Times article about the country’s widening wealth gap and growing evidence of a K-shaped economy, where households that own assets see their net worth rise while the majority of Americans are unable to build wealth.
The graph, based on a Moody’s analysis from September, showed that the wealthiest 10% of Americans account for almost half of all consumer spending, a departure from 20 years ago, when spending was more evenly distributed across income groups.
