What We Know About America’s Billionaires: 1,135 and Counting
Exclusive, up-close look at the richest people in the U.S., from celebrities like Taylor Swift and Elon Musk to a founder of a roofing supplier in Wisconsin
3 min
“Billionaire” evokes tech founders such as Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates , but there is a large and growing group of people worth at least $1 billion in small towns and big cities that rarely make the headlines.
There were 1,135 billionaires in the U.S. as of 2024—up from 927 in 2020, according to data from Altrata, a wealth-intelligence firm. The biggest concentration, 255 of them, is in California. But the super rich are also behind businesses in places such as Ridgeland, Miss., and Waunakee, Wisc.
Collectively, these people are worth about $5.7 trillion, according to Altrata’s estimates. That’s enough wealth to buy…
While many of these individuals own properties in upscale communities such as Palm Beach, Fla., they also congregate in destinations such as Cashiers, N.C.—a town in the Blue Ridge Mountains where four billionaire families have residences. The smallest town where a billionaire owns property? Winifred, Mont., population 172.
The list of billionaires includes some familiar dynasties, such as the Walmart Waltons and Hyatt Pritzkers. There are also lesser known members of this elite club, such as Diane Hendricks , co-founder of roofing-products distributor ABC Supply, and the heirs to the Russell Stover Chocolates fortune.
The billionaire border can be fuzzy. Markets fluctuate, the value of private companies can be uncertain and big donations dent fortunes, meaning dozens of individuals—even stars such as LeBron James and Beyoncé—can move on or off the list.
The 100 richest billionaires account for nearly $3.86 trillion in wealth—more than half the total. Just three men— Elon Musk , Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg —account for almost $1 trillion of it.
Despite those outsize Silicon Valley fortunes , most U.S.-based billionaires didn’t make their wealth in tech. About 300 came from banking and finance, compared with roughly 110 from the tech sector. Another 75 came from real estate.
A third of billionaires inherited much or all of their wealth, Altrata said. There is just one Rockefeller on the list, but 50 billionaire heirs of five companies hold roughly $830 billion total. These individuals account for nearly 15% of all the billionaires’ wealth. undefined
Billionaires have publicly donated or pledged to give about $185 billion since 2015, according to Altrata. Mostly, they support causes such as education and medical research—they gave $90 billion to those two in the past 10 years. That has given them sway in ongoing campus debates over freedom of speech and antisemitism.
While some billionaires such as Gates and Warren Buffett have openly pledged to give away much of their wealth , others have donated little so far. About a quarter of the billionaires in the list have known donations of less than $1 million in the past decade.
Some give more to organizations they’re tied to. Hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman gave about $120 million to multiple causes, but he gave $1.36 billion to a foundation where he and his wife serve as trustees, which supports medical research and other causes.
Among the top recipients of donations tracked by Altrata are global charities such as the Gates Foundation and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.
One of the most popular recipients is the Central Park Conservancy in New York, which received donations from 89 billionaires worth about $100 million.
Johns Hopkins University received $7.5 billion from close to 30 billionaires, but most of it came from Michael Bloomberg , who gave more than $5 billion.
Methodology
The Wall Street Journal analysed data on more than 1,100 individuals provided by Altrata, which estimates net worth by assessing privately and publicly held businesses and investible assets. Altrata’s data on properties includes residences, land parcels and other properties owned in the person’s name. It uses primary business address to determine a billionaire’s location and assigns each billionaire to a primary industry based on their current roles. Altrata adjusts totals to account for shifts in asset values that could push some individuals over or under $1 billion in wealth.
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Parts for iPhones to cost more owing to surging demand from AI companies.
4 min
Apple has dominated the electronics supply chain for years. No more.
Artificial-intelligence companies are writing huge checks for chips, memory, specialised glass fibre and more, and they have begun to out-duel Apple in the race to secure components.
Suppliers accustomed to catering to Apple’s every whim are gaining the leverage to demand that the iPhone maker pay more.
Apple’s normally generous profit margins will face pressure this year, analysts say, and consumers could eventually feel the hit.
Chief Executive Tim Cook mentioned the problem in a Thursday earnings call, saying Apple was seeing constraints in its chip supplies and that memory prices were increasing significantly.
Those comments appeared to weigh on Apple shares, which traded flat despite blowout iPhone sales and record company profit.
“Apple is getting squeezed for sure,” said Sravan Kundojjala, who analyses the industry for research firm SemiAnalysis.
AI chip leader Nvidia recently became the largest customer of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing , or TSMC, Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang said on a podcast.
Apple had been TSMC’s biggest customer by a wide margin for years. TSMC is the world’s leading manufacturer of advanced chips for AI servers, smartphones and other computing devices.
Spokesmen for Apple and TSMC declined to comment.
The big computers that handle AI tasks don’t look like the smartphones consumers own, but many companies supply components for both. In particular, memory chips are in short supply as companies such as OpenAI, Alphabet’s Google, Meta , Microsoft and others collectively spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build AI computing capacity.
“The rate of increase in the price of memory is unprecedented,” said Mike Howard , an analyst for research firm TechInsights.
That applies both to the flash memory chips that store photos and videos, called NAND, as well as the memory used to run apps quickly, called DRAM.
By the end of this year, the price of DRAM will quadruple from 2023 levels, and NAND will more than triple, estimates TechInsights.
Howard estimates that Apple could pay $57 more for the two types of memory that go into the base-model iPhone 18 due this fall compared with the base model iPhone 17 currently on sale. For a device that retails for $799, that would be a big hit to profit margins.
Apple’s purchasing power and expertise in designing advanced electronics long made it an unrivaled Goliath among the Asian companies that make most of the iPhone’s parts and assemble the device.
Apple spends billions of dollars a year on NAND, for instance, according to people familiar with the figures, likely making it the single biggest buyer globally. Suppliers flocked to win Apple’s business, hoping to leverage its know-how and prestige to attract other customers.
These days, however, “the companies now pushing the boundaries of human‑scale engineering are the ones like Nvidia,” said Ming-chi Kuo, an analyst with TF International Securities.
Demand for AI hardware is poised to keep growing rapidly. Apple’s spending growth is modest in comparison with what is being spent to fill up AI data centers, even though it is breaking records with huge sales of the iPhone 17.
Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are raising the price of a type of DRAM chip for Apple, according to people familiar with Apple’s supply chain.
Big AI companies pay generously and are willing to lock in supply and make upfront payments, giving the South Korean chip makers leverage against the iPhone maker.
Apple signs long-term contracts for memory, but it has used its heft to squeeze suppliers.
Its contracts have empowered it to negotiate prices as often as weekly, and to even refuse to buy any memory from a supplier if Apple didn’t view the price as favorable, according to people familiar with its memory purchases.
To boost leverage with suppliers, Apple even began stocking more inventory of memory. That was atypical for Cook, who normally cuts inventory to the bone to maximize Apple’s cash flow.
Apple is fighting not only for current deliveries but also for the attention of engineers at suppliers.
Glass scientists who worked on developing the smoothest and lightest smartphone displays are now also spending time on specialised glass for packaging advanced AI processing chips, according to industry executives.
Makers of sensors and other gizmos inside the iPhone are winning new business from AI companies such as OpenAI that are developing their own hardware.
Still, suppliers said they were far from giving up on business with Apple. Working with Apple is a form of education, they said, because it remains one of the most demanding and disciplined customers in the industry.
TSMC, the Taiwanese chip manufacturer, has built successive generations of its most advanced chips with Apple as its lead customer, relying on the big predictable demand for iPhones.
Now that TSMC is doing more business with Nvidia and other AI companies, people with knowledge of the chip supply chain said Apple was exploring whether some lower-end processors could be made by someone other than TSMC.
One of Apple’s biggest profit-spinners is selling extra memory for far more than the memory chips cost the company.
Last fall Apple discontinued the iPhone Pro model with 128 gigabytes of storage.
Customers who want that model must now start at 256 gigabytes and pay $100 more—the type of move that could be repeated this year to help Apple offset higher costs, wrote Craig Moffett, an analyst at Moffett Nathanson, in an investor note.
However, Apple isn’t expected to raise the price of its next iPhone models over similarly equipped iPhone 17s, said Kuo, the analyst.
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