The super rich got super richer in 2024 – and that process is only speeding up.

New data released Wednesday reveals that the 19 wealthiest households in the United States, featuring industry tycoons such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett, saw their wealth increase by $1 trillion last year.

This significant growth in wealth among these super billionaires exceeded the value of Switzerland’s entire economy, as highlighted by an analysis from economist Gabriel Zucman of the University of California, Berkeley, and the Paris School of Economics, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.

And the pace at which these uber-rich households grow their share of the country’s wealth is significantly increasing.

According to Zucman’s findings, in 1982, the top 0.00001% of Americans held 0.1% of the total wealth in the US. Over the next four decades, this share of wealth grew to 1.2% by 2023.

That piece of the pie jumped to 1.8%, or about $2.6 trillion, by the end of 2024 – the largest single-year increase ever, the data show. 

“You see this gradual rise and then, very recently, dramatic acceleration in the rise of the shares of wealth owned by the truly superwealthy,” Zucman told the Journal.

The acceleration was boosted by last year’s stock market surge, partly aided by the “Trump Bump” following Donald Trump’s presidential victory in November. Overall, the broad-based S&P 500 soared 23%, the tech-heavy Nasdaq skyrocketed 28% and the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average increased 13%.

The number of billionaires has grown as well.

There were nearly 1,990 billionaires last year, up from 1,370 in 2021, according to JPMorgan Chase’s private bank estimates. 

The increase in wealth among the richest Americans has far outpaced all other groups.

Households in the top 0.1%, or worth $46.3 billion, have grown their fortunes by about $3.4 million annually since 1990, according to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by Steven Fazzari, economist at Washington University in St. Louis.

The rest of the top 1%, worth at least $11.2 million, grew their fortunes by about $450,000 each year over the same span.

By 2023, the top 1% had expanded its share of total US household wealth to 34.8%, according to the World Inequality Database.

The top 1% in the UK, meanwhile, held 21.3% of the wealth; in France, they controlled 27.2%; and in Germany, 27.6%.

All other wealth groups in the US have seen their shares of total wealth shrink over time.