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By Sharon Zhang / Truthout
A new analysis finds that the richest 15 billionaires in the U.S. saw their wealth skyrocket by nearly $1 trillion in the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, which also contained one of the single largest cuts to welfare benefits in U.S. history.
The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) report, citing data from Forbes, has found that U.S. billionaires’ assets surged by a whopping 21 percent in 2025.
The 935 billionaires in the U.S. now control $8.1 trillion in wealth, the analysis found — nearly double the amount of wealth held by the bottom 50 percent of Americans, which comprises over 170 million people. Roughly a dozen of these billionaires work in the Trump administration.
The very richest billionaires saw the biggest gains. The top 15 richest people in the U.S. gained 33 percent in wealth last year, with their wealth skyrocketing from $2.4 trillion to $3.2 trillion — a gain of roughly $800 billion, IPS found.
A significant portion of this gain was driven by the wealth accumulation of one person: Elon Musk, the richest man on earth. In 2025, Musk’s wealth rose from $421 billion to $726 billion, a gain of $305 billion.
With this amount of money, Musk could singlehandedly pay for Republicans’ newly enacted cuts to Medicare for the next decade, estimated to cost $536 billion. He could fund health benefits for tens of millions of Americans and still be left with nearly $200 billion to spare.
IPS points out that Musk’s net worth has increased by 2,800 percent since 2020, when he was valued at just under $25 billion.
Other billionaires and billionaire families saw gains of tens of billions of dollars last year, including Google cofounder Larry Page, Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, and the Walton family.
“The affordability crisis is hitting ordinary Americans particularly hard as we head into the new year, but not everyone is feeling the pain: billionaires are raking in staggering profits off the backs of ordinary workers,” said Chuck Collins, who directs IPS’s Program on Inequality and the Common Good.
Regular Americans are indeed struggling. At the end of 2025, polls were already finding that an affordability crisis was spreading across the U.S., with roughly 30 percent of Americans saying they skipped medical care in the past year due to cost, according to surveys by Politico and GQR for The Century Foundation.
This is slated to become far worse as Republicans’ cuts to Medicaid and Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies kick in this year. Last week, on New Year’s Day, Affordable Care Act subsidies for tens of millions of Americans expired overnight, causing premiums to double on average as a result of cuts to the Republican budget bill. Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that 16 million people will lose their health care benefits altogether due to the Medicaid and ACA cuts.
These cuts were enacted to pay for a massive tax cut for billionaires and the rest of the top richest Americans. The CBO estimated that the richest Americans would see a gain of $12,000 each year as a result of the bill, while the poorest 10 percent would see their wealth decrease by $1,600 yearly on average.
“It’s not just that U.S. billionaires are entering 2026 with record-breaking increases in extreme wealth: it’s that they are also paying far less in taxes compared to the huge amount of wealth they amass. Average taxpayers like you and I pay income tax at triple the rate of the wealthiest Americans,” said Omar Ocampo, inequality researcher for IPS, in a statement. “Not only are a small number of Americans holding more wealth than the rest of America, but they’re also not paying their fair share in taxes.”
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Sharon Zhang
Sharon Zhang is a news writer at Truthout covering politics, climate and labor. Before coming to Truthout, Sharon had written stories for Pacific Standard, The New Republic, and more. She has a master’s degree in environmental studies. She can be found on Twitter: @zhang_sharon.