A look at today's billionaires a century after Rockefeller became the first

Main Idea: More than a century after John D. Rockefeller was seen as America’s first billionaire, the U.S. now has hundreds of billionaires whose wealth is much larger overall and increasingly tied to tech and markets.

Key Points:

• Estimates put the number of U.S. billionaires at well over 900, with some reports placing it above 1,100 or even near 2,000.
• Many of today’s richest people, including Larry Ellison and Elon Musk, have fortunes far above Rockefeller’s inflation-adjusted wealth.
• U.S. billionaires now hold about $6.8 trillion in total, and their share of national wealth has risen sharply since the 1980s.
• The billionaire class is still mostly male, and many fortunes are still built by founders rather than inherited, though inheritance matters more in the U.S. than in some other places.