The wealth of the richest billionaires in America grew by more than $340billion over the past year, while that of the middle class has declined. According to CNBC, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are billionaires in the United States. They have increased their combined wealth to $341 billion by 2021.

Elon Musk, the co-founder of Tesla, saw his wealth increase by $121 billion over the past year. This is more than any billionaire around the globe. Jeff Bezos, the Amazon executive chairman, saw his wealth rise to $195 billion.

Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, has nearly $140billion in wealth. Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, holds $130billion after increasing his wealth by $47billion in 2021. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, is worth $128 billion. This is thanks to an increase of $24 billion in 2021.

The American middle class has also seen a drastic drop in its wealth. The 77.5 million households that make up the middle class in America have an average annual income of $27,000 to $111,000 and a total household size of 77.5 million.

Breitbart News reported that the richest one percent of Americans now have more wealth than the entire American middle class in October 2021. The middle class has seen its share in national wealth drop to 26.6 percent, while the top 1%’s wealth share has risen to 27 percent. This is the first time that the top 1%’s wealth share has exceeded the middle class’s.

The top 20 percent of income earners in the United States have seen their share increase by approximately 10 percentage points since 1991. In contrast, the middle class has seen its share of real property, private businesses, and corporate equities decline over the past 30 years.

Economists have confirmed that the highest-income Americans pay lower annual taxes than all others in 2019. For example, the average tax rate paid by the wealthy was only 23 percent in 2018. The rich’s average tax rate of 23 percent has fallen 47 percentage points from 1950 when it was 70 percent.