How the Top 1% Invest (and How Do YOU Compare?)

Mindy:
Today we are pulling back the curtain on something many people wonder about, but rarely get to see how the ultra wealthy actually invest their money. Not the sensationalized stories about crypto or tech billionaires, but the real data on how the top 1% allocate their investments might surprise you is that while the ultra wealthy do have access to investment opportunities that most of us don’t, many of their core strategies are actually things you could implement into your portfolio right now. Ready to hear how this might change your investment strategy. Let’s get into it. Hello, hello, hello and welcome to the BiggerPockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen, and with me as always is my top 1% in my heart co-host Scott Trench.

Scott:
Oh, that’s very nice, Mindy. Likewise, and I would argue that we should be up there having invested so much time together on this podcast. Alright, BiggerPockets is a goal of creating 1 million millionaires, not just in the heart, but literally in your bank account and your net worth statement. You are in the right place if you want to get your financial house in order because we truly believe financial freedom is attainable for everyone no matter when or where you’re starting. Alright, first things first. We’re going to be talking about how the top 1% of Americans invest their wealth and let’s clarify what we’re talking about with that top 1%. According to Kiplinger’s Wealth Report, to be in the top 1% of wealth in America, you need a net worth of about 11.6 million. That’s eight figures in wealth and the typical BiggerPockets money listener does not aspire at least.
So they tell us in surveys, no one would say no, of course, but does not aspire. The primary goal is not to generate eight figures in personal net worth and get to this fat fire or top 1% level of wealth. It’s more to get in this kind of one to $5 million range with 2.5 million as the sweet spot for many listeners, but by studying the top 1%, I think that may accelerate many folks’ journeys towards this and understand here’s how to get there. And of course if you overshoot, no one’s really going to be complaining about that and the optionality that even more excess wealth might bring into one’s life.

Mindy:
Absolutely. I agree, Scott, I am a little bummed to learn that I’m not in the 1%, but that’s okay. I’m still doing okay. I wouldn’t mind having $11 million, but I agree with you. I don’t think that’s where the majority of our listeners, by majority, I mean 99.999% of our listeners aren’t looking to build even $10 million in net worth. They’re looking to build enough so that they can comfortably live the life that they want. They can retire early if they choose. They can continue working if they choose, but without this pressure of, oh, I have to keep my job so that I can keep putting foot on the table, they’re looking to be comfortable. Scott, who do you think of when I say the top 1%? I already told you it’s not me.

Scott:
I think the top 1% is a executive at a large corporation who has earned a very large income for a long period of time, or a business owner or a real estate investor or an entrepreneur, I guess is also a business owner in that category, or someone with an incredibly high skill ceiling like an investment banker or an elite broker agent in there, a mortgage broker that has an item there or a fund manager. Those are the kinds of folks that I think are going to make up this list. What do you think?

Mindy:
I think our minds are so different. I go billionaire, I think of Charlie Munger, I think of Warren Buffett, I think of Peter Thiel. I don’t think of regular jobs. And Frank, on that same token, $11 million gets you into the 1% club. I thought you needed more zeros in order to get to the 1% club. So I was really surprised by this article.

Scott:
Let me also kind of walk some of that back, what I just said earlier. I think if you’re looking for the people who make this up, you’re also looking at people who are older 50 plus and have accumulated based on what I just described, 55 plus 50, 55 plus in that category that have accumulated at a very high income level for a very long period of time and invested along there. I think there will also be these outlier, ridiculous entrepreneurs, money managers like Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett, and entrepreneurs who have built several hundred million dollars, several billion businesses early in life, and those guys get a lot of social media press, but I bet you that the majority of this 1%, this majority of this minority are high income earners who spent below their means and accumulated over several decades, and they just had a higher than average income and a lower than average expense and invested appropriately when there’ll also be a disproportionate skew towards small business owners would be my guess in that category.

Mindy:
Okay. I was going to ask you how you guess that they invest. I was thinking that the 1% is investing in real estate, large scale real estate, not your single family homes, but your large apartment complexes, your large office buildings and industrial warehouse things, private businesses, but at a higher level. I said Peter Thiel because when I was thinking of top 1%, I was going billionaires. Peter Thiel famously invested in PayPal and got a bunch of stock in PayPal, and when he received it, he put it into his Roth IRA because he had, I don’t know, it was like a penny a share or something, and he put it all into his Roth IRA, and it grew and now his Roth is 5 billion. I love that story so much because that is not at all what the Roth was intended for, but he’s going to pay $0 in taxes on that $5 billion because it’s in his Roth.
So another thing that I think they do is make really, really smart informed decisions. Warren Buffet says that he spends his day reading, he reads every newspaper out there, he reads all the articles online, he just consumes all of this information and kind of stores it away. So when he’s making a decision about buying a business down the road, he’s like, oh, these people have a big moat because I remember this article, that article, and he’s pulling from all of his vast knowledge base in his brain. So I think that they are very well educated. And Scott, let’s go and see how much they’re doing in crypto.

Scott:
There’s a few crypto ones I’m sure, but I bet you that’s not going to make up a big chunk piece of our pie here either.

Mindy:
How do you think they invest?

Scott:
I think that again, that’s excluding these billionaires. Every billionaire has some, or I think the vast majority of billionaires have some remarkable journey, at least all the ones that are anywhere along that self-made spectrum where they just brought some incredible genius or luck or skill to bear on a series of moves that paid off handsomely and compounded over a good amount of time. So those are the outliers I’m looking at. The person who’s got a $15 million net worth, I’m going back to the Millionaire next door, that book, this is probably somebody that you never would know has a 15 to $25 million net worth by looking at ’em. They probably, again, own a small business or have a profession that earns a very high income, but they spend way below their means would otherwise allow them to spend. I believe they will have invested consistently in a small business for a very long period of time.
I believe that they will have a significant portion of their wealth inequities, either in index fund like investments or in individual companies like companies that they’ve been buying or holding for a very, very long period of time. I believe real estate will be a major component of the portfolio. I believe that they’ll have a large amount of cash on hand, even as a percentage of their portfolios. I believe they’ll be lightly levered for the most part on a relative basis, and again, with some outliers, but that’s what I would be expecting to see here. There’s always an anecdote in the Millionaire Next door about a guy who went to buy a business and was like, well, it didn’t look anything like what the seller anticipated a buyer of the business to look like, very casually dressed, showed up in an old car, and well, there he is, ready to plop down millions of dollars to buy this business largely in cash. And I think that would be my guess.

Mindy:
Well, let’s see who’s right, Scott. Now we need to take a quick add break, but listeners, I am so excited to announce that you can now buy your ticket to BiggerPockets Conference BP Con 2025 in Las Vegas, Nevada, which is October five through seven. Score the early word pricing for $100 off by going to biggerpockets.com/conference while we’re away. Welcome back to the show.

Scott:
Alrighty, let’s do it. Here is the dataset. What we’re looking at here is Federal Reserve data, which discusses assets by wealth percentile group. The Federal Reserve data does a really good job with this in my opinion. We have the bottom 50% discussed, which have a very small amount of the wealth in the country. We then take the 50th through 90th percentile, the 90th through 99th percentile, and we break apart the top 1% into the 99 through 99.9 percentile and the top 0.1% because wealth is so heavily skewed in terms of its distribution towards the top 1.1% in this country, this produces the most fair visual of this. The Federal Reserve data also allows us to take this and look at the percentages of wealth as they’re distributed across these percentiles. So the top 0.1%, for example, has a very different way that their wealth is distributed compared to the bottom 50th percentile.
We’re going to talk about specifically the 90th ninth through 99.9 percentile in our definition of the 1%. So we can exclude Mindy’s friend, Peter Thiel, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger in this discussion and talk much more about my hypothesized fictional small business owner who spent 40 years earning a high income and not spending very much to accumulate a large pile of assets here potentially. We’ll see. And in describing this, let’s look at the breakout in terms of percentage of their wealth. Again, these are people that have a wealth of at least on average over $11.9 million. Let’s take a look at how this wealth is broken out for these folks. So first, real estate is 16%. That sounds actually quite low to me, I think is a surprise. Corporate equities and mutual fund shares publicly traded stocks, for example, are 44% of the distribution for these folks. Private businesses are 14% of the distribution and other is 16%. Things like defined pension benefit entitlements, consumer goods, and other types of pensions and retirement accounts that are not in the after-tax brokerage account comprise less than 10% of the wealth in terms of asset allocation for this group. Mindy, what are your reactions to this? What surprises you and stands out about this dataset?

Mindy:
I’m surprised that real estate isn’t a larger amount of their net worth. And again, I’m not talking primary residents. I’m talking about large multifamily buildings, commercial real estate. I really had it in my head that the wealthy are all in on real estate. I am surprised that 44% of their net worth is in publicly traded companies that anybody can buy, not just the wealthy can buy. Not anybody can buy an apartment building. You need a lot money for that. But anybody can buy a share of a stock, maybe not Berkshire Hathaway, but B shares. Those are like four or $500, right?

Scott:
I think that’s the biggest thing that stands out for me as well. And when we look at the 0.1%, 50% of their wealth is in publicly traded companies, corporate equities and mutual fund shares. They also do own about 20% of their wealth comes in the form of private business ownership. They own even less real estate.

Mindy:
I wonder if that’s just because it’s a percentage of their net worth. So even they might own a lot of real estate, it’s just they also own a lot of publicly traded companies. I have been investing in the stock market for, I dunno, 30, 35 years, and it is up and to the right for the most part. We’ve had some down years, we’ve had some several down years, but I think that you can’t really argue with the top 0.1%, the top 1%, the top 10%. It’s when you get into below the top 10%, the 50 to 90% that you see much more real estate and far fewer publicly traded companies. And again, let’s go over there and look right at that. 38.9% is real estate and 9% is publicly traded companies. 16% is defined benefit pension entitlements, 10% is defined contribution pension entitlements, 4% is in private businesses and 15% is in other. I would be so curious to see what other breaks down to, I would love to see that broken out into more categories just because I’m nosy

Scott:
When I look at this chart right here, 50 to 90th percent and then 90 if through 99% I see the middle class trap, right? I see a very large distribution of wealth in what is likely to be a primary residence in the 50th through 90th percentile. I see a very large distribution of wealth in the 401k or other defined benefit plans. I see a very small slice of wealth in corporate equities and mutual funds, which I assume are largely outside of their retirement accounts. And then I think that there’s an overweighting towards consumer goods and possibly this other category on this. So I think that’s a middle class trap right here is what I’m seeing.

Mindy:
I see that, but I also wonder because 50 to 90 is 40% of the population. That seems like such a large amount, they could have broken it out a little bit more. The bottom 50, I think I’m okay with that being like that, but I would’ve liked 50 to 75 and 75 to 90. I think you would have a different breakdown, but also I would be so curious to see what other assets means. And by this I’m talking about crypto and things that aren’t mainstream or are mainstream, but people who don’t have a large net worth shouldn’t be investing in.

Scott:
The other category is remarkably consistent in terms of a percentage of wealth invested across every one of these wealth categories. And Mindy, I agree it would be great to see different breakouts for different wealth percentiles, but also I think that the Fed did a very reasonable job here because these are the largest, these are very reasonable pieces of the total wealth of Americans. It’s remarkable that the bottom 50th percentile, the bottom half of Americans own about 10 trillion in wealth. The top 0.1% own 22 trillion in wealth, right? It’s a remarkable inequality that we’re looking at in this, and so that’s probably why they visualized the data in these percentile groups in order to help us understand where that wealth is distributed and how it’s invested here.

Mindy:
I am glad you pointed that out, Scott. And also for anybody who’s listening to this on the podcast on audio, it might be a good one to go watch on YouTube so you can follow along with what we are talking about here with all of these different, because we are looking at a chart, and it’s pretty fascinating, this chart.

Scott:
Let’s go back in time here. What they do is a great job here is let’s go back to before covid. So we’re looking at 2024 Q3 data. Let’s take a look at what happens.

Mindy:
Oh my goodness, in the way back machine.

Scott:
I like going to 2019 Q3 as in this. So let’s take it. Let’s tear this down, right? We see different percentiles here. Let’s see what jumps out to us here. Not much. The wealthy have invested very consistently across time for that. There’s a couple of notable differences though. What do we see that stands out most about where the top 1% or 0.1% invest when we toggle back and forth between the two? So let’s just look at this top 1% here and see what happens. Not much pretty consistent. It’s not like one of these asset classes. Turbocharged it. Let’s go back in time. Another five years, right? Okay. Some interesting stuff. The stocks were not nearly as big a piece of that real estate starting to gain share. Let’s go back to 2006 and see what happened there. Real estate’s a much bigger piece of the pie here. And if we go back to 2000, we got our look at that, the market contractions and expansions to make a big difference here, but the story’s the same. We’re seeing that wealth is concentrated if we’re these top 1% or top 0.1% folks through time in publicly traded corporations and in privately held businesses with a sprinkling of real estate that actually diminishes as a percentage of the portfolio the wealthier one gets.

Mindy:
This is so much fun to play with, and we will include a link to this chart, so you can check it out in our show notes.

Scott:
Let’s conjecture here about how these folks got to these positions, and I think that it’s a little easier for me. Well, we already did that at the very beginning, but I bet you that your 0.1%, your Peter Teals are largely reflected in this category here. And a big chunk of that corporate equities piece is folks that either made an enormous killing betting on Tesla in the early days, or were former employees of Microsoft or some of these big corporations that really rode these enormous waves of equity ownership up there like Nvidia, I saw that one in ridiculous percentage of Nvidia employees are now millionaires and some ridiculous percentage are now worth over $25 million because of their equity ownership. So I bet you that reflects, that’s providing a good chunk of this for a lot of those folks. I’d also, surely there’s entrepreneurs in the executives that have earned big compensation in these companies, taking them public or those areas. So that’s got to be one of the most obvious way is to get into that elite income categories in the United States, right? Would you agree with that?

Mindy:
Yeah, I would say so. I mean, my husband worked in tech and a lot of his friends work in tech and they came together and worked at one company and then they would go off to other companies, and I hear some of these salaries and some of these stock options that are part of their salary. It blows my mind. I had a friend who was working at Amazon and he was getting something like 2000 shares of Amazon every quarter, and that’s just part of his salary. And I dunno if you follow this, but Amazon, they’re doing okay right now.

Scott:
Yeah, I heard they became a pretty big company over the last 20 years, so you invested in that early. You’re probably in this group as that, and that’s probably one of the, but that’s probably, I bet you there’s a disproportionate amount of this point. 1% of Americans, let’s do the math here. How many Americans are there? 341 million Americans. So 1% of that is 3.4. Let’s start how many American households, because that’s what we’re really looking at here. So there’s 132 million American households, 1% of that is 1.3 million. 1.3 million people comprise these two categories. 130,000 individual households comprise the top 0.1%, and I bet you that a very good chunk of that close to half made their money by having some sort of outsized participation in the growth of one of these behemoth companies in the tech category, early Facebook employees, Tesla employees, Amazon employees, those types of folks, Nvidia employees and the like.
So that’s probably a really good chunk of this. The next biggest chunk of these 0.1% folks are probably are the owners of private businesses. So these are folks that probably built a business and sold it to private equity or in the private equity world there. They’re not quite in that publicly traded category, but that’s how they built their wealth in those categories. I have no idea what other means here. So if anyone listening or watching has an idea what other comprises, that definition is not provided by the Fed on this, so we don’t know what’s in it. And then very few folks made it to the top 0.1% by investing in real estate, and I bet you that those folks are disproportionately large real estate syndicators and fund managers who have been doing it across decades and really earned their returns and fees and carried interest on performing real estate investments of very large scale.

Mindy:
Oh, okay. Let’s look at the key differences between how the wealthy invest and the average investor. So Scott, would you say the average investor is the top 10% or the 50 to 90%?

Scott:
I think the 50 to 90th percentile is the right dynamic, right? If you’re in the bottom 50th percent of wealth, you’re likely just getting started or have just begun listening to BiggerPockets money, we will quickly help you move out of the bottom 50th percentile on there into the top, the top 50 to 90th, and then ideally approach the top 10% level of wealth, which is where you’ll need to be to fire. And if you’re not interested in fire, you should not be listening to BiggerPockets money because that’s all we do on this, or at least the option to fire for this. So let’s look at the 50th through 90th percentile, and I think the biggest thing that stands out here again, is the middle class trap, right? These are folks that bought a home, have two cars that comprise a good chunk of that wealth, and here in the consumer durable goods or other assets category, maybe that other concludes the cars in this category on this and all that wealth is in their retirement plans.
So there’s no option, there’s no way to get super lucky on this. There’s nothing that can actually carry the portfolio through on this, right? If someone came into BiggerPockets Money podcast for a finance Friday and said, I’m worth 500 grand and I got 200 of that in my house in my home equity, I got another 115 in my retirement accounts, I got 35 in my outside of after-tax brokerage account and I got a little bit of cash crypto and two cars in various stages of being paid off, we’d tell ’em, Hey, man, you need to really think about cutting your expenses, making some life lifestyle changes or drastically increasing your income or otherwise amassing cash and concentrating it in an investment category that could propel you up the chain in a bigger way. This portfolio will not get you anywhere quickly. It is too diversified on there, on too low level of net worth to move you across this asset category. You must take more concentrated risks or generate more after-tax cash to invest in after-tax assets that could propel your wealth forward.

Mindy:
What I see is the real estate, which I read as home equity at 38%, and unless you are me doing a live-in flip or Craig doing house hacking or Scott doing house hacking or somebody who is using their house to generate income, your home is not an investment. Your home is where you live. It is not of your investment portfolio, and you can email [email protected] to tell me how wrong I am, but your home is not an investment. So we’re taking away that almost 40% and looking at the rest of it, consumer durable goods, I don’t even understand what that means. So I’m going to skip that too because it’s my show and I can Corporate equities and mutual fund shares, we all know those are publicly traded companies at 9.6%. I love that they’re getting into it, but defined benefit pension entitlements. Scott, what does those words mean?

Scott:
These are going to be like pensions and retirement accounts. So your 401k, your Roth IRA, your pension that you’re building up at work, the thrift savings plan if you’re in the military, all those are going to combine into these two categories, defined benefit pension entitlements and defined contribution pension entitlements.

Mindy:
My dear listeners, we have a brand new BiggerPockets money newsletter. If you’re interested in receiving this newsletter, you can go to biggerpockets.com/money newsletter to sign up. Thanks for sticking with us. Why do they have such big words? Why can’t you just say 401k and retirement plans and pensions? But anyway, I digress. Private businesses, 4%. I think that is not surprising at this level because I don’t know a lot of small business owners. I know a lot of the ones that I do are real estate agents. My real estate agency is my business. It’s not really when I consider a business that’s not really the kind of business that I think of when I think of a small business, I think of somebody who is selling products or providing goods and services to others, so a small percentage of the private business and then other assets at 15%. I can really see that being cars. I can see that being, oh, my friend told me to buy crypto and he’s rich. So I did. I was having a conversation with somebody recently and they said, oh yeah, crypto was up really a lot last year, so I’m doing really well and I just had to stop. I mean, if your investment is so great, why are you harping it all the time? There’s always this hype that’s going on

Scott:
Because Mindy, it’s going to make your bloodline as one crypto bro told me in one of the comments.

Mindy:
I don’t even know what that means.

Scott:
I don’t know either, but yeah. Oh, another crypto bro tells me that I will not be remembered because I did not invest in Bitcoin. My legacy will die. That’s how important it’s, yeah.

Mindy:
Oh, I will remember you, Scott, but I’m also way older than you, so I’m probably going to die before you.

Scott:
I do have an update on this one actually. I want to define the difference between define pension benefit entitlement and define contribution pension entitlement. Define benefit pension entitlements are things like a pension for a teacher or a firefighter or a police officer or those types of things. So you’re not necessarily contributing directly to them or you’re contributing in a minor way that’s automated, but this is a pension that is guaranteed by somebody, the government or a large corporation. This is your 401k defined contribution pension entitlements, so that’s surprising to me.

Mindy:
Yeah, that 40% of Americans that we’re talking about 40 16% of them have a pension and 10% of them have some form of 401k that they are building, but it’s not a lot of 401k. It’s back up there. So I would think that corporate equities and mutual fund shares are after tax investments rather than 401k investments, maybe a Roth IR or something. So we’re back to the bulk of their wealth is most likely in their home. Maybe they have another rental property or something, but it’s mostly in their home and they are absolutely going to fall into the middle class trap because that’s even harder to access than your retirement accounts. I mean, if I needed to get into my 401k, I can get into it today and just pay a 10% penalty. I don’t want to, but I can get to it with my equity. I have to get a home equity loan, and I have been trying to get a home equity loan, and let me tell you, that is not easy at all. So how do we reach those 40% of Americans, Scott? Those are the people that need to be listening to our show. Not that we don’t love all the rest of our listeners, but the 40% right there is really who needs to be listening.

Scott:
One question that this does not answer for us though is obviously the pension or the 401k as a percentage of total wealth declines for the top 1% and top 0.1%. My guess is that the reason for that is not because the top 1% or 0.1% don’t contribute to these things, but because they’ve created so much more of their wealth outside of those accounts, that they’re able to max those out. Okay, let’s do another analysis here. So this says it’s 22 trillion in terms of the top total 1.1% wealth. This is by household. We know there’s 134 million households in America, so there’s 134,000 houses. Let’s do 22 trillion equals 22 trillion divided by 134,000, $164 million. So these people are truly worth 150 ish million dollars a pop on there. So it’s no surprise that the 401k, even if you max it out every year and invest it reasonably well, you ain’t going to get that beyond about 1.5 million in an average lifetime for Americans. So that makes sense. That’s an interesting finding there, but if you want to get a hundred million dollars or more, you ain’t going to do it by having all that wealth tapped in your house.

Mindy:
I don’t want to do the work to get the a hundred million, but I would definitely take it if somebody wanted to start writing checks. That’s Jensen, J-E-N-S-E-N, and you can email me [email protected] for my address if you want to send me a hundred million bucks.

Scott:
Yeah, we probably should have defined that at the very beginning of this, but we wanted to react in real time to the dataset to have a good discussion about it. I think that helped things.

Mindy:
Okay, so Scott, what can we learn from the investment habits of the 1% and the 0.1% that we could apply to our own portfolios?

Scott:
Businesses are the way to get into the truly elite income categories. There’s a smattering of real estate that’s a part of that, and I believe real estate’s a great way to build a portfolio and get into the millionaire status. I think it’s a proven path there, but to get really, really rich, hundreds of millions of dollars, you’re building a business.

Mindy:
You don’t have to build it. You can buy it.

Scott:
You’re buying and building a business. You are participating in the growth of one of these corporate behemoths that go on to have multi-trillion dollar valuations, or you’re building a huge private business or participating meaningfully in a huge private business. But I don’t see another way if you want to get into the top 1% or 0.1% outside of that, I mean, even if you’re a doctor earning huge amounts of money, you’re never going to get into the 0.1% unless you get super lucky with something out there that has to be a business to get into that at 0.1% to get $158 million, $154 million, it’s business in there. Or it’s the small elite cadre of wealth managers, which is business that are doing real estate or other types of investing with those funds.

Mindy:
And when somebody says business, when you say own a small business, Scott or own a business, that doesn’t mean you own Amazon. There are so many small businesses out there that you can invest in. Tim Delaney was on our podcast, I want to say it was episode 3 29, but I cannot remember exactly what his episode was. 3 25. He talked about buying a liquor store and he found this little liquor store near him. It was a mom and pop shop. They still had price stickers on everything. They had no POS system, they had no really any kind of inventory system, and they closed up one night. He had negotiated everything, and then they transferred the inventory over. They closed up one night. They did manual inventory all night long. The next day he opened up, he brought in a POS system, he brought the company up to current standards and has elevated his wealth.
And that’s not an unusual story. It might not be a story that you have heard before, but it is absolutely not an unusual story. There’s all sorts of small businesses that are mom and pop shops that have been there forever. They aren’t up to date, technologically aren’t. There’s lots of different practices you could do. I was in advertising for 13 years and I can’t tell you how many people just don’t advertise at all. Oh, I don’t want to spend the money on it. Advertising will get you so much more business as if a good business. I mean, if you’re a garbage business, that’s not going to help you at all. But there are so many things you can do that a lot of people, a lot of small business owners aren’t doing. They, oh, well, I’m as busy as I want to be. So there’s opportunities out there.

Scott:
I’ll call this out. I think that the small business buying opportunity, like what Tim Mullaney did, and I think Tim Deney has a great portfolio and is certainly able to live a fire lifestyle from that. The top, you ain’t getting $10 million anytime soon buying a liquor store right’s not going to happen.

Mindy:
No, but that’s the first step.

Scott:
So you’re going to need to chain together moves like that over many years to get to $10 million or you’re going to have to do something that’s more scalable on there. You’re going to need a lot of time in compounding to do it with those. Another concept that I’m going to throw out here, the top 0.1%, I bet you more than half of those people got there via some form of meaningful carried interest. You familiar with this term, Mindy? Maybe the listeners. Okay, so let’s say you join a company and you get an option grant in that company. So you join Amazon when it’s worth 500 million in the early days, you get an option grant for 0.1% of Amazon’s future valuation in excess of $500 million. I don’t know if that happened on Amazon, but that would not be an uncommon situation for a company like that, for a director, vp, whatever. The ranges will vary depending on that, right? A CEO would get much more carried interest in that and a chief financial officer less so on and so forth. But Amazon is worth what, like a trillion dollars right now, right? Several trillion.

Mindy:
Oh, I don’t know what their current net worth is.

Scott:
Amazon market cap, Amazon is worth $2.1 trillion. So 0.1% of times $1 trillion is 0.1% times 0.1 trillion is one Teslas is what AI is telling me. That’s hilarious. That’s not exactly what’s happening here, but times 1 trillion is going to be, there’s a lot of zeros associated with this number, so give me a second here. Billion dollars. So the and just probably came as that person’s compensation package. That’s what I mean by these early investors in these companies. That is how many thousands of people had that happened to them to some degree in Tesla or Amazon, Nvidia, Microsoft, apple, Facebook, now, meta alphabet, so on and so forth. And that’s still a large number on a billion or 10 billion company like a Zillow or a NerdWallet or something like that. So I bet you that’s a major component of what’s going on here, and that can also of course happen in private business.

Mindy:
That is kind of blowing my mind,

Scott:
And that’s why people join companies like that, right? In those positions, they want crack at that upside, right? Another one is the syndicator world, right? A syndicator. This is common to many of the guests that have been on BiggerPockets in recent years, buys a hundred million dollars apartment complex, they put $40 million in equity. They don’t come up with that. They raise that from other investors. If the apartment complex goes to $140 million in valuation over the next three years, we have a $40 million gain. That gain is split 70 30 with the investors and the person doing the deal. So 30 million of that rounding here would go back to the investors, and 10 million of the profits is carried interest, which is paid out to the person who raised the funds and did the deal. There’s much more to it than that, but those are likely the mechanisms by which the top 0.1% generated that those 130,000 households generated so much incredible wealth.

Mindy:
I think that’s really interesting, Scott. It’s a little mind blowing, but I think it’s really, really interesting. Something to think about. If you’re younger and you’re listening to this show and you’re like, oh, how can I grow my wealth? I want to be a 0.1% or go work for the next Amazon, the next Nvidia, the next Tesla, ooh, SpaceX.

Scott:
I bet you that those folks disproportionately represent that top 0.1% and that a very small minority of them are the incredible, super famous elite athletes and the billionaires that you probably recognize by name in many cases around there. I bet you that the silent majority of the top 0.1% are people who got carried interest in private businesses or public businesses that really went on to become huge.

Mindy:
And if you are a 0.1 percenter and would like to tell us how you invest, please email [email protected] [email protected]. I don’t think we’re going to get a lot of those emails, but I would love it if we did.

Scott:
Yeah, we’d love to have a top 0.1 percenter there. We come up on a thousand episodes. We want to feature every money story. We have not had a 0.1% hundred, someone with $150 million net worth. Come on and tell their story. Maybe Kevin O’Leary actually would be an exception to that. So we did have Kevin O’Leary. Come on.

Mindy:
Yeah. Okay. Well, we’ll have to get somebody else on too, or Kevin, come back.

Scott:
Well, with that, should we get out of here? Mindy?

Mindy:
We should. Scott, that wraps up this episode of the BiggerPockets Money Podcast. You are Scott Trench. I am Mindy Jensen saying So long King Kong.