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How this was measured

Everything on this site is arithmetic on published figures. This page exists so you can check our work, including the parts that make our case weaker.

The scale

One CSS pixel represents $1,000,000, and that never changes anywhere on the site. A CSS pixel is defined as 1/96 inch, so 1,152 pixels is one foot of real scrolling. The descent is 847,000 pixels, which comes to 735 feet, or 224 meters.

• Median household net worth $192,900 = 0.19 pixels. It is not drawn because it cannot be.
• $37,000,000,000 of gain over 223 days works out to about $1,920 per second. A year of median household income is about 44 seconds at that rate. A year of full-time federal minimum wage is about 8 seconds.

What "net worth" is, and is not

Net worth is assets minus debts. For the people at the very top it is overwhelmingly unrealized equity in companies they founded. It is not cash, and it is not sitting in an account. When this site says a fortune "could pay for" something, that is a statement about scale, not a liquidation plan: selling shares at that volume would move the price, and the proceeds would be smaller than the sticker figure.

That objection is correct, and it does not change the comparison. The distance between an ordinary household and the top is so large that the mechanics of turning shares into cash are a rounding error next to the gap itself.

Why the headline number moves

Wealth trackers disagree about this figure by more than $100 billion, because SpaceX and xAI have no public share price, only funding-round valuations. This figure crossed $1 trillion when SpaceX listed on 2026-06-12 and fell back below it as the stock corrected. Trackers disagree by more than $100B because SpaceX and xAI are valued from funding rounds rather than a share price.

The site currently uses $847,000,000,000 from Bloomberg Billionaires Index, as of August 11, 2026. It is an estimate, and we say so on every card.

The distribution figures

Total US household net worth is $183.0 trillion (FRED TNWBSHNO, Q1 2026). Shares come from the Federal Reserve's Distributional Financial Accounts:

• Bottom 50%: 2.5%, which is $4.6 trillion, or 0.8 miles (WFRBSB50215)
• Top 1%: 31.6%, which is $57.8 trillion, or 9.5 miles, or 68 times the descent (WFRBST01134)
• Bottom 90%: 32.1%, which is $58.7 trillion, or 9.7 miles. The DFA publishes this as two groups, so it is the bottom 50% above plus the 50th-to-90th group at 29.6% (WFRBSN40188)
• All US household wealth: 30 miles

The stopped page also splits two of those figures per household: 44 pixels each inside the top 1%, against 0.5 pixels each inside the bottom 90%. That needs a household count, which the DFA fixes without a separate source: the bottom 50% is half of all US households by definition, so the 66 million households in that bucket put the total at 132 million, and the two groups at 1.32 million and 119 million. Both splits are even shares within a group, which flatters the top: wealth inside the top 1% is itself concentrated, so a typical household there gets less than 44 pixels and the few at the top of it get far more.

Two caveats that cut against us. First, the DFA is survey-anchored and is generally understood to undercount wealth at the very top, so the top 1% figure here is conservative. The real concentration is probably greater, not smaller. Second, aggregate net worth includes home equity and retirement accounts, so "the bottom 50% holds 2.5%" is not the same claim as "the bottom 50% has nothing." Many of those households own a home and a pension. The claim is about share, not destitution.

The browser limit

Act 3 asks the browser for an element as tall as the top 1% (57,821,680 pixels) and then measures what the browser actually produced. The numbers shown are that measurement, taken in your own browser. They are not figures we typed in. Chrome clamps near 33.5 million pixels and Firefox lower. If your browser draws the whole thing, the page says so instead.

Medical debt, and definitions that move

Estimates of total US medical debt range from about $220 billion in formal balances to roughly $500 billion once bills absorbed into credit cards, payment plans, and family loans are counted. The site uses the lower, narrower figure throughout.

Derived markers

Most of the descent is empty, because at this scale most of it genuinely is. Where a long stretch has no sourced marker, the site shows arithmetic on figures it already cites: how many typical households, how many years of a median income, or how many years of minimum wage the passed amount equals. These invent no new claims and carry no separate citation, which is why they are generated at build time instead of filed alongside the sourced markers below.

The strongest arguments against this site

• The money is not liquid. True. As above, this is a scale comparison, not a budget proposal.
• Wealth is not a fixed pie. Also true: value created by a company is not taken from someone else's pile. The site does not claim otherwise. It claims that the resulting distribution is worth being able to picture.
• Net worth ignores lifecycle. A 28-year-old with a mortgage and a 68-year-old with a paid-off house sit in different parts of the same distribution. That is a real limitation of any snapshot, and it does not begin to account for a factor of 68.
• Billionaire estimates are soft. Yes. That is why the anchor is a tutorial for the scale and the argument in Act 3 rests on Federal Reserve aggregates instead.

Source list

Every claim rendered anywhere on the site, generated from the same files the site reads. 29 markers, all with a live link, an archive snapshot, and a verification date. Figures file last verified August 12, 2026.

Caveats on individual markers

• $15,080: a year of full-time work at the federal minimum wage.The yearly figure is 52 weeks of 40 hours at $7.25, the same minimumWageYearUsd figure in figures.json that the derived markers divide by. The rate and its July 2009 effective date could not be re-checked from the build environment, which cannot reach dol.gov. Confirm against the linked page, ideally the history table at /minimum-wage/history, before launch.
• $1,063,700: the average household. The median is $192,900.Mean and median are paired deliberately: the gap between them is what concentration looks like inside a single statistic.
• Every paycheck of a whole working life.Derived: median household income multiplied by a 45-year career, not adjusted for wage growth or career arc. An order-of-magnitude figure, not a projection.
• Here the bottom 99% ends and the top 1% begins.The DFA's latest published cutoff is 2022 Q3, while the wealth shares used in Act 3 are 2026 Q1. Asset prices have risen since, so the real entry price to the top 1% is higher than the figure shown. This marker sits slightly too high on the scroll, not too low, which understates the gap rather than inflating it.
• $2.04 billion: the largest lottery jackpot ever won.Seed value from the project's 2026-08-12 research pass. Re-verify against the linked source and update verifiedOn before launch.
• A year of the National Cancer Institute.Seed value from the project's 2026-08-12 research pass. Re-verify against the linked source and update verifiedOn before launch.
• $9.1 billion: a year of the Environmental Protection Agency.Seed value from the project's 2026-08-12 research pass. Re-verify against the linked source and update verifiedOn before launch.
• $9.2 billion: a year of the Centers for Disease Control.Seed value from the project's 2026-08-12 research pass. Re-verify against the linked source and update verifiedOn before launch.
• $12.3 billion: Head Start, for 750,000 children.Seed value from the project's 2026-08-12 research pass. Re-verify against the linked source and update verifiedOn before launch.
• The estimated cost of housing every homeless person in America.The point-in-time count is HUD's own; the $20B annual cost estimate is a widely cited order-of-magnitude figure and the weakest link in this marker. Re-verify or cut before launch.
• $25.4 billion: a year of NASA. All of it.Seed value from the project's 2026-08-12 research pass. Re-verify against the linked source and update verifiedOn before launch.
• $28 billion: school breakfast and lunch for 30 million kids.Seed value from the project's 2026-08-12 research pass. Re-verify against the linked source and update verifiedOn before launch.
• $31 billion: Pell Grants for 7 million students.Seed value from the project's 2026-08-12 research pass. Re-verify against the linked source and update verifiedOn before launch.
• What Elon Musk gained this year, while you were living yours.Wealth trackers are estimates, not accounts. Bloomberg and Forbes routinely differ by more than $100 billion on Elon Musk because SpaceX and xAI are valued from funding rounds rather than a share price.
• $47 billion: the National Institutes of Health, for a year.Seed value from the project's 2026-08-12 research pass. Re-verify against the linked source and update verifiedOn before launch.
• $60 billion: a year of federal highway funding, all 50 states.Seed value from the project's 2026-08-12 research pass. Re-verify against the linked source and update verifiedOn before launch.
• Every housing program the federal government runs, for a year.Cited to the OMB budget landing page because HUD's own budget URLs have moved twice in a year. Pin the exact congressional justification PDF before launch. The cost-burdened renter share is the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies figure the site also uses at the close of Act 3.
• The year America cut child poverty nearly in half, and then stopped.The cost figure is a CBO/JCT-scale estimate for the 2021 expansion; the poverty movement is the Census SPM's own. Re-verify both before launch.
• A year of food assistance for 41 million people.Seed value from the project's 2026-08-12 research pass. Re-verify against the linked source and update verifiedOn before launch.
• $130 billion: medical care for every US veteran, for a year.Seed value from the project's 2026-08-12 research pass. Re-verify against the linked source and update verifiedOn before launch.
• You just passed all the medical debt in America.Estimates range from about $220 billion in formal balances to roughly $500 billion once bills absorbed into credit cards and family loans are counted. The site uses the lower, narrower figure deliberately.
• $369 billion: the whole Department of Veterans Affairs.Seed value from the project's 2026-08-12 research pass. Re-verify against the linked source and update verifiedOn before launch.
• Halfway. 368 feet down, 368 to go.Purely derived: half the anchor net worth, recomputed whenever the anchor figure changes.
• Everything Americans paid out of their own pockets for health care.Seed value from the project's 2026-08-12 research pass. Re-verify against the linked source and update verifiedOn before launch.
• The federal half of Medicaid, which covers 72 million people.Seed value from the project's 2026-08-12 research pass. Re-verify against the linked source and update verifiedOn before launch.
• The entire US defense budget. One year, one fortune, same height.Seed value from the project's 2026-08-12 research pass. Re-verify against the linked source and update verifiedOn before launch.

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong, tell us. Every number lives in one data file or one collection entry, and the whole site recomputes from it. Send the correction with a primary source and it takes one line to fix.

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