The bottom 50% of households in the U.S. own only $4.27 trillion of the nation’s $174 trillion in available wealth. By contrast, the top 0.1% own $25.07 trillion, and the top 99 to 99.9% own a little under $30 trillion, according to Federal Reserve data.
With AI now supercharging the stock market, and richer families already owning the majority of those assets, that divide is only likely to widen.
Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, is well aware of this phenomenon. In fact, the man worth more than $3 billion according to Forbes says he understands why people are “anti-rich.” Speaking to Axios, Dimon said the “anti-rich thing has been around for a long time.”
In his role as CEO of the largest bank in the U.S., Dimon rubs shoulders with some of the wealthiest people on the planet. But he also works for the bank’s customers who have more standard levels of income.
The resurgence in popular resentment of inequality has happened because “we have, in fact, left the lower-income folks behind,” Dimon said. The Wall Street veteran, who has the ear of everyone from world leaders to central bankers to the markets, said he often reminds well-off people that they don’t have to worry about the schools their children attend, and they don’t live in “crime-ridden neighborhoods.”
“If you are making less income and you’re in a poor rural area, or an inner city area, your schools aren’t good, you go to crime-ridden neighborhoods, [there is] more divorce, less jobs–it is becoming intergenerational, so let’s acknowledge it and fix it,” Dimon said.
Dimon contextualized the frustration of lower-income families, noting that, compared with the 1960s and 1970s, standards of living have improved across the board. In fact, a Fed study released last year found that the share of people who said they were financially “doing okay” or “living comfortably” rose from 62% to 73% in the U.S.
However, that doesn’t mean the divide between the haves and the have-nots is fair. Dimon added: “If you were the average citizen here and you say, ‘These wealthy people are getting unbelievably wealthy, and this segment’s been left behind,’ that’s kind of annoying.”
The “aggravation” felt by families whose schools are not doing well, who can’t find jobs, whose trades have shut down, is very real, added Dimon, but he added: “Let’s figure out how we’re gonna fix it going ahead. I hate crying over spilled milk; it’s not my nature.”
Dimon for president?
On inequality, the Queens-raised bank CEO suggested that solutions to improve the living conditions of poorer households needed to be backed across the political spectrum and by unions, too. He added: “I just think we have to get better at good public policy and remind people that good public policy is free, [and] doesn’t increase the deficit to spend the trillion dollars.“
In the Axios interview, Dimon once again shut down the possibility of him running for president. But he was asked about whether a candidate for the 2028 election—Republican or Democrat—may choose to run on being either “anti-rich” or “anti-AI.”
Dimon responded: “I think it’s possible, but unlikely. I think there will be a lot of not anti-AI, but people saying we’ve gotta control AI, we’ve gotta make it work for society. That’s a perfectly reasonable thing. I think if someone’s just anti-AI, I’d think that won’t work.”
