Just nine Silicon Valley billionaires hold 15 times more liquid wealth than the bottom half of all households in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, according to the 2025 Silicon Valley Index, an annual report slated to be released Friday.
RELATED: Silicon Valley’s inequality gap is growing twice as fast as rest of U.S.
Those billionaires — the region’s richest .001% of residents — had an estimated $150 billion in cash or cash equivalents in 2024.
The 447,000 households in the bottom half had just 1% of the total liquid wealth in the region — about $10 billion.
While the data does not name individuals, it is not hard to find the list of billionaires who call the region home: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and businesswoman and philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs in Palo Alto, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in Los Altos, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, WhatsApp founder Jan Koum and financier George Roberts in Atherton, and Ubiquiti Networks founder Robert Pera in San Jose, are the richest nine in the two counties, according to the group’s analysis of a Forbes list.
They each have between $16 billion and $243 billion in total wealth as of February 2025, according to the estimates, which include billionaires’ public and private holdings, including stocks. Those totals eclipse their estimated liquid wealth, which does not include those holdings, and dwarfs the wealth held by their less fortunate neighbors.
But there are more than a handful of super-rich in the Bay Area. The wealthiest 1% of Silicon Valley, about 9,000 households, hold a whopping 42% of the region’s collective wealth, about $421 billion.
And that gap between the richest and the rest is growing. “The top 10% has 71% of the wealth,” said Russell Hancock, president of Joint Venture Silicon Valley, up one percentage point in a year. Wealth for the bottom half remained at 1%.
There are 56 billionaires and about 145,000 millionaires who call Silicon Valley home, according to the newest estimates. And per capita income in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties was $157,100 in 2023, slightly lower than in San Francisco but more than twice the U.S. per capita income of $70,000 and nearly twice the $81,000 average for California.
Meanwhile, “a significant portion of the population faces significant economic hardship,” the report says. “An estimated 30% of Silicon Valley households do not earn enough to meet their basic needs without assistance.”
Among the bottom half are 110,000 households, 12.3%, that have zero or negative wealth. Another 10.1% have under $5,000, and another 6.1% have between $5,000 and $10,000.
Income and wages have grown fastest for those making the most
Because so many households have little to no wealth, wages and income are the critical metrics for most. And while income in the region is much higher than statewide and national averages and has grown quickly, the biggest gains have been for those at the top already.
“Silicon Valley’s income divide has grown twice as quickly as that of the state and nation, since the end of the Great Recession,” according to the report, and “the income gap between residents of varying educational attainment levels is much wider in Silicon Valley than in California or the United States as a whole.”
Those with a bachelor’s or graduate degree are the only residents who have seen a notable increase in income in the past two decades.
Median wages in Silicon Valley have been tempered recently, but gains remain much higher over the past decade in Silicon Valley than in other parts of the Bay Area.
Alameda County’s median wages have grown alongside California’s, while median wages in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties were growing quickly year over year in the 2010s and then exploded in 2020, though they were back down a little from 2022 to 2023.