The six heirs to the Walmart fortune are worth as much as nearly half of all American households.
The Walton family was worth $89.5 billion in 2010, the same as the bottom 41.5 percent of U.S. families combined, according to Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute. That's 48.8 million American households in total.
Sylvia Allegreto of the University of California at Berkeley found last year that the six children of Walmart founders Sam and James “Bud” Walton had the same net worth in 2007 as the bottom 30 percent of American households. But between 2007 and 2010, that net worth rose, while the incomes of most Americans declined, explaining the three-year shift, Bivens notes.
