A fat stock portfolio and an expensive car can both make you feel rich. Over the past three years, though, they did very different things to Americans’ finances.

The Federal Reserve’s latest Survey of Consumer Finances revealed a striking split: Median net worth rose roughly 38% for households headed by someone 75 or older between 2022 and 2025, while falling 23% for those headed by someone under 35. Both figures account for inflation, according to an analysis by Nick Maggiulli, chief data officer at Ritholtz Wealth Management and author of The Wealth Ladder.

The Wall Street Journal first reported the age split in a short post on what it called “the gold standard for measuring household wealth,” which the central bank releases every three years. Americans 55 and over now hold roughly $140 trillion, about three-quarters of the nation’s net worth, Fortune reported this month, citing a Bank of America Institute analysis of the Fed data.

The oldest households finished the period with a median net worth of $504,600, up from $366,288 in 2022, measured in 2025 dollars. For the youngest households, it fell from $42,725 to $32,820. The oldest group now has roughly 15x the wealth of the youngest, compared with about 9x three years earlier.

Across all families, inflation-adjusted median net worth rose just 2% between 2022 and 2025, reaching $215,900. That modest national gain concealed sharply different experiences at opposite ends of the age spectrum.

The findings also echo an argument Yale law and history professor Samuel Moyn made in an interview with Fortune this summer about his book, Gerontocracy in America: The concentration of wealth among older Americans is not merely a matter of who has had longer to save. In his account, it also shapes whose interests the economy and political system serve.

Moyn describes an “oldigarchy,” in which older, disproportionately wealthy Americans hold outsize influence. His book argues that “aging Americans control the biggest bank accounts and stock portfolios,” and that “the old rich have pulled away from everyone else.”

Asked about the latest Fed figures, Moyn responded by email that they further prove his thesis. “The question is whether the age correlation of the haves versus have-nots with the older versus the younger is fair,” Moyn ventured. “And it isn’t. So this is a case of the older getting richer, not just the rich getting richer.”

“The boomers have created a new American system of rule, which reserves power—including in the form of wealth—for later life,” he told Fortune. “And that is the wrong time for power, including in assets and resources.”

The Yale professor added that he does not expect the pattern to end here. Boomers, he wrote, “lucked out in acquiring a lot early and enjoying several asset bubbles along the way,” but the issue is older asset owners in general. “The pattern will increasingly be wealth concentrated towards the upper end of the age spectrum.”

A bracket full of boomers

The 75-and-older bracket is not purely boomers, to be sure. Households headed by someone that age in 2025 were born in 1950 or earlier, so it also includes the Silent Generation; the under-35 bracket mixes Gen Z with younger millennials. The survey also does not track the same households over time. Still, the youngest and oldest groups stood out. No other age bracket recorded a change in median net worth larger than 6% in either direction, according to Maggiulli, writing in his blog, Of Dollars and Data.

Boomers help explain why the oldest group’s gains look so large. Wealthier boomers aged into the 75-and-older bracket between surveys, lifting its median. Comparing households aged 72 and older in 2022 with those aged 75 and older in 2025, Maggiulli calculated a smaller—but still substantial—21% increase. That follows a birth cohort, not the same individual households.

The youngest households’ decline followed an unusually large pandemic-era gain. Their inflation-adjusted median net worth rose from about $18,000 in 2019 to nearly $43,000 in 2022—a roughly 140% jump that Maggiulli calls the largest on record—before falling to roughly $33,000 in 2025. Even after the setback, young households remained wealthier than their counterparts were before the pandemic. With stimulus checks gone and student loan payments back, Maggiulli suggests the drop may partly be a return to normal. But the figures still suggest that young adults up to age 35 feel 23% poorer since 2022.

The crucial distinction, Maggiulli argued, was ownership—not just how much people owned, but what they owned. Older households had more of their assets in homes and financial investments. Younger households were less likely to own a home and had a bigger share of their assets sitting in the driveway. As investments rose and vehicle values fell, those different starting points mattered.

Housing helps explain why. The share of under-35 households that owned a home fell from 38.5% in 2022 to 35.6% in 2025. Nearly two-thirds of young households therefore did not own an asset that accounted for a substantial share of homeowners’ wealth.

Maggiulli recalled that back in 2021, he argued that millennials weren’t poorer than previous generations, and the data eventually proved him right. “But things feel different with the youngest households, many of whom are Gen Z,” he added, citing the worst job market for recent college graduates on record and housing reaching its least affordable in 40 years.

Older households that built wealth over the last few years didn’t necessarily have to do anything differently, Maggiulli continued. “Their wealth gains came from appreciating assets. There’s nothing wrong with that. But many younger households may not get the opportunity to build wealth in this way.”

The old rich pull away

When Fortune first talked to Maggiulli, in August 2025, about his book The Wealth Ladder, he said there’s “something weird” going on in the economy, a problem of too much affluence and numbers that do not always match how people feel. “The economy wasn’t built to handle this many people with this much money,” he told Fortune. More recently, he described an “upper-middle-class trap,” in which even high earners find themselves working harder to buy declining-quality products and services.

His latest analysis gets at another version of that disconnect: Rising asset prices can make the economy look prosperous while leaving younger households behind. If you already have a house and a portfolio, your wealth can grow without much additional effort. If a large share of what you own is your car, the same economy can deliver a very different result.

The divide also fits a longer-running pattern. A 2025 paper submitted to the National Bureau of Economic Research by Edward Wolff found that average wealth among households under 35 fell from 21% of the national household average in 1983 to 16% in 2022. That measures relative wealth, not an outright decline in dollars, but it shows younger households falling further behind the country as a whole.

Even within wealthy families, Moyn told Fortune, the timing can work against younger generations. “We have this syndrome even within wealthy families of folks waiting around on their parents to inherit them,” he said. “It’s so late. It’s the wrong time in life for people to come into their house or their wealth.”

The wealth gap has political stakes, too

That sense of waiting for an opportunity has electoral relevance. Young men were among the groups that swung sharply toward Trump in 2024. More than half of men under 30 supported him, according to AP VoteCast, after a similar share backed Joe Biden four years earlier. They were an important part of his winning coalition, though not the only group responsible for his victory.

With midterm elections weeks away, Republicans face signs that some of those gains are slipping. Recent midterm polling shows young voters moving toward Democrats, and surveys of young men also indicate a Democratic advantage in congressional voting preferences.

The Fed’s wealth figures provide a financial backdrop to that shift, not proof of what caused it. The survey does not isolate young men or measure political attitudes. But a rising stock market is a very different advertisement for the economy when you have a substantial portfolio than when you have little invested.

Moyn said “there is absolutely a connection” between these wealth figures and waxing and waning support for Trump among young men. Reasoning that young people are “far more liberal” on the whole, he argued that the swing to Trump is partly explained as “youthful desperation in a society organized around the old and their advantages.” Younger people know deep down, he added, that “gerontocracy isn’t just a matter of old politicians but unfair policies.”

“The boomers have created a new American system of rule, which reserves power—including in the form of wealth—for later life,” he told Fortune. “And that is the wrong time for power, including in assets and resources.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com