Some super managers and visionairies can attain the Wealthy level but rarely do someone outside that class. Those Forbes covered were generally from the former. The numbers from the 1600 Mega Rich would be different. That number does not include the income of family foundations which preserve the wealth and where there is a huge capital invested.
Today many/most of these are pushing in the wrong direction and undermining the nation. And setting up trusts to increase the pass-through of income. See Ted Kennedy.
At some level, in a democracy, the wide inequality of wealth and income will produce a catastrophe.
Inequality is caused by the federal government devouring the substance of employees, burdening the country with debt, devaluing their currency, artificially keeping interest rates low, etc. It has always been this way.
"I am not among those who fear the people. They...are our dependence for continued freedom. And to preserve their independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.
If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds...our people...must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they (the British) now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers....
This example reads to us the salutary lesson that private fortunes are destroyed by public, as well as by private extravagance.
And this is the tendency of all human governments.
A departure from the principle in one instance, becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering. Then begins, indeed, the 'bellum omnium in omnia,' which some philosophers...have mistaken for the natural, instead of the abusive, state of man.
And the fore-horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression." - Thomas Jefferson