Unlike the virtual billionaires, titans of manufacturing continue to prosper. There clearly are still fortunes to be made in such necessities as real estate and healthcare. Buyout king Thomas Lee ($1.2 billion) made like Johnny Damon and split for New York.īut most of our entrepreneurs endure-and profit. Casino baron Sheldon Adelson, who once drove his purple Rolls-Royce home to Newton, took his $15.6 billion to Las Vegas, where he owns the Venetian.

Viacom’s Sumner Redstone, now worth $8.4 billion, moved to Beverly Hills. Others took their green to greener pastures. David Wetherell of CMGI, for example, saw his stake in the company plummet from $2.1 billion to $100 million in less than a year. Not everybody at the top has fared so well since we last produced this list.

Over the past two decades the wealthiest households in this state have seen their incomes rise five times faster than the poorest and twice as fast as those in the middle class. That’s more per capita than in Los Angeles, Chicago, even New York City. Today nearly one in 20 families here is worth at least $1 million. It’s been that way for two centuries, ever since Salem’s Elias Hasket Derby’s profits from the China trade made him America’s first. Massachusetts has always had more than its fair share of millionaires.

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