Lots of inheritance paying out is the only logical explanation.
Because nothing got better, but your parents dying and leaving you half a house is a huge gain in wealth when you don't have anything, leading to a huge percentage increase in wealth.
I'm not young, but that's basically what we (sadly) are waiting for. My mother is well off and 82 and we have to wait for her to die to get our lives to a place where we're all satisfied with them, i.e. selling the house we have now and moving somewhere else because we live in an undesirable location and our house is worth very little comparatively despite being a nice 3-bedroom in one of the safer neighborhoods in town.
She knows it too, which is the worst part. She already told me that she's giving her giant house to me and not my brother so I can sell it and we can get out of where we're living. God I hate that she has to think about things that way, but worse, my daughter has to think about things that way.
Sounds like it's just you and a brother, a few generations ago 5-10 kids was normal, and a house didn't mean much because it's value wasn't inflated.
Common people are actually able to inherit significant stuff now, which considering government inaction, is pretty much the only way to rebuild the American middle class.
It's slow, and it sucks, but over time it leads to improvement.
Like say two families have two kids, and only one kid from each goes on to have kids, for simplicity we'll say with each other. The grandkids are going to inherit from their grandparents, parents, and childless aunts/uncles eventually. That's three houses, even if there's nothing else
That's wealth concentration, it's how the upper class has been doing it for centuries.
Someone posted this in politics. I pointed out that if you take out the top 1-5% and run those numbers again we will see a different picture. Wealth disparity didn't change much since the pandemic.
The "supporting data" are averages though, which are the fake news of statistics, so I suspect it's more to do with the richest 5% of the population owning the vast majority of the assets (stock, housing, etc).
Zuckerberg's wealth increased from 55 to 177 BILLION since 2020. If there are 100 million adults under 40 in the US, his growth alone represents $2,440 for every one of them. All you need to do is extrapolate the growth of the richest 1-5% assets and the bottom 95-99% are well behind where they were in 2020.
Remember! The corporatocracy-owned media exists to make you believe dystopia and poverty is actually freedom and prosperity.
The numbers are inflation adjusted. One may disagree with official numbers capturing the "real" inflation, but inflation is the relative Cost of Living.
The article also gives a breakdown in where the gains were, and an estimate of how much net worth raise was from increases in home prices.