Additionally (I am a layman, but this is my understanding), to get around taxes, rich people take out loans using their assets as collateral.

This means the rich probably have very little liquid cash, but incredibly large lines of credit.

In regards to spending, what's the difference between cash in hand and credit?

So from my probably poorly informed position, this question doesn't make very much sense.

I've absolutely 0 info on cash distribution across the richest people, but this figure shows average asset across all people (in France). It still can be helpful as a way to "visualize" asset type property distribution across the spectrum.

http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/ideology/pdf/F11.17.pdf

Also - "liquid cash" is a vague term. Depending on the situation, accountants put a wide variety of not-literally-cash assets into the "cash & liquid assets" category. Even if you could get all the data - who was where on a "X Liquid Cash Richest" list would be extremely sensitive to both (1) the exact date of your list and to (2) the exact definition used in the accounting.

Stockholdings of highly capitalized, highly traded stocks on major stock exchanges (NYSE, Nasdaq, FTSE, a few others) are one of the more liquid assets there are.

If you are a multi-billionare it's reasonable to think you can convert maybe $500M - $1B of stock holdings to cash and have it in your bank accounts in 24 hours.

See https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/032715/what-items-a...

> Cash equivalents are typically investments that have short-term maturities of less than 90 days and are considered liquid assets because they can be readily converted to cash.

If you want "Cash" only. I believe that point of owning cash is privacy and not having to disclose them.

More accurately, that should be 'Cash-poor, asset-rich'. Assets are not just stocks, but also real-estate, precious metals*, commodities such as copper, wheat, etc.

*Gold as normally looked on as a 'store of wealth', not an 'investment'. It has been traditionally looked at in the same way as a permanent form of cash, rather than as a commodity like copper, or iron, or other metals.

Spare cash lying around is 'lazy money'. While it's good to have some cash on hand, it's poor investing to keep a lot of cash lying around. How much cash you have on hand is a function of your wealth-level. Some of us can get a bit twitchy if the cash(plus gold) levels should go down under a couple of hundred thousand or so. Your assets should be out there working, and bringing in more money.

Stocks are only one form of asset. And most people use them wrongly. Many people people chase the share-price without bothering about the company's fundamentals which is where real investing is involved. 'Trading' is merely another form of gambling. You do 'trading' for fun, not for investment, and you should be willing to lose all of that money if it be.

A good rule-of-thumb for an asset is that you have to be able to hold it in your hot little hand or at least touch it. Anything else is just numbers in somebody's computer and that can be taken away from you in the blink of an eye. (Or even when the power goes off.) Oh, and there's nothing 'safe' about a Bank's Safety Deposit Box. If they hold it in their Bank, it's theirs, not yours.

One last thing. Get rid of the debt. Pay off your mortgages as soon as possible, within months rather than years. Keep your Credit Cards in a positive balance rather than in debt, so pay them off entirely at the end of the month or even more often. I consider it a failure on my part if they get into debt at all. Online banking is your friend.

1- https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...

They check all participants, for what amount of cache they have.

AAA+ rating only possible for subject, who have 100% coverage of all credits bodies by cache.

Unfortunately, from NASDAQ, only Microsoft have AAA+ rating. Other companies have coverage only for year or more of percents, none cover body.

there are also forms of assets that are actively making them money yet easy to access and reallocate (say at x% loss depending on how urgent you need it).

$10M in paper cash is far less liquid and harder to spend than $10M in public stocks.

...can I get in on it?

Once you know this reality, when folks like AOC want to ban 'billionaires' what they are actually saying is they want to go after unrealized stocks. Which isn't just stock market, it can be fine art, cars, whatever. Their goal is to seize private property to fund their spending. Many countries have tried this, all of them collapsed.

Because of inflation and FDIC protection limits, most people don't carry around excess cash. It costs money to hold cash.

Fidelity will let you hold up to 1.25M before getting past FDIC protections. Many don't like their cash to go beyond FDIC protections, so 1M or so cash is around the upper limit people would regularly want to hold.