I think most people don't realize just how much money the richest people have. People generally think of normal(ish) distributions like height, where if you're 10% taller or shorter than average, you're a tall or short person, and 40% taller makes you the tallest person in the world. In comparison, wealth has a very, very long tail, making it hard to visualize.

Here's what I've come up with to visualize wealth. Suppose you start counting, going up by 1 million dollars every second, and people sit down when you reach their net worth. Most people in the US will sit down immediately. After about 9 seconds, people in the "1%" will start sitting down. Mitt Romney would sit down after 4 minutes. Near the 17 minute mark, billionaires would start sitting down. Eric Schmidt would sit down around 2.8 hours. Finally, after nearly a day, Bill Gates would sit down.

The point of this is there's a huge range of billionaires (analogous to comparing 17 minutes to a day), and the 1% hardly even registers on this scale (like a few seconds).