Just when you thought you had a foot in the door, the price went up, remarkably:

One billion dollars is no longer enough. The price of admission to this, the 25th anniversary edition of the Forbes 400, is $1.3 billion, up $300 million from last year. The collective net worth of the nation’s mightiest plutocrats rose $290 billion to $1.54 trillion.

That is a lot of money. We don’t know how high a stack of 1.54 trillion one dollar bills would be, but we imagine it would be quite high.

Once the wind starts blowing, no doubt all those dollar bills circling the earth will cause an eclipse.

Or, as Forbes quotes:

The late John Paul Getty once observed, “If you know exactly how rich you are, you’re not really rich.” We don’t pretend to know exactly, either, but we can get pretty close.

The oldest of the 400, John Simplot, is 98. The youngest, John Arnold, is 33.

The alumni map of the Forbes 400 is quite interesting as well. Harvard, Stanford, Princeton and Yale dominate. High school seniors, it’s time to put down the Wii and the iPod Touch and ace those SATs.