Wealthy individuals have a large influence on the income distribution in society through politics and the corporate world. How do they think about redistribution? We find that wealthy individuals from the top 5% in the U.S. prefer less redistribution than a representative sample of the bottom 95%. The affluent want to further decrease taxes for the rich and were more likely to support Donald Trump in the last presidential election. This difference in tax attitudes and political decisions can be largely attributed to differences in distributional preferences, which we measure with an incentivized experiment. The wealthy (N = 467) and the general population (N = 415) could redistribute real earnings between real workers, who received unequal compensation for their work. The top 5% accepted more inequality than the general population by redistributing less of the earnings between workers. Individuals who climbed the income ladder, such as successful entrepreneurs and investors appear to drive the gap in distributional preferences. By contrast, individuals who are born rich have distributional preferences much closer to the preferences of the general population. Our findings raise the possibility that wealthy individuals contribute to the persistent income inequality in the U.S.