Lifetime Earnings in the United States over Six Decades

I was wondering the other day other how many years are high earners are actually earning a very high income. In-equality wise it is very different if people in the 2 percentile of income stay there for a decade or more or if they are in that income bracket only for a few years while doing a specific job and drop down to lower income again when they change their job.

Assuming for instance an average work-life of 40 years (25-65), and anyone in the 2 percentile income bracket stays there only for 5 years, that means 16% of the population will be high-income at some point in their life (and stay there for 5 years), or up to 32% of households. This means that in this scenario up to a third of the population (maybe more if kids are taken into account?) would benefit sooner or later from an exceptional boost in disposable income.

That picture would be very different if high-earners stayed high earners for a longer time as they would truly form an elite that is clearly separated in income wealth from the rest of the population.

Obviously what you do with this income determines a lot about your actual wealth. So this is a different question than how absolute wealth is distributed.

I would be very much interested in pointers towards data and/or studies about how runaway elite incomes actually are in different parts of the world.

EDIT: I may have answered that to myself by drawing some income distribution curves. I guess it's a plausible outcome if the P90 for "all" is closer to the male P90 while the P10 is closer to the female P10 with the two curves being significantly different (which is increasingly the case as one goes to the past).