So you could craft a headline targeting the individual with the highest debt and still say "this greedy scumbag has more money than n% of the population combined", where n is the percent of people who have negative wealth.
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You could even include some people who do have wealth since it will get canceled out by those who have negative wealth.
Either you have logicked incorrectly, or I cannot read you. (I'll take the blame for the latter...) Care to clarify with some numbers?
He's saying that if you add up a bunch of negative net worths, eventually the sum is going to be very negative, even if each individual number was small. In particular, he's talking about the case where each of those numbers that you add up is individually smaller than your personal debt, but their sum exceeds your personal debt. Therefore, it looks like you are wealthier than all of those people combined (since your worth exceeds the sum of all theirs!).
Not to mention, that by having a negative net worth, you are a part of the bottom X%. But your debt is less than the sum of all debt, by definition. So 100% of Americans have more net worth (individually) than the bottom 5% combined.
If you have $100K in debt, you have "more" than 20 people with $10K each in debt combined.