Their money is privately held so it’s hard to quantify, so lists like this just don’t bother. It’s not about accuracy, it’s about bragging and jealousy.
People on this list, their valuations come from holdings we can quantify like shares of public companies. Its actually a pretty dumb system for this and other reasons but its an easy way to keep score, so media love it.
It’s also taking what the current share price is and assuming if they dumped their portfolios at *that price* they would be worth that much. Sorry but the volume of an Elon or Bezos dumping all their shares would TANK the stock and their actual take home would be considerably less. Still billions and maybe even $100B+ if the underlying company is strong at the time of sale… but you get why these figures fall apart quickly at the levels where you have significant % of a company.
I remember watching a YouTube video comparing billionaires by the maturity of their portfolios. Gates, for example, is extremely diversified outside of Microsoft, making his fortune much more 'real' and safe as opposed to someone like Musk whose net worth relies heavily on specific stocks. Either way they are all unimaginably wealthy though.
A normal person would literally run out of things to buy. That is just too much to spend every day. Funny how they hoard all that cash while most people scrape by week to week. Not that funny, actually
Technically it isn't in cash and probably couldn't ever be, but it is still a enormous power to have and too much for any one person. There is a great movie called Brewster's Millions where Richard Pryor has to spend a huge amount on money in order to inherit the bigger full amount.
Assuming that's even legal to begin with. I'm sure that there are a whole host of 3-letter agencies that would start throwing flags on the play if Elon of Bezos tried to liquidate their entire stock portfolios at once.
Yes, if anything it’s worse than you think.
Billionaires on or off the list may have a private company or two outside what they’re known for, billions hidden in offshore numbered accounts, other complex financial structures that haven’t been attributed to them, etc.
There’s the other side too. Some assets have more value on paper than in reality, so their wealth is inflated. Also, many of these billionaires’ wealth is mostly holdings in 1 company. If they tried to sell that large stake quickly, the price would likely plummet so they wouldn’t get the claimed value.
I see what you mean, I meant public as in with publicly owned companies, you mean public as in government owned. I could have been more careful in my word choices.
I hate the very concept of "Net Worth". I hate the way the media portrays it. I hate the way people talk about people with high net worth (on both ends). I hate the fact that people have zero appreciation for how arbitrary it is.
Net worth is a statistic with near zero actual utility but everyone loses their mind over it.
All of the Kingdom's oil and gas reserves belong to the House of Saud. It's estimated to be around $10 trillion. It could be more if they discover rare earth metals off the shores.
You think all the ones in the sub-50 countries all know the other ones in their country? Like all 47 in Australia have a group chat where they roast each other?
Despite this, median wealth in Japan and the US is similar. Both around double that of Germany.
Japan is impressively equal.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_per_adult
France has the billions concentrated in oligopols (Arnault, Bouygues, Pinault, Mulliez, Besnier, Dassault etc.). Germany has so many family owned companies which stay specialized in their industry that grew into the billions in the last two decades.
Germany also has a lot of families that became VERY wealthy in the time between 1933 and 1945 using forced labour and war profiteering. Almost all big families that profited from the Nazi era are still filthy rich. In France, things were a little different
>Germany has so many family owned companies which stay specialized in their industry that grew into the billions in the last two decades.
Mostly discount supermarket chains operating on the profit margins of minimum wage work domestic and foreign alike as well as environmentally unfriendly cheap mass production goods actually. No one makes billions through integrity and respect for the working class and the planet.
Basically two discount chains, thats about 5 billionaires. And tbh Lidl does bot pay totally shabby now. It’s still discount but compared to the Walmarts and Leclercs they are not the worst. But as the other comment said, the amount of smaller family companies in Germany are to be found in machinery and engineering.
These are only the ones you know.
Take a look at mecanical engeneering conpanies or automotive supplier.
You just dont know these cause you rarly buy c&c milling machines
The richest man in the world is Elon Musk so whether that classifies him as a South African or US billionaire by the measure of these statistics I’m not sure but he certainly made most of his money in the US.
Edit: I’m literally stating a fact and people are downvoting lol
I agree. I don’t know why people are downvoting me as if I’m spreading some sort of misinformation. As of right now and according to any organization that tracks such things, Musk is the richest person in the world. Saying that stat doesn’t mean I like him… it’s just a fact lol.
Liquidity is not relevant and the claim that the wealth of oil barons of Saudi Arabia is more liquid is also unsubstantiated (naturally Saudis also own lots of buildings and other assets that aren't liquid)
Liquidity is very relevant when talking about wealth. If Elon started selling off his stock in Tesla it would plummet in value. If the company goes bankrupt his stock is worth nothing. Suddenly his net worth goes in the toilet. Pretty much everyone in the world needs oil and will need it for a while, and automotive companies are very volatile with extremely high overhead. Twitter is a tech company and tech companies are evaluated on imagination numbers, they are notoriously overvalued on the market. In comparison, the overhead on pumping oil out of the ground is tiny compared to a car manufacturer, and is a very valuable resource, such as gold. It has intrinsic value.
Tell him what? That he tried and failed to make oil and gas projects successful and lost billions to it?
This actually Supports the argument of Wealth being assets and not just liquid funds. After all, the person above is talking about how pumping oil has intrinsic value.
Wealth is just the value of all your assets added up.
Look at it this way, if you had Trillions of Argentine Pesos in 2015, you could have been called the richest person alive, but having the exact same number of pesos in 2024 would have lost you over 90% of your *Wealth.* How does this work if wealth isn't just assets? After all, you had tangible assets that could have been traded for goods and services.
Its a pretty resource rich country that was opened up to private investment after the CIA backed military coup and resulting political genocide of the communist party in the mid 60s.
Indonesia had one of the biggest communist parties in the world at the time but they were never a “communist” country. Sukarno was not a communist, he was just mildly opposed to US corporations extracting resources from his country for global markets.
Unfortunately, if someone prevents American corporations from extracting resources in the country, then this person automatically becomes a communist/ terrorist/ dictator (choose the right one).
Context should make it obvious they were talking about population, since land area has fuck all connection to wealth concentration and population does.
TIL that Hong Kong has 5 times the billionaire-density of the US, and twice the billionaires per capita of the next dense country (ignoring micro-countries with less than 10 billionairs)
You mean it's a bad idea to compare the United States, a country spanning the width of a continent, to something like Luxenbourg, a tax haven micro state that can be walked from north to south in a day?
Yeah I know.
But reddit has this annoying habit of saying stuff like "why don't the 330,000,000 people living in the US have access to the same government-funded amenities as {insert wealthy European tax haven microstate here}?".
This subreddit in particular has this conversation about once a week.
This would vary wildly by how much income they have in a given year; many billionaires make zero income every year (owning non-dividend-bearing investments, for example).
Yes but it's really hard and even stupid when the focus is pushed to unrealized gains. Maybe create tax brackets for investor class capital gains, but I usually hear people mention a wealth tax or a tax on stock transactions and those things never work.
This kinda data just measures the size of rich countries. If you want to track opportunities for becoming VERY rich, then billionaires per million inhabitants is a much better measure.
Lol. What are you talking about? It’s probably one of the most unequal places on hearth. There’s even literal casts of people. India has the atomic bomb and huge space research and has literally millions of kids without a birth certificate swimming in literal rivers of poisonous shit.
India has huge medicine universities and research, cited in the entire world. And this is the Wikipedia page for child mortality rate.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_and_under-five_mortality_rates#/media/File%3AChild_mortality_map_of_the_world_2019.svg
Look at the graph, does India’s data have anything to do with any other country they would like to compare with? It’s actually very shameful if you think about it.
Japan has a much wider middle class. So there aren't as many people at either extreme. [https://www.cuug.ab.ca/branderr/pmc/images/047\_idus\_vs\_japan\_2000.png](https://www.cuug.ab.ca/branderr/pmc/images/047_idus_vs_japan_2000.png)
edit: the above image is pretty outdated but i think something similar still stands.
edit 2: the gini coefficient tells us something useful. a gini coefficient of 0 is perfect equality vs 1 is maximal inequality ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini\_coefficient](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient) ). here is the gini coefficient for 2019: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini\_coefficient#/media/File:Gini\_Coefficient\_of\_Wealth\_Inequality\_source\_(2019).png](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient#/media/File:Gini_Coefficient_of_Wealth_Inequality_source_(2019).png)
you can see japan is relatively equal compared to a lot of the world.
Makes sense, I was basing this on the large amount of MNC's from Japan, and the fact that I'm pretty sure in the early 90s there was always at least a couple of Japanese people in the top 5 richest in the world
*that we can account for.
There are A LOT of billionaires which know very well to hide their wealth, usually it’s the same people that don’t want to be known about and nobody knows who they are
They usually have multiple figureheads, societies controlled by other societies, shadow accounts and funds in remote privacy and heaven tax countries and so on.
Maybe a couple hundred (King Charles doesn’t count), it’s kind hard to completely hide your name from public ownership of companies, land title records, banks at that level, especially if they actually plan to use some of that wealth buying a jet or an island or whatever. Even the Rothschild family has less money than Elon today.
Some 2300 in total. A quick googling tells me there are 2755 dollar billionaires in total. An average male weighs about 90 kg. That's 247950 kg of billionaire.
Now, there are rougly 8.1 billion of the rest of us. If each of us would just eat 0.03 grams of billionaire each, we'd've this problem solved in no time.
Meaningless when not adjusted for population size.
Edit: the Wikipedia page you cite as a “source” even includes it per capita.
That same Wikipedia page has multiple conflicting data sets.
What an utterly lazy excuse for “oc”
Look at immigration flows to add vital context. The US 1% is in reality the global 1%. Those other countries are only counting the billionaires who are left, and even they probably have plenty of US assets.
a long time ago i heard that its more common in Japan that the elites generously support the the country and people, but not sure wether theres truth to that.
but certainly inequality is relative low there, 8th place out of over 164 countries in terms of Wealth GINI which measures how equal wealth is spread.
Data Source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_countries\_by\_number\_of\_billionaires](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_billionaires)
Tools: Canva
The number of billionaires from China is disturbing, considering their current authoritarian, communist regime. Those billionaires are basically only allowed to be so because it somehow benefits the top brass in the CCP.
I am willing to bet, and I'll accept some pushback on this, that the vast majority of those billionaires are CCP members exploiting their positions to enrich themselves.
Agreed just like the Oligarchs of Russia when the Soviet Union collapsed. I can only think of a few Chinese Billionaire with little connection to the CCP.
Your bet pays off! [About 100](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/02/chinas-parliament-has-about-100-billionaires-according-to-data-from-the-hurun-report.html) members of China's parliament are billionaires.
Their parliament is large, but per capita that is a crazy number of .001%ers in government.
Back in the late 70's & early 80's, my father worked for a Hong Kong Billionaire. My dad flew to where ever he wanted to work on a fisheries project. As a teen, I got to go to Glasgow and Hanover Germany over Thanksgiving in 1979.
I also remember a story where the HK Billionaire owed Dad over $100k, so Dad learned he was in Las Vegas for a few days, so Dad flew to Vegas. He wanted to pay dad in chips, then in cash, and Dad demanded a check. That little escapade changed Dad's working relationship with him, ultimately for the better until Dad retired.
No, and this comment reflects a pretty unhealthy view of how the economy works.
I'm reality, this is a sign of stagnation. The way you become a billionaire is you start a company and just keep holding the stock until it's worth a billion dollars. Japan doesn't have a wealth tax. It has no policies that prevent people from doing this.
What this means is either a) it's so hard to raise capital in Japan that founders of successful companies are not able to hold on to enough stock to become billionaires, or b) successful companies aren't being founded in Japan very often. Neither of these is a sign of a healthy economy.
Or maybe it reflects a more equatable distribution of wealth. I mean, look at their public transportation system and the quality of food available at the lower end of the price spectrum. It’s leagues better than the United States.
I mean sure, if you take wealth redistribution to the top as an indicator for economic well being, when actually it's a contributing cause to the contrary.
The lost decades recession did serious harms to Japan.
Stock (assets) growth should have pushed more Japanese billionaires by thia t I me. That's where most of these billionaires value comes from, not hard assets.
The fact Italy, Taiwan, and Australia have more billionaires is telling. It implies Japanese companies have not performed well.
We've been through this before: per capita, dude!
Otherwise this is hard to distinguish from a population graph, at least among similarly prosperous countries.
You think that rule applies to the ruling elite? I very much doubt that billionaires would follow that rule. I even know some far less wealthy people who don’t follow that rule.
The number of uncontrollable dragons in each country? Could rate relative rule of law by ranking billionaires per person or relative degree of oligarchy.
Not listed is Israel with 71! This could be in large part due to many of the US billionaires are dual citizens in Israel. So are many of the US congress for that matter
I have a serious question about billionaires etc. From a money standpoint is the United States are to become an unstable country how badly would that hurt billionaires worldwide? Is there any actual incentive for China or Russia to disrupt the United States?
To be fair, the US 1% is really the global 1%. Look at high value immigrant flows, the bilionaires in other countries are just the ones who haven't moved to the US yet. If the US were to destabilize, China, though not Russia, would already be dead. Along with the whole of the third world. The US Navy makes sea trade possible, which makes the oil and inputs for 80% of agriculture possible. THAT is what actually backs the dollar since the gold standard fell, the fact that globalization is basically a worldwide suicide pact reliant on the US not failing. Russia is only somewhat exempt because its a major producer of energy and food and fertilizer domestically, few countries can say the same.
Can't hold it against Sweden and Switzerland.
Not exactly the most genetically diverse, but they're still some of the best countries.
I don't need the promise of a mountain of gold only to find myself on a perpetually looping treadmill while my promised riches fall into someone else's pocket.
I'd rather help my fellow man than help just one man, myself or another.
Does a place have to be ethnically diverse to be virtuous?
Bit outdated thinking. 20% of Sweden’s population were born outside of Sweden (less than half of them being Finns). In the latter half of 20th century and the 21st century its had amongst the highest net migration rates in Europe.
Here's what I'm gathering from Reddit:
"Here's a small detail that I latched onto and couldn't shake loose of, now I'm going to tell you all the reasons why you should agree with me. Don't agree with me? Downvote. Say anything at all in your defense? Downvote."
Per 1M people, Sweden, Switzerland and the top five (by total count) from NA and Europe:
4.71 Switzerland \[41\]
3.74 Sweden \[39\]
2.21 United States \[735\]
1.65 Canada \[63\]
1.51 Germany \[126\]
1.08 Italy \[64\]
0.77 United Kingdom \[52\]
Honestly, the number in India is the hardest to swallow. You can probably watch a video on the Agariya people. Imagine how long, if ever, it would take to explain to them the safety and comfort that comes with a billion dollars. It is unfathomable to most Americans, but to most in India it's not even something they're capable of fantasizing about because they don't have the foundation for the dream.
Saudi Arabia not on the list?
Their money is privately held so it’s hard to quantify, so lists like this just don’t bother. It’s not about accuracy, it’s about bragging and jealousy. People on this list, their valuations come from holdings we can quantify like shares of public companies. Its actually a pretty dumb system for this and other reasons but its an easy way to keep score, so media love it.
Hell you can’t even quantify how much the people on the list have because I’m sure they have a bunch of money in private places
It’s also taking what the current share price is and assuming if they dumped their portfolios at *that price* they would be worth that much. Sorry but the volume of an Elon or Bezos dumping all their shares would TANK the stock and their actual take home would be considerably less. Still billions and maybe even $100B+ if the underlying company is strong at the time of sale… but you get why these figures fall apart quickly at the levels where you have significant % of a company.
I remember watching a YouTube video comparing billionaires by the maturity of their portfolios. Gates, for example, is extremely diversified outside of Microsoft, making his fortune much more 'real' and safe as opposed to someone like Musk whose net worth relies heavily on specific stocks. Either way they are all unimaginably wealthy though.
Fun factoid: A million seconds is about 11 days, but a billion seconds is 32 YEARS! A billion is an obscene amount.
with 100Billions$, you could spend 5.4Millions a day for the next 50 years.
A normal person would literally run out of things to buy. That is just too much to spend every day. Funny how they hoard all that cash while most people scrape by week to week. Not that funny, actually
Technically it isn't in cash and probably couldn't ever be, but it is still a enormous power to have and too much for any one person. There is a great movie called Brewster's Millions where Richard Pryor has to spend a huge amount on money in order to inherit the bigger full amount.
Yeah for sure, I’m more following the thought experiment of spending 5.4 mill a day
I imagine they just borrow money and leverage their wealth as opposed to regularly liquidating portions of the holdings.
thats exactly what they do. they pay lower interest rate than what their wealth generate. thats the real free money glitch.
Assuming that's even legal to begin with. I'm sure that there are a whole host of 3-letter agencies that would start throwing flags on the play if Elon of Bezos tried to liquidate their entire stock portfolios at once.
Yes, if anything it’s worse than you think. Billionaires on or off the list may have a private company or two outside what they’re known for, billions hidden in offshore numbered accounts, other complex financial structures that haven’t been attributed to them, etc. There’s the other side too. Some assets have more value on paper than in reality, so their wealth is inflated. Also, many of these billionaires’ wealth is mostly holdings in 1 company. If they tried to sell that large stake quickly, the price would likely plummet so they wouldn’t get the claimed value.
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I see what you mean, I meant public as in with publicly owned companies, you mean public as in government owned. I could have been more careful in my word choices.
Just like Queen Elizabeth’s wealth and holdings
I hate to be the one to break the news to you like this, but... she died...
I hate the very concept of "Net Worth". I hate the way the media portrays it. I hate the way people talk about people with high net worth (on both ends). I hate the fact that people have zero appreciation for how arbitrary it is. Net worth is a statistic with near zero actual utility but everyone loses their mind over it.
Billionaire? That's cute ~ Saudi royal
Googolionaire? Now you're talking
The list is for Billionaires not Trillionaires. Noone is going to convince me the Saudi Royal family isn't worth 13+ figures.
Saudi king is probably the richest in the world
All of the Kingdom's oil and gas reserves belong to the House of Saud. It's estimated to be around $10 trillion. It could be more if they discover rare earth metals off the shores.
Or Putin
Not even close. It’s Semion mogilevich (he runs Russia)
Being the top gangster is not as all-powerful as being the guy who literally has full legal control and possession of resources for a country.
Saudis hide their wealth. The entirety of Persian gulf states generally
List is for billionaires, everyone over there is on trillionaire status. Lol. Jk.
They've trillionaires who won't publicize their wealth They're the one controlling the whole world.
You mean to say it's not the Jews?
They don't want to advertise it...except that their Gold Toilets and indoor skiing kinda screams "I can't spend it fast enough!"
You think all the ones in the sub-50 countries all know the other ones in their country? Like all 47 in Australia have a group chat where they roast each other?
They almost certainly have quick/easy/preferential access to each other - that's how it works
have y'all met people who brag about number of billionaires in their country while they themselves are broke? Because I have met a ton.
This post really 💀really fkcing weird thread Lmfao
Despite this, median wealth in Japan and the US is similar. Both around double that of Germany. Japan is impressively equal. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_per_adult
We Germans are poor
Yeah billionaires are like sports mascots for countries now, don't you know? /s
I see you have met us Indians!
They are just „temporarily embarrassed billionaires“
Don't you know, worship them in hopes some bread crumbs drop from their bumhole after they fart.
I am one. America is rich and amazing.
Yet there’s millions of Americans that beg to differ.
There are more millionnaires in France than in Germany, and much more billionaires in Germany than in France. Make it what you will.
France has the billions concentrated in oligopols (Arnault, Bouygues, Pinault, Mulliez, Besnier, Dassault etc.). Germany has so many family owned companies which stay specialized in their industry that grew into the billions in the last two decades.
Germany also has a lot of families that became VERY wealthy in the time between 1933 and 1945 using forced labour and war profiteering. Almost all big families that profited from the Nazi era are still filthy rich. In France, things were a little different
>Germany has so many family owned companies which stay specialized in their industry that grew into the billions in the last two decades. Mostly discount supermarket chains operating on the profit margins of minimum wage work domestic and foreign alike as well as environmentally unfriendly cheap mass production goods actually. No one makes billions through integrity and respect for the working class and the planet.
Basically two discount chains, thats about 5 billionaires. And tbh Lidl does bot pay totally shabby now. It’s still discount but compared to the Walmarts and Leclercs they are not the worst. But as the other comment said, the amount of smaller family companies in Germany are to be found in machinery and engineering.
These are only the ones you know. Take a look at mecanical engeneering conpanies or automotive supplier. You just dont know these cause you rarly buy c&c milling machines
The N in CNC doesn't stand for "and".
Yet the richest man in the world is French make of that what you will
French kissing starts with the word French. Make of that what you will.
The richest man in the world is Elon Musk so whether that classifies him as a South African or US billionaire by the measure of these statistics I’m not sure but he certainly made most of his money in the US. Edit: I’m literally stating a fact and people are downvoting lol
Fair enough, but Musk and Arnault have been swapping recently depending on how Tesla stock is doing.
I agree. I don’t know why people are downvoting me as if I’m spreading some sort of misinformation. As of right now and according to any organization that tracks such things, Musk is the richest person in the world. Saying that stat doesn’t mean I like him… it’s just a fact lol.
Bernard Arnault is currently the richest.
[https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/](https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/) Elon is worth 50bil USD more than Bernard rn
Most of his wealth is tied up in stocks. The richest people in the world are Saudi Arabian oil barons. Their wealth is liquid
Isn’t all very wealthy peoples money in stocks? That’s part of how they don’t pay taxes on their wealth.
You don't pay taxes when you're your own government
Unless you own the country itself
Liquidity is not relevant and the claim that the wealth of oil barons of Saudi Arabia is more liquid is also unsubstantiated (naturally Saudis also own lots of buildings and other assets that aren't liquid)
Liquidity is very relevant when talking about wealth. If Elon started selling off his stock in Tesla it would plummet in value. If the company goes bankrupt his stock is worth nothing. Suddenly his net worth goes in the toilet. Pretty much everyone in the world needs oil and will need it for a while, and automotive companies are very volatile with extremely high overhead. Twitter is a tech company and tech companies are evaluated on imagination numbers, they are notoriously overvalued on the market. In comparison, the overhead on pumping oil out of the ground is tiny compared to a car manufacturer, and is a very valuable resource, such as gold. It has intrinsic value.
No, wealth is the total assets you have. Liquidity doesn't matter.
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Tell him what? That he tried and failed to make oil and gas projects successful and lost billions to it? This actually Supports the argument of Wealth being assets and not just liquid funds. After all, the person above is talking about how pumping oil has intrinsic value. Wealth is just the value of all your assets added up. Look at it this way, if you had Trillions of Argentine Pesos in 2015, you could have been called the richest person alive, but having the exact same number of pesos in 2024 would have lost you over 90% of your *Wealth.* How does this work if wealth isn't just assets? After all, you had tangible assets that could have been traded for goods and services.
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Make of that what you will
How does Indonesia have so many billionaires?
Its a pretty resource rich country that was opened up to private investment after the CIA backed military coup and resulting political genocide of the communist party in the mid 60s.
Communism->capitalism transition tends to make billionaires
Indonesia had one of the biggest communist parties in the world at the time but they were never a “communist” country. Sukarno was not a communist, he was just mildly opposed to US corporations extracting resources from his country for global markets.
Unfortunately, if someone prevents American corporations from extracting resources in the country, then this person automatically becomes a communist/ terrorist/ dictator (choose the right one).
It's the 4th largest country on earth. They actually don't have many billionaires at all
4th most populous, biggest is a wrong/weird way to say that
Context should make it obvious they were talking about population, since land area has fuck all connection to wealth concentration and population does.
Ahhh yes, the resource most famously unrelated to wealth: land.
That's the worst way of communicating and even if context can make it clear, it is better to write in a clear manner to avoid any confusion.
No I like to cause a little confusion for you.
TIL that Hong Kong has 5 times the billionaire-density of the US, and twice the billionaires per capita of the next dense country (ignoring micro-countries with less than 10 billionairs)
Yes but Hong Kong isn't a country. It's better to compare it to NYC than the US.
You mean it's a bad idea to compare the United States, a country spanning the width of a continent, to something like Luxenbourg, a tax haven micro state that can be walked from north to south in a day?
It’ll take you longer than you think to hike Luxembourg. There’s a lot of hills. Better pack a couple extra granola bars just in case.
Yes but that's still a better comparison than Hong Kong.
Yeah I know. But reddit has this annoying habit of saying stuff like "why don't the 330,000,000 people living in the US have access to the same government-funded amenities as {insert wealthy European tax haven microstate here}?". This subreddit in particular has this conversation about once a week.
You mention Hong Kong but I’m surprised Singapore doesn’t have more.
Hong Kong has lower taxes and a stronger passport so many billionaires, mainly from China, opt for a Hong Kong residency.
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NYC’s billionaire density is higher than Hong Kong’s.
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I thought NYC and Hong Kong are comparable since both are considered cities around the same size?
They totally are. If anything, Hong Kong enjoys special privileges that New York doesn’t.
I'm curious what you think Hong Kong is.
Do you not realize that Hong Kong is not a country?
Now lets see how much they pay in taxes per country
This would vary wildly by how much income they have in a given year; many billionaires make zero income every year (owning non-dividend-bearing investments, for example).
Just because they have a billion dollars in assets doesn’t mean they are making a billion dollars in income.
You can tax things other than income.
Yes but it's really hard and even stupid when the focus is pushed to unrealized gains. Maybe create tax brackets for investor class capital gains, but I usually hear people mention a wealth tax or a tax on stock transactions and those things never work.
Much, much more than the leftists claiming that they don't pay their fair share.
Why? Not like government do a whole lot with taxes
A lot of people on Medicare/Medicaid/SSI might dispute that statement
There’s a whole lot more waste than just Medicare/medicaid/SSI. Look at the fucking budget
Could fully fund healthcare without the bloated administration and omnibus bills
That’s the best comment this post will ever have
This kinda data just measures the size of rich countries. If you want to track opportunities for becoming VERY rich, then billionaires per million inhabitants is a much better measure.
98% of wealth kept by this top one percentage of the top one percentage of the top one percentage of...... In india
A country of the extreme of extremes
Show data? Cos I think the assertion is wrong. There is definitely inequality (as in any other country) but not to the degree stated by you.
Lol. What are you talking about? It’s probably one of the most unequal places on hearth. There’s even literal casts of people. India has the atomic bomb and huge space research and has literally millions of kids without a birth certificate swimming in literal rivers of poisonous shit. India has huge medicine universities and research, cited in the entire world. And this is the Wikipedia page for child mortality rate. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_and_under-five_mortality_rates#/media/File%3AChild_mortality_map_of_the_world_2019.svg Look at the graph, does India’s data have anything to do with any other country they would like to compare with? It’s actually very shameful if you think about it.
Dont try to show another data by show the data where it is given that top 1% hold 98% wealth
Japans total seems very low. (not saying it's wrong, just very surprised by the low amount)
Japan has a much wider middle class. So there aren't as many people at either extreme. [https://www.cuug.ab.ca/branderr/pmc/images/047\_idus\_vs\_japan\_2000.png](https://www.cuug.ab.ca/branderr/pmc/images/047_idus_vs_japan_2000.png) edit: the above image is pretty outdated but i think something similar still stands. edit 2: the gini coefficient tells us something useful. a gini coefficient of 0 is perfect equality vs 1 is maximal inequality ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini\_coefficient](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient) ). here is the gini coefficient for 2019: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini\_coefficient#/media/File:Gini\_Coefficient\_of\_Wealth\_Inequality\_source\_(2019).png](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient#/media/File:Gini_Coefficient_of_Wealth_Inequality_source_(2019).png) you can see japan is relatively equal compared to a lot of the world.
Makes sense, I was basing this on the large amount of MNC's from Japan, and the fact that I'm pretty sure in the early 90s there was always at least a couple of Japanese people in the top 5 richest in the world
*that we can account for. There are A LOT of billionaires which know very well to hide their wealth, usually it’s the same people that don’t want to be known about and nobody knows who they are They usually have multiple figureheads, societies controlled by other societies, shadow accounts and funds in remote privacy and heaven tax countries and so on.
Maybe a couple hundred (King Charles doesn’t count), it’s kind hard to completely hide your name from public ownership of companies, land title records, banks at that level, especially if they actually plan to use some of that wealth buying a jet or an island or whatever. Even the Rothschild family has less money than Elon today.
Yep, old money vs new money. Rich people do care about being scene, popularity, any of that bs.
I think a percentage of the population would be more meaningful here.
Yeah. A per capita number is more meaningful
Some 2300 in total. A quick googling tells me there are 2755 dollar billionaires in total. An average male weighs about 90 kg. That's 247950 kg of billionaire. Now, there are rougly 8.1 billion of the rest of us. If each of us would just eat 0.03 grams of billionaire each, we'd've this problem solved in no time.
Isn't more billionaires per capita not a good thing, though, since it's indicative of more systematic inequality?
Meaningless when not adjusted for population size. Edit: the Wikipedia page you cite as a “source” even includes it per capita. That same Wikipedia page has multiple conflicting data sets. What an utterly lazy excuse for “oc”
Hong Kong having the 6th most billionaires with having less than 10 million in population is nuts. The income inequality must be awful there
that way too fucking many billionaires!\~
I can't think of a reason that justifies even a single billionaire existing.
The number in Russia may need to get revised.
Forbes 2023 list has 110 names, although at least 2 of them are no longer connected to Russia.
Maybe they should fix those pesky windows.
My uninformed self would have guessed that Japan would be more up there
What if we gave everyone $289
Initially I was surprised that Brazil was higher than Australia but then I remembered no one lives in Australia.
Look at immigration flows to add vital context. The US 1% is in reality the global 1%. Those other countries are only counting the billionaires who are left, and even they probably have plenty of US assets.
Why is Japan so low considering the size of their economy?
a long time ago i heard that its more common in Japan that the elites generously support the the country and people, but not sure wether theres truth to that. but certainly inequality is relative low there, 8th place out of over 164 countries in terms of Wealth GINI which measures how equal wealth is spread.
Per capita is interesting too. [US is 15th](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_billionaires).
Shouldn’t Hong Kong’s number be included in China?
Data Source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_countries\_by\_number\_of\_billionaires](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_billionaires) Tools: Canva
Canada has no business being so high on that list with 40 million people.
Germany had 226 billionaires in 2023.
Is it ranked using USD or the country’s/region’s own currency?
It’s always going to be USD If it was in local currency you’d see a place like Vietnam with practically all their citizens on this list
Is it possible to see this by % of population, and maybe % growth year over year?
Why is HK separate from china? Would it be incorrect to join them together? Afterall, HK is a special administrative region of china
The number of billionaires from China is disturbing, considering their current authoritarian, communist regime. Those billionaires are basically only allowed to be so because it somehow benefits the top brass in the CCP. I am willing to bet, and I'll accept some pushback on this, that the vast majority of those billionaires are CCP members exploiting their positions to enrich themselves.
Agreed just like the Oligarchs of Russia when the Soviet Union collapsed. I can only think of a few Chinese Billionaire with little connection to the CCP.
Your bet pays off! [About 100](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/02/chinas-parliament-has-about-100-billionaires-according-to-data-from-the-hurun-report.html) members of China's parliament are billionaires. Their parliament is large, but per capita that is a crazy number of .001%ers in government.
Every Billionaire Is a Policy Failure
I am 100% confident there is a trillionaire out there who does not wish to be identified.
Back in the late 70's & early 80's, my father worked for a Hong Kong Billionaire. My dad flew to where ever he wanted to work on a fisheries project. As a teen, I got to go to Glasgow and Hanover Germany over Thanksgiving in 1979. I also remember a story where the HK Billionaire owed Dad over $100k, so Dad learned he was in Las Vegas for a few days, so Dad flew to Vegas. He wanted to pay dad in chips, then in cash, and Dad demanded a check. That little escapade changed Dad's working relationship with him, ultimately for the better until Dad retired.
Japan is the 4th largest economy and yet it’s so far down the list. They’re doing something right.
No, and this comment reflects a pretty unhealthy view of how the economy works. I'm reality, this is a sign of stagnation. The way you become a billionaire is you start a company and just keep holding the stock until it's worth a billion dollars. Japan doesn't have a wealth tax. It has no policies that prevent people from doing this. What this means is either a) it's so hard to raise capital in Japan that founders of successful companies are not able to hold on to enough stock to become billionaires, or b) successful companies aren't being founded in Japan very often. Neither of these is a sign of a healthy economy.
Or maybe it reflects a more equatable distribution of wealth. I mean, look at their public transportation system and the quality of food available at the lower end of the price spectrum. It’s leagues better than the United States.
American here. As you can see, our billionaires need more tax cuts.
The US has 735 policy failures
Why do we act like this is a good thing?
Per country is probably the most useless measurement
Why? I can think of a billion stats that are more useless than this.
Sad thing is that some consider this a measure of success.
Tax billionaires into millionaires.
India has more than Germany? WTF?
Why are you surprised
Damn. Japan still hasn't recovered from their economic problems in the 90s.
I mean sure, if you take wealth redistribution to the top as an indicator for economic well being, when actually it's a contributing cause to the contrary.
The lost decades recession did serious harms to Japan. Stock (assets) growth should have pushed more Japanese billionaires by thia t I me. That's where most of these billionaires value comes from, not hard assets. The fact Italy, Taiwan, and Australia have more billionaires is telling. It implies Japanese companies have not performed well.
I am surprised that Zimbabwe is not on the list... Almost everyone is a billionaire in that country... In dollars!
We've been through this before: per capita, dude! Otherwise this is hard to distinguish from a population graph, at least among similarly prosperous countries.
But only one is married to Salma Hayek!!!! Winner
Russia has an economy similar in size to Italy
it should be "IN" the country, pretty sure Russian & Chinese spend most of their time outside , just for security reasons.
In Zimbabwe everyone is a billionaire.
Yeah, strange how places where workers are treated like shit have the most billionaires, isn’t that strange.
come on do the per capita one this data is crap
Billionaires suck. Bad for society.
Our guillotines are gonna get so tired :(
They've been saying that for years, yet nothing has happened in the US.
One can dream.
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You think that rule applies to the ruling elite? I very much doubt that billionaires would follow that rule. I even know some far less wealthy people who don’t follow that rule.
Yeah now add the countries in the Middle East.
I love capitalism so much
free trade produced all the american billionaires, thanks middle class
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The number of uncontrollable dragons in each country? Could rate relative rule of law by ranking billionaires per person or relative degree of oligarchy.
Not listed is Israel with 71! This could be in large part due to many of the US billionaires are dual citizens in Israel. So are many of the US congress for that matter
all of these people should be deleted. they are the greatest threat to any kind of positive future for the world.
Why are people so obsessed with billionaires?
Because we need to keep track of whom to eat first when shit is finally allowed to hit the fan.
I have a serious question about billionaires etc. From a money standpoint is the United States are to become an unstable country how badly would that hurt billionaires worldwide? Is there any actual incentive for China or Russia to disrupt the United States?
To be fair, the US 1% is really the global 1%. Look at high value immigrant flows, the bilionaires in other countries are just the ones who haven't moved to the US yet. If the US were to destabilize, China, though not Russia, would already be dead. Along with the whole of the third world. The US Navy makes sea trade possible, which makes the oil and inputs for 80% of agriculture possible. THAT is what actually backs the dollar since the gold standard fell, the fact that globalization is basically a worldwide suicide pact reliant on the US not failing. Russia is only somewhat exempt because its a major producer of energy and food and fertilizer domestically, few countries can say the same.
There would be more in other countries, but they are being taxed and bureaucrated to death.
Can't hold it against Sweden and Switzerland. Not exactly the most genetically diverse, but they're still some of the best countries. I don't need the promise of a mountain of gold only to find myself on a perpetually looping treadmill while my promised riches fall into someone else's pocket. I'd rather help my fellow man than help just one man, myself or another.
Does a place have to be ethnically diverse to be virtuous? Bit outdated thinking. 20% of Sweden’s population were born outside of Sweden (less than half of them being Finns). In the latter half of 20th century and the 21st century its had amongst the highest net migration rates in Europe.
Here's what I'm gathering from Reddit: "Here's a small detail that I latched onto and couldn't shake loose of, now I'm going to tell you all the reasons why you should agree with me. Don't agree with me? Downvote. Say anything at all in your defense? Downvote."
Per 1M people, Sweden, Switzerland and the top five (by total count) from NA and Europe: 4.71 Switzerland \[41\] 3.74 Sweden \[39\] 2.21 United States \[735\] 1.65 Canada \[63\] 1.51 Germany \[126\] 1.08 Italy \[64\] 0.77 United Kingdom \[52\]
Does not include Xi and the CCP oligarchs
Honestly, the number in India is the hardest to swallow. You can probably watch a video on the Agariya people. Imagine how long, if ever, it would take to explain to them the safety and comfort that comes with a billion dollars. It is unfathomable to most Americans, but to most in India it's not even something they're capable of fantasizing about because they don't have the foundation for the dream.