Here’s my latest animated “bar chart race” visualization above showing the world’s top ten billionaires in every year from 2000 to 2022 based on data from business magazine Forbes’ annual lists of the World’s Billionaires via Wikipedia for 2000 to 2022 and also via Forbes’ World’s Billionaire List for 2022. The billionaire wealth estimates by Forbes are based on stock prices and exchange rates in mid-March of every year (March 11, 2022 for this year).
A few observations:
1. Bill Gates was the world’s wealthiest person in 13 of the years from 2000 to 2020, No. 2 in seven years, No. 3 in one year (2008), and No. 4 this year (and last year), his lowest ranking ever going back to 2000.
2. Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos appeared in the world’s top ten billionaires for the first time in 2016, and Jeff Bezos very quickly rose to become the world’s richest person in 2018 with a net worth that year of $112 billion — 24% more wealth than Bill Gates ($90.0 billion) and 33% more than Warren Buffett ($84.0 billion). Bezos has retained the No. 1 position in each year from 2018 to 2021, but Elon Musk rose to No. 1 this for the first time, while Zuckerberg fell off the top ten list this for the first time since 2015. Over the last five years, Bezos’s wealth has increased by a factor of four times from $45.2 billion in 2016 to $171 billion this year, which is an average annual compound return of 24.8%.
3. The Koch brothers (Charles and David) first appeared on the top ten billionaire list in 2013 and stayed on the list for the next five years through 2018 but haven’t made the list since then.
4. Various members of the Walton family appear on the top ten list in many of the years (2001 to 2005, 2011, 2014, 2015, and 2020) thanks to the success and profitability of Walmart.
5. Brothers Karl and Theo Albrecht are the German entrepreneurs who founded the discount supermarket chain Aldi and one or both of them were on the top ten list in nine of the years from 2000 to 2012. Ingvar Kamprad is a Swedish entrepreneur who founded Ikea in 1943 when he was 17 years old and he made the top ten list every year from 2005 to 2009.
6. American billionaires are the dominant nationality in most years, especially in the early and later years of the time period. In the early 2000s Americans represented 8 or 9 of the world’s top ten billionaires from 2000 to 2004 and then the group became more internationally diverse throughout that decade, as more billionaires from countries like India started making the top ten list. In 2008, three of the world’s top ten billionaires were from India. In recent years from 2014 to 2022, Americans represented seven or eight of the world’s top ten billionaires, including eight this year joined by non-Americans No. 3 Bernard Arnault (France) and No. 10 Mukesh Ambani (India).
7. You can see the large decline in the billionaires’ net worth in 2009 during the Great Recession as the combined wealth of the top ten billionaires fell by $142 billion (and by 36%) from $396 billion to $254 billion.
8. Elon Musk joined the world’s top ten billionaires last year for the first time at the No. 2 position with a net worth of $167.3 billion and this year ranked No. 1 at $211.5 billion. Forbes also reports updated daily real-time wealth estimates and Musk’s net worth has risen to $218 billion as of today (May 19, 2022).
9. The combined wealth of the world’s top ten billionaires appreciated by 11% during the last year, rising from $1.17 trillion a year ago to $1.30 trillion this year. The nine billionaires who made the top ten list in both 2021 and 2022 had the following year-over-year gains:
- Jeff Bezos: -5.3%
- Elon Musk: 34.9%
- Bill Gates: 7.0%
- Warren Buffett: 22.5%
- Bernard Arnault: -1.3%
- Larry Ellison: 18.2%
- Sergy Brin: 24.1%
- Mukesh Ambani: 11.6%
- Larry Page: 24.9%
Bottom Line: Many of the world’s richest billionaires are successful self-made entrepreneurs who accumulated large fortunes by providing low-cost goods at brick-and-mortar retailers like Aldi, Trader Joe’s, Walmart, and Ikea, and through online retail e-commerce platforms like Amazon, and in the process have generated cost savings and value for consumers (especially low and middle-income households) in amounts that are collectively far in excess of their personal wealth. Other successful billionaires/entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and Elon Musk created entire new industries that also generated value for consumers that far exceed the personal wealth of innovators like Gates and Musk. It could maybe be described as a kind of reverse/perverse, soak-the-rich Marxism that consumers have actually “exploited” the billionaires above by “extracting” more value, cost savings, and wealth collectively from those entrepreneurs than the value of their personal fortunes. And it’s arguably not even close — the wealth and value generated for society by successful entrepreneurial billionaires dwarf their personal fortunes, which were only made possible because they made the lives of millions of consumers, many of them living in low-income households, better off.
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