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mmmmmbop

Genuinely curious: Do you have any more background on this? Who are these rich people that are not listed in Forbes?

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Really good Bloomberg piece just came out. "Bill Hwang Had $20 Billion, Then Lost It All in Two Days"

That would be top 100 - and it was totally liquid. Not locked up in owner shares

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-04-08/how-bill-...

Cryptocurrencies have created many paper-rich people who wont be on the list. Just 10k bitcoin would make you very rich these days, and there must be a few low-profile geeks with that may coins on a HDD.

Also anyone rich, non-domiciled and "avoiding tax" will presumably not be on the list.

And now that Monero is getting traction, it will be absolutely impossible to pin down who owns what money. Times are certainly getting interesting.

There are lots of rich non doms on the Forbes list.

Even simpler than that, you could have inherited a billion dollars, stuck it in an index fund, and not made a big deal about it. I'm certainly no billionaire but I can appreciate living below your means and not having a flashy lifestyle. If you stonewall the Forbes people, you don't get on the list. If you send an accountant to politely explain that Forbes has no idea how much of that billion dollar investment is left, you don't get on the list.

This is an ongoing curiosity of mine. One really cool example is Mubarak of Egypt who became wealthy from corruption. When he lost power he had some wealth exposed and he was richer than any known person in the world.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2011/04/11/egyptia...

It's very likely that the richest person in the world right now is Vladimir Putin.

At some point I guess you run into definitional questions around what counts as wealth or ownership. If you could seize any building in your country at will, do you own all of them? What if you could probably only size a few dozen before people started getting angry about it? Etc.

The same goes for stock, though. When we talk about billionaires, most of that money is invested somewhere. So nominally it's worth $X because it's N shares worth $Y each; but if they try to sell them all off rapidly, that would drive the price down. Finding enough buyers might also get tricky.

I sometimes think this is overrated. Bezos has as much stock as anyone but if he sold it all in the course of a year I don't think it would lose value. Musk probably would - but only so many people on the top of the list (at least I think)are in a position where there company worth would drop dramatically from the founder selling.

The real trick is using it as a collateral for loans. So yeah, this is even more complicated in practice.

That's exactly why successful companies generally have to pay more than their stock value to go private.

Royal families and dictators are big secret. There is an ongoing mystery about lose of a $128B (yes billion!) in my countries (Turkey) CB budget which they don't talk or give any clue and it's just a recent thing. Imagine beyond this, offshore accounts and freeports.

Thanks for the link. I'm a bit skeptical of that number ($700B). Intuitively, it's just a very large amount of money to hide without anyone noticing. It should be relatively easy to track down most of it.

However, after searching for follow-ups on that story, I wasn't able to find any news article saying that any significant (>$1B) amount of wealth was found. There were $664M that were frozen in Switzerland, as well as an undisclosed amount in the EU [1] (but both freezes were annulled in the meantime). Additionally, there were some properties and luxury cars he owned in Western cities [2].

All of these (and some generous extra for wealth he was able to hide) would add up to wealth in the order of billions, but most likely below $70B, and definitely below $700B.

[0] https://dailynewsegypt.com/2018/11/25/the-years-long-tale-of... [1] https://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/396228/Egypt/P... [2] https://cifar.eu/6-years-later-mubaraks-billions/

Lots of German billionaires don't want to be listed on it except I think a guy who flaunts it because it his brand to be rich.

PG himself is a good example. His equity stake in VC is very likely worth in the $1-10B range (YC didn't take outside capital, see footnotes: http://www.paulgraham.com/worked.html). But his ownership stake isn't transparent to Forbes.

I think a lot of VCs and real estate investors would fall in this category.

An example is the House of Saud. They are incredibly wealthy, but I believe Forbes doesn't look at _families_ only _individuals_, even if, say, the head of the family would technically make the list.

Also, they're unlikely to put out public accounting statements

I've never looked at that list so I have no idea who is on it. Is there a reason I care who the richest people on earth are?

To become the richest people on Earth, they have to collect economic rent from the actual producers of wealth, which is all the rest of us. Wouldn't you want to know who is being unfairly enriched by your labor?

Perhaps. But I tend to look at the actual interactions I have as a laborer and consumer, and try to determine the effects of those actions. So I care about Jeff Bezos because I occasionally order goods from Amazon, not because he is the richest person on earth.

Even in the example you describe, there is an interesting question: how much of that money that you pay to Amazon for those goods ends up in the pockets of those people who fulfilled your order, and how much ends up in the pockets of Jeff Bezos? And how does it affect the quality of the service that you get?

This is a bit "I don't even own a TV" in a thread about TV shows. The topic is wealth and the industries/methods behind it. You're responding to two people having an interesting discussion about known and unknown riches.

So what? It is an honest question. Nobody answered. I still don't care.

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