Yeah, but if the media did that rather than cherry-picking then it wouldn't be possible to create an endless stream of headlines like this which make it seem like the richest people always win and this must be somehow at the expense of the rest of us. I remember there were a bunch of headlines about the wealth of the richest increasing during the pandemic that pulled the same trick too, measuring from around the bottom of the huge pandemic-induced dip in the markets.

I think there's another layer of cherry-picking too, in that the list is the 25 richest families in the world now, so it excludes families whose investments have done poorly. Not sure how much of an effect that has, but entry number one and number five weren't on the list last year and they're both owners of big state oil companies which is a sector that's done unusually well compared to the rest of the economy and to how it was performing a couple of years ago.

That doesn't make nearly as good of a headline.

During the pandemic there were very similar claims about the massive growth in wealth of the top 1%, where the graph conveniently started at the bottom of the 2020 stock market crash. See also: graphs that compare deaths from terrorist attacks vs. other causes, which start in 2002.