Show HN: Richest people in the world by wealth creation instead of ownership | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Richest people in the world by wealth creation instead of ownership

anti-forbes-list.vercel.app

60 pointssakshyampatro56 comments

This is super wrong! Honestly they should probably take this down because of how wrong it is.

Where is Norman Borlaug?

Looking only at stocks is spitting in the face of every economist in the history of humanity. And they didn't even do that right. A company is not one person for starters! And what about if your company causes another company's stock to decrease in value, thereby destroying wealth? This is embarrassing.

I commented elsewhere that I think that arguing over the definition of "wealth creation" is pointless - obviously there are a million different subjective interpretations of that, and I at least give credit to the author to fully specifying his (admittedly very narrow) methodology.

That said, I think your point about "And what about if your company causes another company's stock to decrease in value" is an interesting and valid one even under the author's very narrow definition. Just take the current (at least very recent) phenomenon where tons of SaaS companies completely tanked due to AI fears. How does Jensen Huang get allocated some of that "wealth destruction"?

It's absolutely wrong. We also have: Alexander Fleming, Howard Florey & Ernst Chain who contributed significantly to antibiotics.

You could even add politicians. How much wealth did FDR create?

An economist would say that making another company less valuable is good in most cases because it usually means you are outcompeting them because y(u found another way to supply that need more efficiently.

the real reason this is not good is because it doesnt and cant easily capture what value flows to the customers and if the market is competitive all the value will eventually flow to the customer since pricing aboce marginal cost will get competed away and moat innovation is essentially making marginal cost lower

It is a list of very wealthy people showing how much they created for others and how much they created for themselves.

Norman Borlaug was not wealthy.

> showing how much they created for others

Except it's not even that, even if you still only look at outside investor returns.

Sure, we can argue about whether it is measuring that correctly, but my point is trying to look at how well billionaires have done at creating wealth for others.

All these commenters listing people for inclusion who created a great deal of wealth but aren't/weren't billionaires (many of them not even wealthy) are missing the point of the list.

No, that's not my point, as a commented elsewhere. Even restricting it to "outside investor returns generated by billionaires", this list is only looking at outside investor returns since the IPO and in excess of T-bill returns.

Drew Houston generated tons of wealth for outside investors, but only for pre-IPO investors, hence he's on the list with a -3B number, because post-IPO investors have done so poorly.

unrealized gain it isn't wealth creation unless the gain is realized.

It is indeed wrong if it were trying to show a list of people who have helped humanity, but that is clearly not what it was intended to show. The specifically define what they're showing as market value of company a founder created minus the amount that the founder took out of the company. In so doing, it downgrades Elon Musk considerably presumably because he's retained so much of the shares of his companies.

Comments here are all arguing over the list without reading or understanding the methodology.

My biggest issue with the methodology is that it really only counts stock returns of people not including founder in excess of the T-Bill rate since the IPO. So companies, like Dropbox, that are less than where they were on IPO date give their founders huge negative value created for others, despite the fact that lots of people besides Drew Houston got rich as pre-IPO investors.

I still think the methodology is useful - collectively, every investor since the IPO into Dropbox has done pretty horribly. But that's also pretty obvious just looking at the stock price.

Obviously there are a billion different possible interpretations of what "wealth" could mean, but even if you only take the very narrow definition of "outside investor returns", this is only looking at post-IPO returns.

Where is Linus Torvalds on this list?

I would expect him to be in one of the top spots.

Read the article. It calculates wealth creation in a very specific way, looking at public company value minus what the founder/largest shareholder holds. Obviously that doesn't apply to Linus Torvalds.

Obviously this is only a very small slice of what "wealth" means, but it's easy to calculate and objective.

What's his "company"?

This is a list of people.

Yes I was seeing it as a list of people. Even if you ignore Linux and focus only on the amount of wealth Git has created... ...I still think he'd be at the top.

I agree, I was just responding to the idea that there should be a company behind the people.

This is a list of people, not companies, so why should there necessarily be one?

His organization is The Linux Foundation.

Jimmy Wales too

Though he also eliminated a lot of value for shareholders of World Book, Encyclopaedia Britannica, etc

This is a list looking at how various billionaires have done. He's not anywhere near being a billionaire.

This seems very lazily/sloppily put together. I think it would have been far more useful if a more involved and holistic approach to measure/estimate the proposed idea was taken.

Boy this really shows how little value the market provides

Yeah, it only pays pensions, retirement accounts, provides liquidity for new industries, which then grow and provide jobs, and has been demonstrably one of the best inventions for pulling billions out of poverty and increasing standard of living generation after generation for hundreds of years over hundreds of countries on the planet.

We should outlaw all markets, right?

> Yeah, it only pays pensions, retirement accounts, provides liquidity for new industries, which then grow and provide jobs, and has been demonstrably one of the best inventions for pulling billions out of poverty and increasing standard of living generation after generation for hundreds of years over hundreds of countries on the planet.

What is it doing to feed my family in burundi?

> We should outlaw all markets, right?

Nobody said this, asshole. But how is the market going to correct for western retardation? Any move towards rational allocation of earth's resources will strip the west. Are you willing to argue that the west is worth sacrificing the east?

> What is it doing to feed my family in burundi?

That it has not solved everyone's problems on the planet is no argument it against what it has provided more than any other system.

It's surprising how many of your comments place you in the US, and not one in Burundi. I'm guessing based on your past comments you're not too consistent on your claims.

> Nobody said this, asshole

You claimed they provide little value against obvious reality. We're done.

> It's surprising how many of your comments place you in the US, and not one in Burundi. I'm guessing based on your past comments you're not too consistent on your claims.

I am in the US. Umuryango wanjye uri mu Burundi. My loyalty lies with my family, asshole.

> That it has not solved everyone's problems on the planet is no argument it against what it has provided more than any other system.

Presumably a collective society would be able to provide for people regardless of their ability to produce quarterly profits for western corporations

In what way?

Well; nobody on this list has made much wealth at all for society, just shareholders—the most contemptible of parasites

At a glance, this seems heavily recency-biased and not adjusted for inflation. I would expect a lot of other names that predate the 21st century to be on the list. The methodology page doesn't even contain the word 'inflation'.

Personally, I thought the list was about the criteria for wealth creation—like a standard for discovering the most valuable knowledge, technologies, or research papers. But it turns out it's just a slightly different rich list. So what value did Buffett actually create?

I was expecting to see a list of technologies like Linus's Linux or the transistor, but it's just a list of rich people.

The strangeness of capitalism seems to be that it misjudges value that hasn't been financialized.

I think the title is misleading—I should probably correct it to something like:

'A list of donors who contributed a lot of dividends and capital gains to Wall Street pension funds and index funds.'

"The Anti‑Forbes List"

Other possible titles:

  "List of Founders by Uncaptured Equity Value"
  "List of Most Regretful Founders"

Logic fully breaks down when looking at ratios. If you have 1 cent, your ratio explodes.

Reed Hastings may be the most regretful. He kept just 1.4% of the eventual value:

https://anti-forbes-list.vercel.app/founder/reed-hastings

Linus Torvalds - $8.8T [0]

Maybe Stallman deserves to be on that line as well.

I do wonder where on the list people like Fabrice Bellard and other folks of the FOSS community would sit.

[0] https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/24-038_51f8444f-...

OK, their methodology is pretty concrete [0]:

> This list ranks ... the dollar value their companies generated for shareholders ...

If one defines "share holder" as "general population", then maybe my pithy remark holds.

[0] https://anti-forbes-list.vercel.app/methodology

Somehow, I expected Deng Xiaoping to be number 1, pulling a billion people out of poverty. Then I read the methodology used.

Non founders like Eric Schmidt are not recognized.

Not talking about Eric Schmidt specifically, but this list seems to irrationally over allocate value creation to founders rather than the team that supports them?

The point is that it's a direct response to Forbes list of richest individuals. It's the same format, but arguing that measuring how much someone earned is a bad metric

Are these all one person shops?

That's news to me

> It’s not a claim that one person built the company alone.

It is a list of wealth created for index funds, pensions, employees and co-founders, not the overall benefit to society.

A more serious ranking would probably be dominated by these groups:

* Agricultural and public-health innovators - affecting billions of people at low cost - Louis Pasteur, Norman Borlaug, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, followed by sanitation engineers, vaccine developers and epidemiologists, then the myriad of scientists/engineers responsible for clean water systems

* General-purpose infrastructure creators - electricity, semiconductors, refrigeration, telecommunications, etc... - Faraday and Maxwell

* Open standards and open-source creators - Linux, Git, FFmpeg, TCP/IP, HTTP/HTML, Python, PostgreSQL, etc - they repeatedly eliminate costs for millions of organizations. Richard Hipp created SQLite that is embedded in millions of phones, browsers, apps, OSs, ... - Claude Shannon, Tim Berners-Lee, Linus Torvalds

* Institutional and conceptual inventors - double-entry bookkeeping, randomized clinical trials, peer review, container standardization, cryptography, etc - reducing transaction costs and increasing trust across the world.

Vaccine inventors should be named and way higher? Everyone who survived and created any wealth after did so thanks to them

I'd love to see something like this but with jobs created.

In some ways that Thomas Peterffy fellow has a career to envy.

Warren Buffet is number one. He has shown generations how to invest and think about investing (not only using Bershite Hathaway). He would have been a perfect president of the Unitef States!

What a bullshit list this is. It's high time we grew out of this myth that 'wealth creation' comes from capitalists. Any list like this first needs to make some effort to quantify how much of that 'wealth' is being created by employees, or scientists and engineers whose ideas made the venture responsible for that wealth possible. And as others point out in this thread, look at how much wealth these capitalists destroy, from crushing competition, monopolistic practices, legal intimidation, or most of all from imposing unfair burdens on other companies by lobbying for tax breaks or paying workers too little. All of which shift non-trivial costs onto the shoulders of others.

What is concerning to me is how many people in this comment section have little to no reading comprehension if they even read the site at all. The site is clear of what exactly they are calculating and how (in a specific and narrow way - whether you agree with it or not).

There should be some kind filter/litmus test to prevent people commenting here if they didn't view/read the site first [1]. It will save the rest of us some time reading alot of these garbage comments[2].

[1]: yes I know this is hard problem to solve (if solvable at all), but my general point stands. HN comment quality is steadily degrading because people cant be bothered to RTFA

[2]: Probably should just stop coming here in the first place

What do the minus numbers signify?

First line in the article:

> Each figure is the shareholder wealth a founder’s company created, now held by index funds, pensions, employees and co-founders, minus what the founder kept.

someone has problems with math. jack dorsey generated 7B, kept 7B, and the factor is 0.1?

I'm no economist but I'm having a hard time grokking any meaning out of this metric.

So if Elon decided to sell all his shares today (and likely destroy his companies in the process), he'd shoot to the top of the list? What's the point in that?

My 401k has benefitted from the growth of e.g. Amazon for sure, but the main 'wealth' I get from them is my ability to buy anything and get it delivered in a day. That is, I benefit from their infrastructure existing, regardless of who the shareholders are.

> So if Elon decided to sell all his shares today (and likely destroy his companies in the process), he'd shoot to the top of the list? What's the point in that

It looks like the methodology involves subtracting the founder's entire net worth, so selling the shares would leave him in the same place.

Hmm you are right. But looking closer at the methodology, I find myself even more confused.

It seems the metric is something like "most successful stewards of shareholders' investments" which I guess is interesting. But now I'm tripped up on why the metric would only consider founders rather than CEOs more generally. Imagine Gates didn't start Microsoft, but instead became its CEO a month after some other founder started it and that founder sat on the beach in Hawaii while Gates did well, what he did. The founder would appear on this list but not Gates.

Edit: basically, all my intuitive "this doesn't make any sense" alarm bells are going off, but I think I need someone who really knows what they're talking about to help me understand exactly why, or what would be a more sensical version of this

How is the "Multiple" column calculated? Is it wealth created "For Others" / "Self"? I can't get to that number for anyone if this is the formula. And Elon Musk's mutliple looks downright wrong if he created $357B for others and $917B for himself with a multiple of 1.4×

I like the effort.

It needs some improvement.

Elon musk is among the top of the list. He is also the founder of companies that created and advanced a lot of technological wealth in the world. A huge contribution.

But it's far from certain that the recent SpaceX stock will create a lot of wealth for retail owners. Maybe even the opposite.

Which companies are those?

SpaceX is the only one I know that he founded and which, through their satellite network advanced "technological wealth".

Also this lists definition is:

> "Each figure is the shareholder wealth a founder’s company created, now held by index funds, pensions, employees and co-founders, minus what the founder kept."

How should this even remotely apply to Elmo?

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