Show HN: Richest people in the world by wealth creation instead of ownership(anti-forbes-list.vercel.app) |
Show HN: Richest people in the world by wealth creation instead of ownership(anti-forbes-list.vercel.app) |
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.
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"?
You could even add politicians. How much wealth did FDR create?
Norman Borlaug was not wealthy.
Except it's not even that, even if you still only look at outside investor returns.
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.
Other possible titles:
"List of Founders by Uncaptured Equity Value"
"List of Most Regretful Founders"
Reed Hastings may be the most regretful. He kept just 1.4% of the eventual value:
I would expect him to be in one of the top spots.
Obviously this is only a very small slice of what "wealth" means, but it's easy to calculate and objective.
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
We should outlaw all markets, right?
> 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.
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.'
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.
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?
That's news to me
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.
It looks like the methodology involves subtracting the founder's entire net worth, so selling the shares would leave him in the same place.
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
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.
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.