How Many Billionaires Are There, Anyway? (Published 2022) (2024)

In 1981, Malcolm Forbes, the eccentric and fabulously wealthy magazine publisher, came to his editors with a request: Could they pull together a special issue about the 400 richest Americans? The idea was inspired by Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, the doyenne of Gilded Age New York, who regularly hosted the city’s high society in her Fifth Avenue ballroom, which was said to fit about 400 people. It’s quite possible Forbes saw something of himself in Astor. This was a different era of magazine publishing; Forbes — who wound up making the cut on his own list — lived like a sultan. He entertained celebrities and politicians on a 126-foot yacht called the Highlander. By the end of his run he owned a chateau in Normandy, 12 Fabergé eggs and a collection of hot-air balloons in fantastical designs — one shaped like the Sphinx, one like a bust of Beethoven, one like a Fabergé egg, one like the chateau in Normandy and, of course, one in the image of a sultan, about as tall as his yacht was long.

According to a brief history of the magazine written by Malcolm Forbes Jr., better known as Steve, the editorial staff was not pleased with his father’s idea. They conducted a feasibility study and told him it wouldn’t be possible to figure out who these 400 people were. The elder Forbes replied if they wouldn’t do it, he’d find some other journalists who could. “Edit capitulated,” writes his son. The resulting reporting project took a year, dozens of flights and thousands of interviews. At the top of the very first Forbes 400 list was Daniel K. Ludwig, a shipping magnate, estimated by the magazine to be worth more than $2 billion.

If you simply adjusted for inflation, that’s now at least $5.8 billion, a fortune that would land Ludwig in a seven-way tie for the 182nd spot on the last Forbes 400 list, alongside Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx; Gary Rollins, chief executive of Rollins, Inc., which owns several pest-control companies; and who could forget Peter Gassner, the head of a cloud-software company called Veeva. Fortunes at this tier hardly seem to merit media coverage anymore. One of Gassner’s most in-depth profiles was published on the blog of the Hacienda Business Park in Pleasanton, Calif., where Veeva keeps its offices. He does not own any hot-air balloons.

Since 1987, Forbes has published another list, which started smaller but has grown to be much larger: the World’s Billionaires List. The magazine just published this year’s edition, with a staggering 2,668 names. The task of gathering information for both lists is overseen by Kerry Dolan, an editor at Forbes, in a highly collaborative effort that involves at least 92 different reporters from all over the organization, including from the company’s many internationally licensed editions — Russia, Poland, Mexico and more, each a testament to the triumph of globalized capitalism. Dolan has worked at Forbes for nearly three decades, starting in 1994 covering Latin America, which involved helping out on the billionaires list too. Compiling it was far more laborious back then: “I couldn’t just go online and look at the São Paulo stock exchange and figure out who owned what,” Dolan says. But a financial magazine down in Brazil used to put out a book about all the biggest companies in the country, and she would have a contact in Brazil ship it to her in the States. That would reveal financial information on these companies, and she could go from there.