(Roughly) Daily

There are, of course, myriad ways to rank people. Increasingly these days, the preferred scale seems to be one’s wealth. The Forbes 400, which ranks the richest Americans by their wealth, has become the scorecard of our zeitgeist. But one of its denizens (currently #4), Jeff Bezos, suggested in 2024, “somebody needs to make a list where they rank people by how much wealth they’ve created for other people.”

Sakshyam Patro has obliged…

… this is that list: [It ranks] founders by Wealth Created For Others (WCFO): the dollar value their companies generated for shareholders other than themselves…. every number traceable to an SEC filing, an academic dataset, or a named data source — refreshed every fifteen minutes while markets are open. 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. It’s not a claim that one person built the company alone…

See the list here. (Teaser: as of this writing, Bezos moves up one slot, from #4 to #3); the current Forbes #1, Elon Musk, drops to #28 (his wealth is $798B; his investors have lost $243B). And see the details of the methodology here.

Patro adds some important context– the first point especially:

• It is the Forbes billionaires list, re-sorted — not a ranking of humanity’s benefactors. The universe is living billionaires with a trackable public company. Norman Borlaug, Linus Torvalds, vaccine developers, and public-sector reformers created enormous value and belong at the top of a different list; they are absent here because they are not billionaires with public equity, not because the metric judges them small. This list answers exactly one question Bezos posed: among the people Forbes already ranks by personal wealth, who created the most for others versus kept for themselves?
  
• Not a measure of consumer surplus, wages, or societal value beyond shareholders (those are larger still — Nordhaus [see here] estimates innovators capture only ~2.2% of the social surplus they create — but they are not reliably measurable per person, so we do not headline them).
  
• Not a moral scoreboard. It measures one thing: dollars of shareholder wealth created beyond a risk-free benchmark, minus dollars kept.
  
• Not affiliated with Forbes or with any prior ranking site.

Ranked by the wealth they built for other investors: “The Anti‑Forbes List.”

To observe the obvious, the numbers at play here are big… so big as to be hard to understand. Amanda Shendruk urges us to make the effort and offers some helpful tips: “Understanding large values: It’s our ethical duty.”

* Tim O’Reilly

###

As we re-evaluate, we might recall that it was on this date in 1598 that Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice was entered on the Stationers’ Register. By decree of Queen Elizabeth, the Stationers’ Register licensed printed works, giving the Crown tight control over all published material. In those days, “copyright” mainly meant “the right to make copies”; secondarily, it conferred intellectual property rights (though in those days, mainly to the guild printers who got the permissions).

In some cases, the companies of actors appear to have registered plays through co-operative stationers, with the express purpose of forestalling the publication of a play when publication was not in their interest. This seems to have been the case with The Merchant of Venice and Shakespeare’s company, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men: the copyright was granted to James Roberts, who printed the company’s playbills and held copyrights on five of their plays (two by Shakespeare). But Roberts transferred the copyright to fellow stationer Thomas Heyes in 1600, and Hayes published first quarto edition of the play before the end of the year.