They say you should study people you want to be like. That’s probably bad advice since, statistically speaking, “they” probably aren’t billionaires. Regardless, I’ve compiled some data of the 2016 (nearly) top 1000 Forbes billionaires in hopes that myself and others can move in that direction.
I say “nearly” because I actually only included 974 billionaires. The next spot was a tie of like 50 people, and so I didn’t want to include more than 1000 people in my analysis. This is partly because I’m anal, and partly because I’m lazy (probably a non-billionaire characteristic). Nine hundred and seventy four is a valid sample size, so give me a break.
I think the last chart is the most interesting, which may seem like an attempt to get you to read the whole article. Maybe it is.
By Country
The ranking is about as I would expect, with only a few unexpected swaps here and there. The US is on top (U-S-A, U-S-A) and the typical Western powers are up there as well. China and India are up there because of the massive manufacturing base and population. Japan, Sweden, Israel … I think we can all agree this is expected.
Surprisingly, United Arab Emirates ranked 46th, much lower that I would have guessed considering what I thought Dubai was all about. The Dubai PR team must be doing their job well. It has a small population (about 6 million, CIA, 2016), so having 2 billionaires is pretty good. Maybe billionaires look down on the pleb-millionaires for having to move to Dubai, and not being able to bring Dubai-luxury into their backyards.
I included all of the countries in the data, because I would have felt bad for leaving some out, but Google Charts lumped all the countries with one billionaire together. Sorry Liechtenstein.
By Country, per Capita
Being fair to the small countries, I included the same pie chart after dividing by population (millions of people).
Wait, Monaco, seriously? Wait, Liechtenstein? I guess I’m not sorry. I should mention that their populations are around 30,000, 40,000, and 70,000 people (CIA, 2016), respectively. I actually had to change my rounding strategy (to the nearest 10,000 rather than nearest million people). After the three extremely-low-population countries with billionaires, the order is similar to the overall billionaire ranking.
As intuition would predict, European countries rank much higher since they are relatively small. Although no longer in first place, the United States ranks very high (tenth) considering the population is an order of magnitude greater than any country in the top 20. And since I mentioned UAE before, they come in at 28th, which is still lower than I would have guessed. I still want to go.
Sector
Note: I categorized all 974 billionaires into sectors by hand, so there could be errors. The Forbes list provided each billionaire’s industry (or industries), and some of these were ambiguous. I just categorized based on my initial gut instinct, so these may not be the best answer. A Google search brought me to webpage containing concise sector definitions (SprinkleBit).
Billionaires owing their fortunes to the Financial, Consumer Goods, and Services sectors make up about 75% of my list. I would also expect these to be the largest sectors of the overall global market.
Age
The age distribution of these billionaires is nearly a textbook normal distribution. If you’re making specific plans for future net worth (as you should), this data suggests 65 is the sweet spot.
Awesome Chart
For the grand finale, we have bubbles scaled to the number of billionaires per sector plotted against the average worth and average age (in the sector).
The big three (Financial, Consumer Goods, and Services) are all grouped with an average age just over 66. Technology is a “young” sector and has a higher average worth, which we would expect with founders of Uber and Airbnb in this sector. The “old” sector, then, is Utilities with an average age around 72 (which makes sense; utilities definitely aren’t trendy). Most sectors have an average net worth of around $5 billion, but I don’t think this is a very useful metric, since there are lots more single digit billionaires. It only seems useful when comparing sectors, not for the specific value.
There you have it. I hope you dig in and find many additional insights in these charts. You can download the spreadsheet with the raw Forbes data and my sector guesses here.
References
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/
https://www.sprinklebit.com/education/chapter/sectors-and-industry/the-9-sectors