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.

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.

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-...

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

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

"The Anti‑Forbes List"

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:

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

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.

Non founders like Eric Schmidt are not recognized.

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.

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

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

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

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!

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'.

What do the minus numbers signify?

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×

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.'

Are these all one person shops?

That's news to me

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

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.

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.