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.

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benregenspan 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> 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

It looks like the methodology involves subtracting the founder's entire net worth, so selling the shares would leave him in the same place.

	▲	paytonjjones 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Hmm you are right. But looking closer at the methodology, I find myself even more confused. 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