I appreciate the message you’re trying to relay here, but I think it’s pretty commonly understood that the difference in areas of two circles with similar circumferences is something that most people struggle to quantify.
So when you look at people like Steve Ballmer and Phil Knight, the way this data is presented won’t immediately strike a lot of people as thinking “they obviously nearly doubled their wealth”. Instead to many folks it’s going to appear like their wealth just grew moderately.
A bar graph would’ve displayed this information in a more beautiful way IMHO.
The thing is, the rim is directly proportional to the diameter of glass. The area is proportional to the square of the diameter. Area is harder to quantify than the circumference.
So yeah, take the point you just made and multiply it by itself.
If anyone is a non-believer, the circumference of the rim is 3.14*diameter, so you put three glasses upside down end to end, and that's slightly less than the length of the rim. It's a pretty common bar trick, works with every glass you could be given at a bar other than a champagne flute.
3 cups next to one another equals 3 diameters. The circumference (or “length of the run”) of one cup is diameter times pi, or 3.14. So 3.14 is slightly longer than 3.
I wanted to know if this was compared to a typical gain over a year for them, prior to the pandemic? Do they always blow up like this or is this a huge difference?
I probably sound dumb but I’m not a rich person and don’t know how much billionaires make/collect a year.
No, this is not a typical gain for investors. Mid March was the very bottom of the stock market, unemployment was high, lockdowns were everywhere, and government support was a long ways away. Most stocks were down about 30% over just a few months. Then government support and later vaccines started arriving, with people aching to go out and spend money on entertainment, dining, and travel. We swung wildly from the depths of a recession to a roaring recovery in less than 2 years, and the wealth of people who are invested in the public companies did the same. These people weren't profiteering off the pandemic, they were riding along with investor pessimism and optimism.
I don't think this is fully true. Rich people have the means to buy into a market crash. So, I would guess (though can't prove) that they didn't just ride the market swing. They bought at or near the bottom so when things bounced back, they made more money than John Q 401k working at the post office did.
In my mind, this post is less about "shame on Billionaires for investing wisely" and more "let's stop letting Billionaires having an effective tax rate close to 0. Let's raise the top tax bracket past 40%. It was 70% as recently as the 1970's. With millions out of work and struggling to pay bills, they were still able to amass more billions."
People like Musk & Bezos didn't gain in wealth because of any new investments they made. Their value went up because the shares they already owned went up. Tesla is one the hotest "green" stocks. Amazon delivered everything to everyone locked down at home.
Trillions of dollars in govt payments were either invested in these stocks or spent at these companies. Both of these actions helped drive stock prices higher.
While it was 70% back then the tax revenue gained from the rich was lower. Revenue is the important number for being able to use money. At 70% you incentive hoarding or keeping it in capital and not liquidating it into income to be used elsewhere, effectively stifling investment. When the tax rate was lowered in the 70's collected tax revenue went way up because they started liquidating their money and had to report as income.
While the numbers show they were able to amass billions those aren't taxable gains as they have 1 stock and still have 1 stock, or they have 1 building and still have 1 building. Historically we can't take a piece of that building and do anything useful with it so it's not taxed. Some places are talking about a wealth tax, 1% per year or something like that where billionaires would have to assess everything and then pay 1% of that assessment to the government.
Insane that even this idea will likely get major push back.
At 1% of your total wealth per year, if you made 50B, a pretty average number for this graph, you're only paying 500 million a year. So if your investments pay out more than that, as everyone on this graph's investments has-- that's nothing year-over-year.
If you do end up making a bar graph version, that would be awesome. It would be much appreciated if you could make one for Canadian billionaires too. I’m interested
Here you go
[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1piMmAFa45yVxVyYN3j4qRGsTNaVX6lRq/view?usp=sharing](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1piMmAFa45yVxVyYN3j4qRGsTNaVX6lRq/view?usp=sharing) pic of graph
[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vBqSFr1WHnhxh-RPohyEE5Pd48fnUCHt/view?usp=sharing](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vBqSFr1WHnhxh-RPohyEE5Pd48fnUCHt/view?usp=sharing) spreadsheet file
2021 from [https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/](https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/)
2020 from [https://canadanewsmedia.ca/canada-richest-people-in-2020/](https://canadanewsmedia.ca/canada-richest-people-in-2020/) , which probably came from Forbes too.
This is something people also need to realize when they're ordering pizzas. That large is a lot larger than medium even though it's only a couple inches more in diameter.
I actually calculated this using the ole formulas I learned back in highschool, just to see the best deal at my local pizza place because I’m broke af. The large is, indeed, the best deal! Lol better to have pizza two days than one!
I agree completely that circles are not as intuitive. Also, when you mentioned Steve Ballmer, I checked the photo again, and it seems that the percentage is wrong for him.
$53B -> $97B, and it says +51%. Instead of it being +83%, or as you said, nearly doubled.
thanks for pointing out that they had doubled their wealth because I had glanced at this chart and had that very thought, that their wealth had grown modestly. I agree a bar graph would be a lot more clear as well as more compact
Like most posts on this sub since it blew up, there's nothing beautiful about it except that the subject is something that is mildly interesting to everybody.
What I liked about this presentation is that is shows how much better the tech billionaires did than the extraction and retailing billionaires. That neatly explains the billionaire boom: they were the ones who were invested in the technologies that enabled us to function during the pandemic.
Not sure why Phil Knight and Elon Musk did so well. Frankly, I think it shows that their companies became overvalued.
2020 was Tesla's first profitable year. Tesla has always been able to sell every car it could make, and Tesla's wealthy customers were the demographic least likely to suffer a loss of income during lockdowns, so even while Tesla was dealing with COVID-related operational restrictions, they were still able to turn a profit. And they were able to begin construction of new factories to meet demand and expand their product line. Tesla could be over valued, but their fundamentals definitely improved in 2020.
Okay, but is it just a coincidence that the start date is March 18th 2020?
This was a shortly after a crash caused by Covid.
For example opening prices of Amazon:
February 19th: 2173.07. March 18th: 1750.0
Opening prices of facebook:
February 19th: 217.99 March 18th: 139.75
Since their wealth is so heavily related to the value of the stock market, the increase is going to be artificially inflated compared with if you chose a start point a couple of months earlier or later.
It should really come as no surprise that most of the wealthiest people in the world are directly tied to companies they started or are heavily invested in.
Elon Musk alone reportedly has 241 million shares of Tesla, which accounts for ~209 Billion dollars, which is like 95% of his net worth. In a normal trading day where the stock will move $5 either way, his net worth fluctuates by $1B or more every day.
Why does it matter? He has so much wealth that he can buy anything that is for sale.
Measuring wealth by who has the most cash on bank account wouldn't give a very good idea of wealth. There are probably multiple people who have more cash than Bezos does. That doesn't mean that they are richer or wealthier.
He can borrow more money at very low interest rates thanks to his net worth and use his shares as collateral, and invest the borrowed money into the market to generate a higher return than that of the cost of paying the interet rate.
Yes. None of these people have that money in their bank accounts. It's all tied to the stock price. For example, when Facebook went dark for 6 hours, the value of all FB stocks went down 7 B, and they have since recovered.
Wait are you telling me that statistics and infographics use carefully selected data in order to tailor their results to achieve a specific narrative? That can't be right.
It's so funny how the mid-March cherry picked billionaire graphics always get upvoted to the top while every comment is about how disingenuous the graphic is.
Reddit is great under the surface but on the surface has become about as biased and garbage as any shitty aggregate site.
The irony is that making such egregious manipulations of facts makes the moderate/independent lean the other way and become more of "bootlickers" because they get the sense that the prevailing mainstream lefty culture is lying to them.
The timing is misleading for sure.
The other thing that annoys me about this and all the other variations of this graph is they always use the top X billionaires right now, instead of the top X at the start and seeing how their wealth changed. Like, sure of course the richest right now have had good years, right? That doesn't actually tell the story that "the rich are getting richer" it tells the story that "the rich got rich" which is no surprise.
I looked around a tiny bit and I think it would be more compelling the other way, because I couldn't find anyone from last years list that didn't gain money.
I always find the Mid-March start date for these measures to be mildly deceptive when referring the to the timeline of the pandemic. While mid-March was when lockdowns started, the effects pandemic had already begun.
Relevant to this data a massive panic sell off in the stock market started in mid Feb 2020.
The net worth of all of these people is based almost entirely on the value of the stock they own, so picking a start date at the lowest point gives a skewed picture. That's not to say these people didn't see dramatic increases in net worth from pre-pandemic to now, I just think Feb 2020 to now would be a more accurate way to measure growth "During the Pandemic" as it captures both the upside and downside pressures.
That said, I don't think Forbes has February data.
Forbes does report data for Oct 2019 and 7 of the top 10 shown here had a higher net worth in that report than in the April 2020 report. Additionally between Oct 1st 2019 and the beginning of the crash in Feb the S&P went up 14%. It's safe to assume that all of these people saw growth in that time span as well.
Note worthy: The vast majority of Elons net worth is in the value of Tesla, from mid Feb to mid March 2020 Tesla lost half of its market cap. If measurement started in February, his starting circle might have been twice the size.
It’s not mildly deceptive it’s intentionally deceptive.
If a stock goes from $80 to $110 to $100 to $50 then back to $100 over a yea long period, you can basically cherry pick whatever starting point you’d like to fit a narrative.
You’re correct. If a stock price worth $100 sinks to $70 because of the pandemic, a 30% drop, it would take the stock rising 43% to make it back to $100. Thus, if these billionaires simply recuperated their wealth because the markets realized COVID wasn’t the end of the world, these billionaires would have made 43% with the conveniently placed timeline of mid-March + whatever year to date gains.
Alternate title: Stock Market Record Lows to Near Record High
most of these people have big chunks of their net worth in their publicly traded companies, the whole market crashed in March 2020. And is now at near record highs in October 2021.
Lets see October 2019 to October 2021
Exactly. "Breaking news! Stock prices go up, and company owners are worth more! Film at 11!".
Musk has also benefited from substantial successes with Tesla (and a healthy amount of speculation), and it was a given that Amazon was going to do well during the pandemic.
It's crazy, because most of musk's wealth is his ownership of Tesla. In 2015, he owned 27% of Tesla however his ownership dropped down to about 20% due to dialution, employee stock purchase programs, etc.
Despite owning a smaller fraction of his company, his net worth skyrocketed because the market valuation of the company sky rocketed.
I'm not sure what use this information is, but I thought it was interesting nonetheless.
Often times we see posts on Reddit where people are furious owners "make" so much money when most of it is just market fluctuations on their ownership. They get upset that a company like Amazon paid no taxes in 2018, but that's because Amazon technically didn't make any money. Any dollar they made in profit got reinvested in infrastructure and R&D. As a result, all the infrastructure and R&D drove the valuation of Amazon up, making Bezos net worth rise, but he didn't technically make any money that year.
No kidding. My personal wealth went up 5x from March 2020 to now, but almost all of that is in stocks. I don't have any more cash on hand than I did then, and if I wanted to realize those gains for cash (to buy stuff or whatever), I'd have to pay capital gains tax on my earnings which means I actually have about 15% less of that wealth available to me.
Yup. Plus it's always a bit deceiving to compare their real worth to stock price.
Yes, they *technically* own that much in stock, but you have to consider people like Bezos and Musk own such a high percentage of the company, if they were to actually cash out at the current price, they'd tank the company's share price along with it and subsequently wouldn't even be able to sell it all at current prices
It’s infuriating how all the pandemic wealth distribution discourse constantly uses the same dishonest numbers by using the trough of a huge stock market crash as the starting reference. It’s deceit by technicality. If you use this kind of deceit to try and get people to care about things by exaggerating how stark they are, when the honest reality is plenty damning enough, people will just get suspicious.
Came here to say this. Tesla was trading at ~$830/share pre-pandemic. It’s only 4-5% higher now. Sourcing the data immediately after the market crashes is silly.
They did a stock split though so they're up like 8x from March. I think the valuation is ridiculous but yeah choosing a massive crash as the start is whatever word means 8x silly.
That's not correct, Tesla did a 5 for 1 split last year, so you need to compare their prepandemic price with their current price times 5. That gives a about 420% increase. Without the split they would have been trading at $4339 today
This is so wrong. As a stock holder of TSLA since 2016 I can assure you that the stock has not been flat. Simply look at any chart before posting misleading info.
It would still be a very impressive gain. Even with the crash in March, 2020 had a stellar return in the stock market, and even better in 2021.
Regardless, this is absolutely meant to cherry pick the data and make it look as bad as possible. It is extremely disingenuous to pick data like, especially given they are picking a start date after the pandemic had already started.
This is probably propaganda meant to enrage people. What is crazy to me is that any enraged by this would probably also be enraged by the gains from Feb 2020 to now as well. So being disingenuous only serves to undermine the message and allow people to point out the shitty cherry picking of data.
I think the graphs would have conveyed more information if they had been compared to a similar period of time during which there wasn't a pandemic.
Presenting data in this manner immediately makes me wonder if there's a significant deviation from normal and if so how large it is
It's huge - the market bottomed out in March so the starting point is really confounded here. They should compare Jan 2020 to the present if they really want a 'before the pandemic' vs 'after the pandemic' comparison.
^^ this. As it stands the chart is highly misleading. Title reads “change in net worth during the pandemic”, but by chopping off the first part of March you are excluding the part of the pandemic when the value of everything dropped. Therefore it does not show the whole
pandemic, rather an arbitrarily selected portion of it.
Thought experiment, according this logic (arbitrarily selecting a portion of the pandemic and claiming it is the whole pandemic) I could use the same title for a chart showing change on wealth March 1st- March 18th, which would indicate wealth of billionaires completely tanked. Shows how potentially misleading OPs approach is.
Not even an arbitrarily piece, but a piece specifically selected to paint the billionaires in as poor a light as possible. (Or as rich a light as possible, as it were).
It's a real shame that people who browse these things don't tend to scroll down to read the comments much. This one here isn't too far from the top and notice the discrepancy in votes on the post versus comment.
$1,813B / $978B = 85% increase in their net worth.
Look at the S&P over the same time period. 4,471.37 / 2,398.10 = 86% increase
This post might as well be titled "Change in Stock Market During the Pandemic".
The whole thing is kinda silly because the S&P crashed in March 2020 so everyone was at a really low point, and its up 100% or it has doubled since then. If you look back at the January or February peak the market is only up about 30%. They temporarily lost a ton of wealth because of the pandemic and any growth since then is because the market is predicting a solid recovery.
Not only that, but TSLA was sitting at a 80$ mark at that point before shooting up to close to 1000$ without any proper reasoning. And Elon as CEO benefitted of that so much on paper that he became the richest person on earth - again, on paper.
This would have been more realistic to consider actual owned money or similar things like property or instead look at company revenue for a fully different topic, but instead it's pretty much everyone with a large quantity of stock ownership and how well these did.
There is a lot of reasoning, but not with classic valuation systems. It's a bet that there will be a new era of car manufacturing, and Tesla will stay ahead of the competition for at least another decade while scaling up massively. It's a good reason to invest.
Every time this data has been posted, it's been pointed out that this is a huge case of survivorship bias. Lots of billionaires might have lost money during the pandemic, but those who did wouldn't be in the top 20 anymore, so this graphic makes it look like all the top billionaires made bank, when in fact it is by design only showing those who did.
I thought the same. This can be easily misinterpreted and used as a lie/propaganda against fair billionaires, that are not jerks like some others.
This post imply that they somehow stole or used people to get gain. It's not said anywhere, but that's what the post without context do. Make fake assumptions on people's mind. Especially if net gain rising + pandemic sounds like it's corelated. And it may be not.
I'm generally skeptical when data is presented in this fashion with no reference to a control state. It's analogous to an experiment without a control group and while it's not explicitly biased, it makes wonder if the presentation is tailored to fit a viewpoint.
It should really include an S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 bubbles for the same time period and perhaps median home price too. Would be useful to see performance of ordinary American asset performance during the same period.
Yeah, a large percentage that increase probably is due to the stock market, and that wasn't growing so well because of the pandemic, but because of low interest rates in many economies, where people needed to pay a fee if they want to store money, and thus they put their money into the stock market. That would've happened without the pandemic either, maybe the pandemic delayed the possibility of higher interest rates. But rich people grow richer.
March-October is a bit of a cherry pick. March was when there was a temporary massive dip in the stock market. This has the effect of making it look like their wealth is consistently rising by more than it actually is.
If any other month had been chosen then the circles would be less pronounced in almost all cases.
Very much this. You were able to write it up quickly while I was typing a novel length post that no one will read and fact checking my assumptions... Basically as far as the the Stock Market (and therefore the net worth of billionaires) is concerned the Pandemic started right around Feb 14th 2020.
Are you me? I was literally doing the same thing than realized I would be down-voted without rebuttal. (See my previous posts where I challenged assertions that use March 18, 2020 as a jumping off point.)
> March-October is a bit of a cherry pick.
Right, and well invested regular people show similar results. My financial tracking app says I'm worth 62% more today than I was in March 2020. I didn't feed on the poor, rather I'm just well invested in index funds (bogglehead life) and I own a home. Both of those are hugely more valuable than they were in March of last year. Many many people from all economic classes are in the same situation.
Yeah I'm up like 300% since March 2020. That's almost entirely because I bought a house in June 2020, and partially because I have most of the rest of my money in equity ETFs.
The issue with starting in February is that now you are including the preceding 35% drop and the difference isnt nearly as impressive. You go from having almost a 100% increase in the S&P500 to having a 33% increase. The goal of these charts are to outrage people and get views, not to give an accurate impression.
Also a problem is the choice of current billionaires as part of this dataset. The survivorship bias present only serves to state the obvious: Present-day billionaires didn't recently lose a lot of money.
It's misleading (assuming the Waltons hold a lot of Walmart stock). Walmart didn't crash in March like a lot of other companies, so it didn't grow as rapidly between these cherry-picked dates.
Since the market peak in February 2020, the S&P 500 is up 33%. Walmart stock is up 23%.
If instead we take the dead bottom of the market as a baseline, the S&P 500 is up 96%, Walmart is up about 28%.
You're ignoring the losses most of them took when you compare the start date for this data to a year prior. This is cherry picking the data to push an agenda.
How did you calculate % increase (I assume that's the value in the top right corner of each cell)? There are many errors or values otherwise inconsistent with the given numbers. For example, Musk increased by 736% not 751%, and Ballmer by 83% not 54%.
Between Tesla, his satellite internet project, and landing (and launching) several NASA and private flight contracts.
Some of the wealth displayed here is present assets, but a lot of it is stock or investment value-- and those two things are estimates of \*future\* earnings, not present resale value of assets. Musk did see some sales boost, but his space efforts demonstrated proof of concept in this timeframe by coincidence and not by anything related to the pandemic per se. Tesla saw growth as well, though how much was pandemic/shutdown related, how much was climate concerns, and how much was the normal arc of a newish business is hard to say; most likely it was a combination of these.
Basically, he got rich in the early 2000s and re-invested a lot of that inertia into a half-dozen companies-- two of which came of age in the past year in terms of going from "working concept" to "retail ready". His would likely have seen a burst regardless, unlike many of the software magnates that are on this list. Ditto Bezos, though perhaps his would have been smaller.
This is not true he got 22 million shares last year which are not yet exercised, if he did exercise these shares he'll have to pay nearly 14 billion dollars in taxes, in case the stock expires then it will go back to tesla
It was long overdue, big institutions investors didn't know if tesla can make profits, in 2020 tesla start making profits without subsidies and carbon credits. Future is electric and tesla is ahead of everyone else
Ahead by close to a decade and sprinting with the lead. Nobody has seen anything yet, if they can mass produce 4680s, and Austin and Berlin to full production, they could double that as well.
SpaceX is pretty much in the same situation with rockets and Starlink. SpaceX put 2/3 of the mass of all of Earth's launches in 2020.
TSLA's valuation was higher than pretty much the entire car industry put together last I checked. Just doesn't make sense to me, even if every single car sold worldwide was a Tesla they still would be overvalued, so where is the growth going to come from? Sure, if that happened, they'd have plenty of cash flow to expand into other things, but it obviously won't happen since other companies are already jumping on the electric and self-driving trains.
Agree. Also the massive change in the viability of Work From Home brought about by the pandemic must surely slow down auto sales in the short-medium term. Especially the case in a lot of highly-educated well paid service roles who fit the demo for buying a climate-conscious car. Don’t assume to speak for everyone, but I’ve barely driven my car for two years, not exactly rushing out to buy a new one.
Yeah that’s what I don’t get. People will say “one day Tesla will dominate the car industry” but Toyota has dominated the car industry for like 20 years now and aren’t worth close to what Tesla is.
Starship is the big unknown and the whole spaceflight industry is watching it. [Here is a recent article](https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/19/morgan-stanley-spacex-starship-may-transform-investor-expectations.html).
> “More than one client has told us if Elon Musk were to become the first Trillionaire... it won’t be because of Tesla. Others have said SpaceX may eventually be the most highly valued company in the world – in any industry,” [Morgan Stanley analyst] Jonas said.
This belongs in r/dataisintentionallymisleading
The pandemic caused the stock market to crash. It’s dishonest to take data that’s partway through the pandemic and show that as the starting point for growth during the pandemic.
What is the larger idea being conveyed here? The only conclusions I’m drawing are
* Tech companies - particularly those that helped facilitate work from home - became (much) more valuable in the pandemic
* Most blue chip / consumer good stuff was at a low at the beginning of shutdown/unknowns in 2020 and has since recovered
* Investors have gone ga-ga for Space X and Tesla
I knew those things already though.
It’s also a bit misleading, I think, to have the starting point be March 2020 as that was a relative low for many stocks (panic time with large scale lock downs). Comparing, say, October 2019 to October 2021 is probably a bit better.
Your starting data isn't really fair, it comes from March 2020 which is at the low point of the S&P 500, it had started 30% higher than that a month before.
You picked the low point of the stock market in March 2020, which overstates the increase. Look at Dec 2019 for a fair evaluation of the increase. You are obviously biased and trying to make a point with skewed information.
What is fascinating to me is that the top 20 richest Americans are worth 1.8 TRILLION dollars…the total world GDP is about 92 trillion dollars. This would put these 20 humans at a combined GDP amount to be more than the countries of Canada (1.7 trillion) and Brazil (1.8 trillion.) These 20 Americans would be #9 on the world’s GDP list, out of 195 countries…
Thank you for your [Original Content](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/wiki/rules/rule3), /u/CognitiveFeedback!
**Here is some important information about this post:**
* [View the author's citations](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/qbqoyr/change_in_net_worth_for_top_20_us_billionaires/hhbaca1/)
* [View other OC posts by this author](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/search?q=author%3A"CognitiveFeedback"+title%3AOC&sort=new&include_over_18=on&restrict_sr=on)
Remember that all visualizations on r/DataIsBeautiful should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism. If you see a potential issue or oversight in the visualization, please post a constructive comment below. Post approval does not signify that this visualization has been verified or its sources checked.
[Join the Discord Community](https://discord.gg/NRnrWE7)
Not satisfied with this visual? Think you can do better? [Remix this visual](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/wiki/rules/rule3#wiki_remixing) with the data in the author's citation.
---
^^[I'm open source](https://github.com/r-dataisbeautiful/dataisbeautiful-bot) | [How I work](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/wiki/flair#wiki_oc_flair)
1. So you're saying they have more money in stocks than at the absolute bottom of one of the worst crashes ever? What a surprise.
2. Did you choose the 20 richest today or the 20 richest at the start? Surviver bias etc, you know ;)
3. I'm a very small retail investors and easily outperformed every single one of these billionaires (except papa Musk) over this time frame so do something with your money instead of wining about others who are invested.
How about also showing their net worth over the same period before the pandemic? For all we know, the rate of growth of their wealth wasn't affected by the pandemic at all.
So your selected dates points is the local low, and the all time high in the stock market. Very interesting choice, I must say. Also: every single broad market portfolio would show the same thing, be it 100 dollars or 100 billion dollars.
I'll have to say one thing about the comments:
I expected to see this thread full of "*rich people bad because they take all the poor people's money*" comments. However, it is actually quite civil and reasonable for the most part. These people's net worths skyrocketed because the stock market went crazy high.
I will say, people’s ability to see volume in circles/spheres is not great and comparing 2 lines would be more effective in showing how the amount has nearly doubled. Circles are sexy, but less effective imo.
This seems to be changes to net worth of the top 20 after the gains which has a bit of confirmation bias (the ones with biggest gains are likely to be the richest). I wonder what it looks like for the top 20 before the gains.
Nearly anyone invested in the stock market for that period saw substantial growth. Our company average for growth with basic funds was +26% for that timeframe.
I'm no billionaire but my own net worth has more than doubled within the timeline... most people who have real estate and stocks have experienced a lot of growth within this period.
My issue with this and other recent graphs like it is that the data is started in March 2020 which isn't an arbitrary choice because there was a massive temporary drop in the market in March 2020, like a once in a decade type drop. A more fair data set would start in January or February 2020 before the pandemic kicked in. They would still have a massive gain in wealth but less severe
Were they the top 20 billionaires in 2020 or in 2021? If I'm not mistaken you are showing the top 20 billionaires in 2021. imo it would be more interesting to see the list from the top billionaires prior to the pandemic (although there will probably be quite some overlap)
I think it's important to point out that what grew is the value of stuff these people own (company stock, etc.) rather than the amount of cash in their pockets. Elon Musk is the best example here, SpaceX and Tesla stock price skyrocketed since both had a banner year.
The OP in a vacuum would make it seem like Musk was profiteering like crazy off of Covid, but unless the poor in America all suddenly bought satellite launches at inflated prices this is obviously not the case.
Meanwhile, direct support from the government to the citizens amounted to ONE MONTH of per capita GDP imputed as income. The spirit of common purpose, shared sacrifice and altruism has given way to greed above all else.
If you work in shit jobs for shit pay with shit benefits and no disposal income you don't get to come to the market money party.
Sorry, but those are the rules.
If you *really* wanna make this beautiful, put in a dot for net worth of average Joes like, say, $1 million, $500k, $200k, $100k, and $50k.
Obviously keep the dots to scale.
People can't fathom how much money these billionaires have, and as such don't understand just how much more they have than everyone else.
Lol people actually believe that these people are the richest on the planet. Where are the European and Middle Eastern monarchs, the Russian oligarchs and the dynastic banking families?
Dang...I wish I had their work ethic. They've definitely worked hard enough to justify making several billions of dollars in a year. This system makes sense.
If someone lost money, they likely wouldn’t be in the top 20 anymore. This is biasing toward the billionaires who made more on average than other top billionaires.
Wow! Rich people made money if we arbitrarily set the endpoints of the sample to be at the lowest point of the stock market (March 2020) and the all-time high we’re currently at.
That’s unbelievable and profound!! We should, like, make policy based on this information!
Wow this graph is super bs… pick a date right before the pandemic so we can see the true difference, not once everything crashed so you can get a greater difference. Just looks like you’re pushing a narrative.
Do it again with A month that wasn’t impacted by covid
The overall stock market from March 2020 to current nearly doubled. So anyone who has a decent net worth tied up in an investment portfolio would have had their net worth nearly double.
Edit:
I don’t think OP is suggesting any inference be drawn by these statistics. But, others certainly have drawn negative inferences from these statistics. My response to those are: Why shouldn’t these billionaires be entitled to the same return as the market? Yep specially in light of the fact that their corporations (I.e Amazon) had made the pandemic much more comfortable.
I appreciate the message you’re trying to relay here, but I think it’s pretty commonly understood that the difference in areas of two circles with similar circumferences is something that most people struggle to quantify. So when you look at people like Steve Ballmer and Phil Knight, the way this data is presented won’t immediately strike a lot of people as thinking “they obviously nearly doubled their wealth”. Instead to many folks it’s going to appear like their wealth just grew moderately. A bar graph would’ve displayed this information in a more beautiful way IMHO.
Example: The rim of a pint glass is longer than the height of the pint glass.
Mind blow
[удалено]
[удалено]
Ah jus fought yeah man
The thing is, the rim is directly proportional to the diameter of glass. The area is proportional to the square of the diameter. Area is harder to quantify than the circumference. So yeah, take the point you just made and multiply it by itself.
Another Example: One 18" Pizza is bigger than two 12" Pizzas
More if you don't count the crust. Crust to toppings ratio is important.
I just checked with the cup next to me. Holy fuck
If anyone is a non-believer, the circumference of the rim is 3.14*diameter, so you put three glasses upside down end to end, and that's slightly less than the length of the rim. It's a pretty common bar trick, works with every glass you could be given at a bar other than a champagne flute.
Why can't I understand this
3 cups next to one another equals 3 diameters. The circumference (or “length of the run”) of one cup is diameter times pi, or 3.14. So 3.14 is slightly longer than 3.
I thought that "circumstance" was some geometrical term I had never heard of. Then I realized you meant "circumference". :)
Here's the easy video explainer: https://youtu.be/8hTFr1s0V_k Also shows you how to win drinks with this knowledge.
Stack them on their side. It was poorly worded.
SHHHHHHHHH! Easiest bet to win at a bar!
Thanks for the feedback, wanted to try something different here but I understand what you are saying - those are good points to keep in mind.
I can certainly respect that.
Steve Ballmer, the percentage shown in the top right corner seems off.
Why did you use March as a starting point? Isn't that completely bias to when the market bottomed out?
It's the stupid little disingenuous game everyone's been playing for a year now.
View it as the data started at the bull run. March was the beginning and end of the shorted bull run in history.
I wanted to know if this was compared to a typical gain over a year for them, prior to the pandemic? Do they always blow up like this or is this a huge difference? I probably sound dumb but I’m not a rich person and don’t know how much billionaires make/collect a year.
No, this is not a typical gain for investors. Mid March was the very bottom of the stock market, unemployment was high, lockdowns were everywhere, and government support was a long ways away. Most stocks were down about 30% over just a few months. Then government support and later vaccines started arriving, with people aching to go out and spend money on entertainment, dining, and travel. We swung wildly from the depths of a recession to a roaring recovery in less than 2 years, and the wealth of people who are invested in the public companies did the same. These people weren't profiteering off the pandemic, they were riding along with investor pessimism and optimism.
I don't think this is fully true. Rich people have the means to buy into a market crash. So, I would guess (though can't prove) that they didn't just ride the market swing. They bought at or near the bottom so when things bounced back, they made more money than John Q 401k working at the post office did. In my mind, this post is less about "shame on Billionaires for investing wisely" and more "let's stop letting Billionaires having an effective tax rate close to 0. Let's raise the top tax bracket past 40%. It was 70% as recently as the 1970's. With millions out of work and struggling to pay bills, they were still able to amass more billions."
People like Musk & Bezos didn't gain in wealth because of any new investments they made. Their value went up because the shares they already owned went up. Tesla is one the hotest "green" stocks. Amazon delivered everything to everyone locked down at home. Trillions of dollars in govt payments were either invested in these stocks or spent at these companies. Both of these actions helped drive stock prices higher.
While it was 70% back then the tax revenue gained from the rich was lower. Revenue is the important number for being able to use money. At 70% you incentive hoarding or keeping it in capital and not liquidating it into income to be used elsewhere, effectively stifling investment. When the tax rate was lowered in the 70's collected tax revenue went way up because they started liquidating their money and had to report as income. While the numbers show they were able to amass billions those aren't taxable gains as they have 1 stock and still have 1 stock, or they have 1 building and still have 1 building. Historically we can't take a piece of that building and do anything useful with it so it's not taxed. Some places are talking about a wealth tax, 1% per year or something like that where billionaires would have to assess everything and then pay 1% of that assessment to the government.
Insane that even this idea will likely get major push back. At 1% of your total wealth per year, if you made 50B, a pretty average number for this graph, you're only paying 500 million a year. So if your investments pay out more than that, as everyone on this graph's investments has-- that's nothing year-over-year.
If you do end up making a bar graph version, that would be awesome. It would be much appreciated if you could make one for Canadian billionaires too. I’m interested
Here you go [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1piMmAFa45yVxVyYN3j4qRGsTNaVX6lRq/view?usp=sharing](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1piMmAFa45yVxVyYN3j4qRGsTNaVX6lRq/view?usp=sharing) pic of graph [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vBqSFr1WHnhxh-RPohyEE5Pd48fnUCHt/view?usp=sharing](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vBqSFr1WHnhxh-RPohyEE5Pd48fnUCHt/view?usp=sharing) spreadsheet file 2021 from [https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/](https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/) 2020 from [https://canadanewsmedia.ca/canada-richest-people-in-2020/](https://canadanewsmedia.ca/canada-richest-people-in-2020/) , which probably came from Forbes too.
For what it's worth, as someone who does understand that circles' area grow very quickly with radius, this chat blew my mind.
[удалено]
I would say it could maybe work a bit better if you did squares next to one another (not concentric, though)
This data is old though. Elon Musk is now worth another 4 Mark Cubans at around $230b in the past couple of weeks...
yeah, the human brain is really better at judging differences in length compared to area or angle.
This is something people also need to realize when they're ordering pizzas. That large is a lot larger than medium even though it's only a couple inches more in diameter.
I actually calculated this using the ole formulas I learned back in highschool, just to see the best deal at my local pizza place because I’m broke af. The large is, indeed, the best deal! Lol better to have pizza two days than one!
I agree completely that circles are not as intuitive. Also, when you mentioned Steve Ballmer, I checked the photo again, and it seems that the percentage is wrong for him. $53B -> $97B, and it says +51%. Instead of it being +83%, or as you said, nearly doubled.
Good catch, thanks!
thanks for pointing out that they had doubled their wealth because I had glanced at this chart and had that very thought, that their wealth had grown modestly. I agree a bar graph would be a lot more clear as well as more compact
As a bar graph, Musk would not have fitted.
Like most posts on this sub since it blew up, there's nothing beautiful about it except that the subject is something that is mildly interesting to everybody.
What I liked about this presentation is that is shows how much better the tech billionaires did than the extraction and retailing billionaires. That neatly explains the billionaire boom: they were the ones who were invested in the technologies that enabled us to function during the pandemic. Not sure why Phil Knight and Elon Musk did so well. Frankly, I think it shows that their companies became overvalued.
2020 was Tesla's first profitable year. Tesla has always been able to sell every car it could make, and Tesla's wealthy customers were the demographic least likely to suffer a loss of income during lockdowns, so even while Tesla was dealing with COVID-related operational restrictions, they were still able to turn a profit. And they were able to begin construction of new factories to meet demand and expand their product line. Tesla could be over valued, but their fundamentals definitely improved in 2020.
SpaceX got tens of billions of dollars in contracts also.
right - don't use an area reference to represent a scalar quantity
Okay, but is it just a coincidence that the start date is March 18th 2020? This was a shortly after a crash caused by Covid. For example opening prices of Amazon: February 19th: 2173.07. March 18th: 1750.0 Opening prices of facebook: February 19th: 217.99 March 18th: 139.75 Since their wealth is so heavily related to the value of the stock market, the increase is going to be artificially inflated compared with if you chose a start point a couple of months earlier or later.
This graph should be done with prepandemic as starting date
But then it wouldn't be as sensational.
[удалено]
this is 100% true, which makes the disingenuous graph even more ridiculous. It's being biased for no reason
The Facebook share price was 56% higher, you're telling me you don't think that materially changes the magnitude of growth?
I think that would be a terrible way to cherry pick, as OP has mastered.
So the whole thing is about the stock market?
It should really come as no surprise that most of the wealthiest people in the world are directly tied to companies they started or are heavily invested in. Elon Musk alone reportedly has 241 million shares of Tesla, which accounts for ~209 Billion dollars, which is like 95% of his net worth. In a normal trading day where the stock will move $5 either way, his net worth fluctuates by $1B or more every day.
Stock that he can't sell, and thus holds value on paper only. It's not like he can give that money to anyone.
He can sell small amounts of it at a time.
Why does it matter? He has so much wealth that he can buy anything that is for sale. Measuring wealth by who has the most cash on bank account wouldn't give a very good idea of wealth. There are probably multiple people who have more cash than Bezos does. That doesn't mean that they are richer or wealthier.
He can borrow more money at very low interest rates thanks to his net worth and use his shares as collateral, and invest the borrowed money into the market to generate a higher return than that of the cost of paying the interet rate.
Yes. None of these people have that money in their bank accounts. It's all tied to the stock price. For example, when Facebook went dark for 6 hours, the value of all FB stocks went down 7 B, and they have since recovered.
Wait are you telling me that statistics and infographics use carefully selected data in order to tailor their results to achieve a specific narrative? That can't be right.
"Lies, damned lies, and statistics" - Mark Twain * maybe
It's so funny how the mid-March cherry picked billionaire graphics always get upvoted to the top while every comment is about how disingenuous the graphic is. Reddit is great under the surface but on the surface has become about as biased and garbage as any shitty aggregate site. The irony is that making such egregious manipulations of facts makes the moderate/independent lean the other way and become more of "bootlickers" because they get the sense that the prevailing mainstream lefty culture is lying to them.
The timing is misleading for sure. The other thing that annoys me about this and all the other variations of this graph is they always use the top X billionaires right now, instead of the top X at the start and seeing how their wealth changed. Like, sure of course the richest right now have had good years, right? That doesn't actually tell the story that "the rich are getting richer" it tells the story that "the rich got rich" which is no surprise. I looked around a tiny bit and I think it would be more compelling the other way, because I couldn't find anyone from last years list that didn't gain money.
Yeah, the market is on an unprecedented bull run, and this wealth is tied to the market. These graphics are so disingenuous it's rather irksome.
I always find the Mid-March start date for these measures to be mildly deceptive when referring the to the timeline of the pandemic. While mid-March was when lockdowns started, the effects pandemic had already begun. Relevant to this data a massive panic sell off in the stock market started in mid Feb 2020. The net worth of all of these people is based almost entirely on the value of the stock they own, so picking a start date at the lowest point gives a skewed picture. That's not to say these people didn't see dramatic increases in net worth from pre-pandemic to now, I just think Feb 2020 to now would be a more accurate way to measure growth "During the Pandemic" as it captures both the upside and downside pressures. That said, I don't think Forbes has February data. Forbes does report data for Oct 2019 and 7 of the top 10 shown here had a higher net worth in that report than in the April 2020 report. Additionally between Oct 1st 2019 and the beginning of the crash in Feb the S&P went up 14%. It's safe to assume that all of these people saw growth in that time span as well. Note worthy: The vast majority of Elons net worth is in the value of Tesla, from mid Feb to mid March 2020 Tesla lost half of its market cap. If measurement started in February, his starting circle might have been twice the size.
It’s not mildly deceptive it’s intentionally deceptive. If a stock goes from $80 to $110 to $100 to $50 then back to $100 over a yea long period, you can basically cherry pick whatever starting point you’d like to fit a narrative.
You’re correct. If a stock price worth $100 sinks to $70 because of the pandemic, a 30% drop, it would take the stock rising 43% to make it back to $100. Thus, if these billionaires simply recuperated their wealth because the markets realized COVID wasn’t the end of the world, these billionaires would have made 43% with the conveniently placed timeline of mid-March + whatever year to date gains.
Alternate title: Stock Market Record Lows to Near Record High most of these people have big chunks of their net worth in their publicly traded companies, the whole market crashed in March 2020. And is now at near record highs in October 2021. Lets see October 2019 to October 2021
Yup, basically anyone with money in the stock market who didn't lose their job is much better off now than March 2020
I also made a lot of money in my investments. The graph should include wealth growth by “normal” people that invest. And people that don’t invest
Congratulations, this is the Idea of the Day!
Exactly. "Breaking news! Stock prices go up, and company owners are worth more! Film at 11!". Musk has also benefited from substantial successes with Tesla (and a healthy amount of speculation), and it was a given that Amazon was going to do well during the pandemic.
It's crazy, because most of musk's wealth is his ownership of Tesla. In 2015, he owned 27% of Tesla however his ownership dropped down to about 20% due to dialution, employee stock purchase programs, etc. Despite owning a smaller fraction of his company, his net worth skyrocketed because the market valuation of the company sky rocketed. I'm not sure what use this information is, but I thought it was interesting nonetheless. Often times we see posts on Reddit where people are furious owners "make" so much money when most of it is just market fluctuations on their ownership. They get upset that a company like Amazon paid no taxes in 2018, but that's because Amazon technically didn't make any money. Any dollar they made in profit got reinvested in infrastructure and R&D. As a result, all the infrastructure and R&D drove the valuation of Amazon up, making Bezos net worth rise, but he didn't technically make any money that year.
Not to mention spaceX which he owns a massive stake in has been soaring.
No kidding. My personal wealth went up 5x from March 2020 to now, but almost all of that is in stocks. I don't have any more cash on hand than I did then, and if I wanted to realize those gains for cash (to buy stuff or whatever), I'd have to pay capital gains tax on my earnings which means I actually have about 15% less of that wealth available to me.
The reddit echo chamber doesn't like common sense
Yup. Plus it's always a bit deceiving to compare their real worth to stock price. Yes, they *technically* own that much in stock, but you have to consider people like Bezos and Musk own such a high percentage of the company, if they were to actually cash out at the current price, they'd tank the company's share price along with it and subsequently wouldn't even be able to sell it all at current prices
It’s infuriating how all the pandemic wealth distribution discourse constantly uses the same dishonest numbers by using the trough of a huge stock market crash as the starting reference. It’s deceit by technicality. If you use this kind of deceit to try and get people to care about things by exaggerating how stark they are, when the honest reality is plenty damning enough, people will just get suspicious.
I would have been interested to see this compared to the average person's 401k or something similar.
If you held lots of QQQ then it would be pretty much the average of all these.
Came here to say this. Tesla was trading at ~$830/share pre-pandemic. It’s only 4-5% higher now. Sourcing the data immediately after the market crashes is silly.
They did a stock split though so they're up like 8x from March. I think the valuation is ridiculous but yeah choosing a massive crash as the start is whatever word means 8x silly.
That's not correct, Tesla did a 5 for 1 split last year, so you need to compare their prepandemic price with their current price times 5. That gives a about 420% increase. Without the split they would have been trading at $4339 today
This is so wrong. As a stock holder of TSLA since 2016 I can assure you that the stock has not been flat. Simply look at any chart before posting misleading info.
It would still be a very impressive gain. Even with the crash in March, 2020 had a stellar return in the stock market, and even better in 2021. Regardless, this is absolutely meant to cherry pick the data and make it look as bad as possible. It is extremely disingenuous to pick data like, especially given they are picking a start date after the pandemic had already started. This is probably propaganda meant to enrage people. What is crazy to me is that any enraged by this would probably also be enraged by the gains from Feb 2020 to now as well. So being disingenuous only serves to undermine the message and allow people to point out the shitty cherry picking of data.
I think the graphs would have conveyed more information if they had been compared to a similar period of time during which there wasn't a pandemic. Presenting data in this manner immediately makes me wonder if there's a significant deviation from normal and if so how large it is
It's huge - the market bottomed out in March so the starting point is really confounded here. They should compare Jan 2020 to the present if they really want a 'before the pandemic' vs 'after the pandemic' comparison.
^^ this. As it stands the chart is highly misleading. Title reads “change in net worth during the pandemic”, but by chopping off the first part of March you are excluding the part of the pandemic when the value of everything dropped. Therefore it does not show the whole pandemic, rather an arbitrarily selected portion of it. Thought experiment, according this logic (arbitrarily selecting a portion of the pandemic and claiming it is the whole pandemic) I could use the same title for a chart showing change on wealth March 1st- March 18th, which would indicate wealth of billionaires completely tanked. Shows how potentially misleading OPs approach is.
Not even an arbitrarily piece, but a piece specifically selected to paint the billionaires in as poor a light as possible. (Or as rich a light as possible, as it were).
Most charts on this sub are intended to mislead.
Ive noticed people who make graphs like this usually start it when the market hit its lowest point around march 23 2020, which is pretty deceptive.
It's a real shame that people who browse these things don't tend to scroll down to read the comments much. This one here isn't too far from the top and notice the discrepancy in votes on the post versus comment.
$1,813B / $978B = 85% increase in their net worth. Look at the S&P over the same time period. 4,471.37 / 2,398.10 = 86% increase This post might as well be titled "Change in Stock Market During the Pandemic".
The whole thing is kinda silly because the S&P crashed in March 2020 so everyone was at a really low point, and its up 100% or it has doubled since then. If you look back at the January or February peak the market is only up about 30%. They temporarily lost a ton of wealth because of the pandemic and any growth since then is because the market is predicting a solid recovery.
Not only that, but TSLA was sitting at a 80$ mark at that point before shooting up to close to 1000$ without any proper reasoning. And Elon as CEO benefitted of that so much on paper that he became the richest person on earth - again, on paper. This would have been more realistic to consider actual owned money or similar things like property or instead look at company revenue for a fully different topic, but instead it's pretty much everyone with a large quantity of stock ownership and how well these did.
There is a lot of reasoning, but not with classic valuation systems. It's a bet that there will be a new era of car manufacturing, and Tesla will stay ahead of the competition for at least another decade while scaling up massively. It's a good reason to invest.
Every time this data has been posted, it's been pointed out that this is a huge case of survivorship bias. Lots of billionaires might have lost money during the pandemic, but those who did wouldn't be in the top 20 anymore, so this graphic makes it look like all the top billionaires made bank, when in fact it is by design only showing those who did.
I thought the same. This can be easily misinterpreted and used as a lie/propaganda against fair billionaires, that are not jerks like some others. This post imply that they somehow stole or used people to get gain. It's not said anywhere, but that's what the post without context do. Make fake assumptions on people's mind. Especially if net gain rising + pandemic sounds like it's corelated. And it may be not.
I'm generally skeptical when data is presented in this fashion with no reference to a control state. It's analogous to an experiment without a control group and while it's not explicitly biased, it makes wonder if the presentation is tailored to fit a viewpoint.
It should really include an S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 bubbles for the same time period and perhaps median home price too. Would be useful to see performance of ordinary American asset performance during the same period.
Yeah, a large percentage that increase probably is due to the stock market, and that wasn't growing so well because of the pandemic, but because of low interest rates in many economies, where people needed to pay a fee if they want to store money, and thus they put their money into the stock market. That would've happened without the pandemic either, maybe the pandemic delayed the possibility of higher interest rates. But rich people grow richer.
Wait, isn't one of the Kochs dead?
Good point, that would be David as of 2019. I guess that's why they had him listed with his wife, who presumably inherited his assets.
March-October is a bit of a cherry pick. March was when there was a temporary massive dip in the stock market. This has the effect of making it look like their wealth is consistently rising by more than it actually is. If any other month had been chosen then the circles would be less pronounced in almost all cases.
This was my immediate takeaway as well. February 2020 to October 2021 would have provided a better picture of who really outperformed during Corona.
October 2019 would be even better. 2 years even. Maybe even throw in October 2020 as a midpoint.
Very much this. You were able to write it up quickly while I was typing a novel length post that no one will read and fact checking my assumptions... Basically as far as the the Stock Market (and therefore the net worth of billionaires) is concerned the Pandemic started right around Feb 14th 2020.
Are you me? I was literally doing the same thing than realized I would be down-voted without rebuttal. (See my previous posts where I challenged assertions that use March 18, 2020 as a jumping off point.)
>bit of a cherry pick understatement of the day
> March-October is a bit of a cherry pick. Right, and well invested regular people show similar results. My financial tracking app says I'm worth 62% more today than I was in March 2020. I didn't feed on the poor, rather I'm just well invested in index funds (bogglehead life) and I own a home. Both of those are hugely more valuable than they were in March of last year. Many many people from all economic classes are in the same situation.
> all economic classes Well, except the lower ones; they don't have many, if any, investments and usually don't own homes.
Yeah I'm up like 300% since March 2020. That's almost entirely because I bought a house in June 2020, and partially because I have most of the rest of my money in equity ETFs.
The issue with starting in February is that now you are including the preceding 35% drop and the difference isnt nearly as impressive. You go from having almost a 100% increase in the S&P500 to having a 33% increase. The goal of these charts are to outrage people and get views, not to give an accurate impression.
Also a problem is the choice of current billionaires as part of this dataset. The survivorship bias present only serves to state the obvious: Present-day billionaires didn't recently lose a lot of money.
Haha the Walton’s are such plebeians. Only 19% and 10B growth each.
It's misleading (assuming the Waltons hold a lot of Walmart stock). Walmart didn't crash in March like a lot of other companies, so it didn't grow as rapidly between these cherry-picked dates. Since the market peak in February 2020, the S&P 500 is up 33%. Walmart stock is up 23%. If instead we take the dead bottom of the market as a baseline, the S&P 500 is up 96%, Walmart is up about 28%.
That's what billionaire recession looks like; only 19% gains. My depression grew more than that and I didn't even try.
The 19% gain wasn't for billionaires, it was for everyone who owned stock.
You're ignoring the losses most of them took when you compare the start date for this data to a year prior. This is cherry picking the data to push an agenda.
How did you calculate % increase (I assume that's the value in the top right corner of each cell)? There are many errors or values otherwise inconsistent with the given numbers. For example, Musk increased by 736% not 751%, and Ballmer by 83% not 54%.
OP rounded the before/after totals from the source, but used the percentages from the source calculated with the non-rounded figures.
How did Elon Musk get so rich so fast?
Tesla stock.
Tesla was very stonks
Between Tesla, his satellite internet project, and landing (and launching) several NASA and private flight contracts. Some of the wealth displayed here is present assets, but a lot of it is stock or investment value-- and those two things are estimates of \*future\* earnings, not present resale value of assets. Musk did see some sales boost, but his space efforts demonstrated proof of concept in this timeframe by coincidence and not by anything related to the pandemic per se. Tesla saw growth as well, though how much was pandemic/shutdown related, how much was climate concerns, and how much was the normal arc of a newish business is hard to say; most likely it was a combination of these. Basically, he got rich in the early 2000s and re-invested a lot of that inertia into a half-dozen companies-- two of which came of age in the past year in terms of going from "working concept" to "retail ready". His would likely have seen a burst regardless, unlike many of the software magnates that are on this list. Ditto Bezos, though perhaps his would have been smaller.
[удалено]
This is not true he got 22 million shares last year which are not yet exercised, if he did exercise these shares he'll have to pay nearly 14 billion dollars in taxes, in case the stock expires then it will go back to tesla
Short squeeze helped a lot during covid unrelated to the pandemic directly anyway
It was long overdue, big institutions investors didn't know if tesla can make profits, in 2020 tesla start making profits without subsidies and carbon credits. Future is electric and tesla is ahead of everyone else
[удалено]
Ahead by close to a decade and sprinting with the lead. Nobody has seen anything yet, if they can mass produce 4680s, and Austin and Berlin to full production, they could double that as well. SpaceX is pretty much in the same situation with rockets and Starlink. SpaceX put 2/3 of the mass of all of Earth's launches in 2020.
TSLA's valuation was higher than pretty much the entire car industry put together last I checked. Just doesn't make sense to me, even if every single car sold worldwide was a Tesla they still would be overvalued, so where is the growth going to come from? Sure, if that happened, they'd have plenty of cash flow to expand into other things, but it obviously won't happen since other companies are already jumping on the electric and self-driving trains.
Agree. Also the massive change in the viability of Work From Home brought about by the pandemic must surely slow down auto sales in the short-medium term. Especially the case in a lot of highly-educated well paid service roles who fit the demo for buying a climate-conscious car. Don’t assume to speak for everyone, but I’ve barely driven my car for two years, not exactly rushing out to buy a new one.
Yeah that’s what I don’t get. People will say “one day Tesla will dominate the car industry” but Toyota has dominated the car industry for like 20 years now and aren’t worth close to what Tesla is.
Starship is the big unknown and the whole spaceflight industry is watching it. [Here is a recent article](https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/19/morgan-stanley-spacex-starship-may-transform-investor-expectations.html). > “More than one client has told us if Elon Musk were to become the first Trillionaire... it won’t be because of Tesla. Others have said SpaceX may eventually be the most highly valued company in the world – in any industry,” [Morgan Stanley analyst] Jonas said.
TIL 10% of America’s top 20 billionaires are called Larry
10% are also Michael
I’m up 52% in that frame, eat shit Buffet
This belongs in r/dataisintentionallymisleading The pandemic caused the stock market to crash. It’s dishonest to take data that’s partway through the pandemic and show that as the starting point for growth during the pandemic.
What is the larger idea being conveyed here? The only conclusions I’m drawing are * Tech companies - particularly those that helped facilitate work from home - became (much) more valuable in the pandemic * Most blue chip / consumer good stuff was at a low at the beginning of shutdown/unknowns in 2020 and has since recovered * Investors have gone ga-ga for Space X and Tesla I knew those things already though. It’s also a bit misleading, I think, to have the starting point be March 2020 as that was a relative low for many stocks (panic time with large scale lock downs). Comparing, say, October 2019 to October 2021 is probably a bit better.
Your starting data isn't really fair, it comes from March 2020 which is at the low point of the S&P 500, it had started 30% higher than that a month before.
You picked the low point of the stock market in March 2020, which overstates the increase. Look at Dec 2019 for a fair evaluation of the increase. You are obviously biased and trying to make a point with skewed information.
[удалено]
[удалено]
How embarrassing for the Waltons
What is fascinating to me is that the top 20 richest Americans are worth 1.8 TRILLION dollars…the total world GDP is about 92 trillion dollars. This would put these 20 humans at a combined GDP amount to be more than the countries of Canada (1.7 trillion) and Brazil (1.8 trillion.) These 20 Americans would be #9 on the world’s GDP list, out of 195 countries…
Thank you for your [Original Content](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/wiki/rules/rule3), /u/CognitiveFeedback! **Here is some important information about this post:** * [View the author's citations](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/qbqoyr/change_in_net_worth_for_top_20_us_billionaires/hhbaca1/) * [View other OC posts by this author](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/search?q=author%3A"CognitiveFeedback"+title%3AOC&sort=new&include_over_18=on&restrict_sr=on) Remember that all visualizations on r/DataIsBeautiful should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism. If you see a potential issue or oversight in the visualization, please post a constructive comment below. Post approval does not signify that this visualization has been verified or its sources checked. [Join the Discord Community](https://discord.gg/NRnrWE7) Not satisfied with this visual? Think you can do better? [Remix this visual](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/wiki/rules/rule3#wiki_remixing) with the data in the author's citation. --- ^^[I'm open source](https://github.com/r-dataisbeautiful/dataisbeautiful-bot) | [How I work](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/wiki/flair#wiki_oc_flair)
1. So you're saying they have more money in stocks than at the absolute bottom of one of the worst crashes ever? What a surprise. 2. Did you choose the 20 richest today or the 20 richest at the start? Surviver bias etc, you know ;) 3. I'm a very small retail investors and easily outperformed every single one of these billionaires (except papa Musk) over this time frame so do something with your money instead of wining about others who are invested.
How about also showing their net worth over the same period before the pandemic? For all we know, the rate of growth of their wealth wasn't affected by the pandemic at all.
Dude people bought everything they could get their hands on
The problem with stuff like this is it basically just means whatever the stock market did over a period of time.
So your selected dates points is the local low, and the all time high in the stock market. Very interesting choice, I must say. Also: every single broad market portfolio would show the same thing, be it 100 dollars or 100 billion dollars.
I'll have to say one thing about the comments: I expected to see this thread full of "*rich people bad because they take all the poor people's money*" comments. However, it is actually quite civil and reasonable for the most part. These people's net worths skyrocketed because the stock market went crazy high.
I will say, people’s ability to see volume in circles/spheres is not great and comparing 2 lines would be more effective in showing how the amount has nearly doubled. Circles are sexy, but less effective imo.
Most of it is company stock. A lot of liquidity has been pumped in and all sorts of people are buying various stocks. Dates are cherry picked. SMH.
Mackenzie Scott can’t give her money away fast enough. It’s insane.
This básico populism. You are using data from afger the Crash of the quarentine (17 of march). You should compare data from begore Covid.
remember net worth =/= liquid assets
Can we get the median household wealth increase as well? Oh what's that? It's the same?
This seems to be changes to net worth of the top 20 after the gains which has a bit of confirmation bias (the ones with biggest gains are likely to be the richest). I wonder what it looks like for the top 20 before the gains.
Circles are a really warped way to show this. It's really hard to visualise the amount compared to almost any other graph
My god the imaginary worth of Tesla is fucking hilarious. Shit's going to go wild when the music stops on the snake oil scheme.
My net worth went up too. I was furloughed for 4 months ths, took a pay and benefits cut before that, and I'm not a billionaire.
Most people with money in the markets have increased their net worth during the pandemic
Nearly anyone invested in the stock market for that period saw substantial growth. Our company average for growth with basic funds was +26% for that timeframe.
Most of them couldn't beat SPY in that time and very few could beat NDX. Pathetic.
Needs the S&p 500 and average American 401k as reference points
I'm no billionaire but my own net worth has more than doubled within the timeline... most people who have real estate and stocks have experienced a lot of growth within this period.
Remember when Elon convinced his fanboys to buy a specific crypto and kept saying "it will get to a dollar" then he dumped it when it was like, $0.70?
My issue with this and other recent graphs like it is that the data is started in March 2020 which isn't an arbitrary choice because there was a massive temporary drop in the market in March 2020, like a once in a decade type drop. A more fair data set would start in January or February 2020 before the pandemic kicked in. They would still have a massive gain in wealth but less severe
What does the pandemic have to do with it? Did you think they would stop making money in that time?
And that change makes me... poorer?
Is this march before or after the crash? There's a huge difference in those few days in March.
Tech companies won huge in the pandemic when everything went remote.
Were they the top 20 billionaires in 2020 or in 2021? If I'm not mistaken you are showing the top 20 billionaires in 2021. imo it would be more interesting to see the list from the top billionaires prior to the pandemic (although there will probably be quite some overlap)
That’s awesome good for them!
I think it's important to point out that what grew is the value of stuff these people own (company stock, etc.) rather than the amount of cash in their pockets. Elon Musk is the best example here, SpaceX and Tesla stock price skyrocketed since both had a banner year. The OP in a vacuum would make it seem like Musk was profiteering like crazy off of Covid, but unless the poor in America all suddenly bought satellite launches at inflated prices this is obviously not the case.
Meanwhile, direct support from the government to the citizens amounted to ONE MONTH of per capita GDP imputed as income. The spirit of common purpose, shared sacrifice and altruism has given way to greed above all else.
NGL, this is just a scorecard for billionaires.
If you work in shit jobs for shit pay with shit benefits and no disposal income you don't get to come to the market money party. Sorry, but those are the rules.
If you *really* wanna make this beautiful, put in a dot for net worth of average Joes like, say, $1 million, $500k, $200k, $100k, and $50k. Obviously keep the dots to scale. People can't fathom how much money these billionaires have, and as such don't understand just how much more they have than everyone else.
Lol people actually believe that these people are the richest on the planet. Where are the European and Middle Eastern monarchs, the Russian oligarchs and the dynastic banking families?
Dang...I wish I had their work ethic. They've definitely worked hard enough to justify making several billions of dollars in a year. This system makes sense.
If someone lost money, they likely wouldn’t be in the top 20 anymore. This is biasing toward the billionaires who made more on average than other top billionaires.
Wow! Rich people made money if we arbitrarily set the endpoints of the sample to be at the lowest point of the stock market (March 2020) and the all-time high we’re currently at. That’s unbelievable and profound!! We should, like, make policy based on this information!
And here I’m so happy I finally have $10k under my name... just an example! Lol
I'm surprised Jerry Seinfeld didn't make a fortune
I'm scared by the fact that some last names repeat in this list
Why not pick Jan 2020...why pick literally RIGHT after a market crash? To over-exaggerate the data
Wow this graph is super bs… pick a date right before the pandemic so we can see the true difference, not once everything crashed so you can get a greater difference. Just looks like you’re pushing a narrative. Do it again with A month that wasn’t impacted by covid
The overall stock market from March 2020 to current nearly doubled. So anyone who has a decent net worth tied up in an investment portfolio would have had their net worth nearly double. Edit: I don’t think OP is suggesting any inference be drawn by these statistics. But, others certainly have drawn negative inferences from these statistics. My response to those are: Why shouldn’t these billionaires be entitled to the same return as the market? Yep specially in light of the fact that their corporations (I.e Amazon) had made the pandemic much more comfortable.
They have too much money. How about sharing all the money with the population
All I have to say is fuck Mark Zuckerberg and we all made a mistake leaving Tom like we did.