The Anti-Forbes List: Measuring Founder Wealth Creation for Others
The Anti-Forbes List: Measuring Founder Wealth Creation for Others
The Anti-Forbes List shifts the focus from personal net worth to external wealth creation
The Anti-Forbes List is a data-driven ranking of founders based on the amount of shareholder wealth their companies created for others—including index funds, pensions, employees, and co-founders—minus the wealth the founder personally retained. This approach attempts to quantify the value a founder has "built for everyone else" rather than simply tracking who owns the most assets.
Methodology and Calculation
The list utilizes a specific, narrow financial metric to determine "wealth created for others." The calculation is based on the following components:
- Wealth Creation Baseline: It uses the Bessembinder baseline (1926–2025) to measure company wealth creation beyond T-bill returns.
- Ownership Data: Sourced from SEC EDGAR filings.
- Net Worth: Sourced from Forbes Real-Time Billionaires.
- The Formula: The "For others" figure is calculated as the total shareholder wealth created by the company (adjusted for T-bill returns and live market delta), attributed by the founding stake, minus the founder's current net worth.
Key Metrics
- Multiple: The ratio of wealth created for others divided by the wealth the founder kept.
- Negative Values: A negative number in the "For others" column indicates that the company has destroyed shareholder wealth since its initial public offering (IPO).
Top Wealth Creators for Others
According to the data, the founders who have generated the most value for external shareholders are:
- Jensen Huang (NVIDIA): $4.98 trillion created for others.
- Bill Gates (Microsoft): $3.19 trillion created for others.
- Jeff Bezos (Amazon): $2.17 trillion created for others.
- Sergey Brin (Google): $1.78 trillion created for others.
- Larry Page (Google): $1.76 trillion created for others.
Notably, some founders have high "multiples" of wealth creation. For example, Reed Hastings (Netflix) created $311 billion for others while keeping only $4 billion, resulting in a high multiple of 72.9x.
Analysis and Community Critique
The project has sparked significant debate regarding the definition of "wealth" and the limitations of measuring value solely through public equity markets.
Limitations of the Stock-Market Approach
Critics argue that focusing on stock returns since the IPO ignores several critical factors:
- Pre-IPO Value: Wealth created for early investors and employees before a company goes public is not captured.
- Non-Financial Value: The list excludes creators of open-source software (e.g., Linus Torvalds), vaccine inventors, and public health innovators who provide immense societal value without capturing it as personal or shareholder equity.
- Inflation: Some users noted a lack of inflation adjustment for historical figures.
- Labor Contribution: Critics suggest the list fails to account for the wealth created by the employees and engineers whose labor actually built the product.
Conceptual Disagreements
Some observers suggest the title "Anti-Forbes" is a misnomer, arguing that the list is actually a "List of Founders by Uncaptured Equity Value" or a list of "donors who contributed dividends and capital gains to Wall Street pension funds."
"Looking only at stocks is spitting in the face of every economist in the history of humanity."
"It is a list of wealth created for index funds, pensions, employees and co-founders, not the overall benefit to society."
Summary of Findings
While the Anti-Forbes List provides a unique lens on the distribution of equity value between founders and the public, it remains a narrow financial instrument. It highlights a stark contrast between founders like Jensen Huang, who has created trillions in value for the public, and founders of companies that have destroyed shareholder value since listing, such as Thomas Peterffy (Interactive Brokers), whose "For others" value is listed at -$71 billion.