Analyzing The Richest Rich
A closer look at billionaires
For a while, I’ve seen Forbes’ Billionaires list and figured I’d love to find out more. Primarily I wanted to learn more about the following:
- How do billionaires compare to “The 1%” that is so often talked about?
- How do countries compare in terms of number of billionaires and net worth?
- How do industries compare in terms of number of billionaires and net worth?
- How do men and women compare across countries and industries?
- What does the age distribution look like?
Before I share the results, let me walk you through how I got there and how you can explore some of your questions as well.
Firstly, I did some work on a Jupyter notebook to explore the data and then make some modifications. The “Source” column from Forbes was not too useful to work with so I made some modifications to it. I generated an Industry column from it based on my subjective understanding of the sources. As you continue to read, please keep in mind that if these assumptions are incorrect it could significantly affect the results and conclusions. After generating this column, I then exported the csv.
Secondly, I played around with the data using Tableau Public and created a few dashboards and a story that you’ll see linked at the end of this post. You can skip to that if you’re more interested in cool visualizations. Otherwise, let’s move on to insights!
Insights
Comparison to “The 1%”
There are actually only 1,810 recorded billionaires according to the dataset. By comparison to terms such as “The 1%”, “US’s 1%”, “US’s 0.1%” this number is significantly smaller.
Billionaires are 0.000024% of the world’s population. The significance of how tiny that value is compared to the more commonly used term of “The 1%” can be seen on the graphs linked below.
Note: some of the references in the data are actually families.
Billionaires Across Countries
The countries with the most billionaires are:
- United States
- China
- Germany
- India
- Russia
The countries with the highest net worth of their billionaires are:
- United States
- China
- Germany
- Russia
- India
Billionaires Across Industries
The industries with the most billionaires are:
- Business & Finance
- Oil, Chemicals, Energy & Manufacturing
- Retail & Consumer Goods
- Real Estate & Construction
- Tech
The industries with the highest net worth for billionaires are:
- Business & Finance
- Retail & Consumer Goods
- Tech
- Oil, Chemicals, Energy & Manufacturing
- Real Estate & Construction
Across countries we get an interesting effect as well.
The United States has the highest net worth for the top 10 industries except for Oil, Chemicals, Energy & Manufacturing (#4) which Russia dominates.
In terms of having the most billionaires, the United States has the most across the top 10 industries except for Pharma (#6) which is dominated by China and Diversified (#10) which is dominated by Turkey.
Billionaires and Gender
The countries with the most female billionaires are:
- United States
- Germany
- China
- Hong Kong
- Switzerland
And the most male billionaires:
- United States
- China
- Germany
- India
- Russia
For net worth of female billionaires:
- United States
- Germany
- France
- Italy
- China
For net worth of male billionaires:
- United States
- China
- Germany
- Russia
- India
The industries with the most female billionaires are:
- Retail & Consumer Goods
- Food & Beverage
- Real Estate & Construction
- Oil, Chemicals, Energy & Manufacturing
- Pharma
Industries with the most male billionaires:
- Business & Finance
- Oil, Chemicals, Energy & Manufacturing
- Retail & Consumer Goods
- Real Estate & Construction
- Tech
Industries with the highest net worth of female billionaires combined:
- Retail & Consumer Goods
- Food & Beverage
- Oil, Chemicals, Energy & Manufacturing
- Real Estate & Construction
- Pharma
Industries with the highest net worth of male billionaires combined:
- Business & Finance
- Retail & Consumer Goods
- Tech
- Oil, Chemicals, Energy & Manufacturing
- Real Estate & Construction
Billionaires and Age
In terms of age, the distribution is close to normal, with the average billionaire age being 64.12 and the median age being 64.0. Check out the histogram in the Tableau story and the Jupyter notebook linked below.
Looking at the sub group of billionaires under the age of 40, the Tech industry dominates in both number of billionaires and total net worth. For most billionaires, Pharma is next whereas for total net worth Retail & Consumer Goods is next.
Other Insights
There are only 15 female Tech billionaires compared to 179 male Tech billionaires for a total of 194 Tech billionaires. Only ~7.7% of Tech billionaires are women.
Conclusion
I hope this analysis gave you some insight into what countries billionaires are from, what industries they work in, age groups they fall under and how gender compares across these factors.
Check out the Tableau story linked below and please share any insights you have found! I may update the post and/or Tableau story with your insights.
Please let me know if you had any questions that you couldn’t directly find answers to and would like me too look into as well as any feedback you have. Thanks for taking the time to read this!
