The opposite stories do get written. e.g. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-19/mark-zuckerberg-s-net-worth-is-down-71-billion-putting-focus-on-met

The opposite stories do get written. e.g. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-19/mark-zuckerberg-s-net-worth-is-down-71-billion-putting-focus-on-meta-s-woes https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-19/mark-zuck... I do agree that it's a very lazy form of news generation. Most of the (publicly) richest people tend to hold most of their wealth in stocks, which have always had volatile prices. So "the rich got richer/poorer" is largely synonymous with stock prices went up/down. Exchange rates tend to be a bit less volatile, but they do fluctuate quite a bit, so that accounts for quite a bit of the changing fortunes of California vs Germany. Still, it's quite remarkable (if true) that California has similar nominal production/income as Germany which has twice the population, implying that the people are on average twice as productive.