I was having this discussions the other day where my boss thinks these wiki list and Forbes list are some sort of ground truth. The Forbes list only include pe

I was having this discussions the other day where my boss thinks these wiki list and Forbes list are some sort of ground truth. The Forbes list only include people who Forbes want it to be listed and / or are public record. For example Michael Bloomberg is included but he is not even on the Bloomberg billionaires list, simply because Forbes want to expose him. And there were plenty of Billionaires in China who wasn't listed before lots of information becomes public. And I would imagine the same for Brazil, India or lots of other countries. These list can only include people by their stock market cap or worth. It doesn't include people who are in the property market and basically own or operate via private equity. And there are plenty of billionaires in the property market. Along with many other asset that we dont even know or aware. Another thing, if a person with $10B net worth of stock for 25 years, and the stock has been paying 3% dividends per year. You will still see him listed as $10B net worth. In reality he has $10B of dividends already. ( Although in US I think dividends are taxed ). And that is excluding any investment he made with those dividends and operate completely in the dark. Basically because the ultra wealth are so opaque I argue that inequality is actually much wider than we thought or what we could calculate.