Visualizing the net worth of the world's richest people

"Bloomberg Billionaires" is an intriguing example of information design. The net wealth of the world's 100 most rich human beings, in an interactive display.

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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http://marjaerwin.livejournal.com/ Marja Erwin

Net worth is immeasurable. Net wealth often depends on what someone can steal, rarely on what someone can contribute. Using net worth to mean net wealth is, well, a bit misleading. It’s like using the Great to mean the Bloody Conqueror.
Greg Sherrid

Why is Bloomberg himself not on this list? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Bloomberg says he is the tenth richest american…
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Ssssssssssh.
  - Conan Librarian
    
    oh, my tea is done!
- Benjamin Palmer
  
  Oh good I wasn’t the only one who noticed and wondered that. He should be ~20th on the overall list if the wikipedia number is correct.
Jake0748

Gaaahhh!! Cheesy cartoon faces of world oligarchs. Not what I need right now. :P
Lexicat

Very white.
http://twitter.com/SovereignEntity SovereignEntity

There are no “Self-made” Billionaire Women according to the filter.
Try harder Oprah!
- Benjamin Palmer
  
  It seems this only has the top 100 billionaires in the world. #100 has 10.7billion, so Oprah’s ~3billion doesn’t crack the list. So no self-made female billionaires in the top 100 of the world.
rocketpjs

Consider it a to-do list if they do manage to lead us into some from of climate or other apocalypse.
- EvilTerran
  
  Or a menu!
- Boundegar
  
  Why wait until it’s too late?
oasisob1

Why couldn’t they manage to find photos of everyone? Google image search turns up dozens of photos, many useable. And these aren’t even photos anyway, just little cartoons. Fire the artist for falling behind?
GyroMagician

A list of people who could really make a difference, but choose personal wealth instead. Depressing. What a broken world we live in.
- wysinwyg
  
  Do you think Gates’ and Buffet’s charitable and borderline populist pronouncements are pure PR? I’m not trying to say it’s obvious one way or the other, I’m honestly curious what other people think. In some ways I’d rather Gates spent his money counteracting the Kochs’ cultural influence but it’s hard to argue with AIDS relief for Africa.
  - Navin_Johnson
    
    And trying to privatize public schools, promote vouchers, break public unions, and demonize teachers in conjunction with their friend up there Alice Walton, but yeah the other genuinely charitable stuff The Gate’s do is pretty good at obscuring some of their more weaselly activities.
    
    Can’t really say much about Buffet. He seems pretty benign, and maybe genuinely wants to do some kind of good, which for an American oligarch is like being a saint.
    
    Also, it’s funny that with the exception (maybe) of Buffet that every American oligarch up there is VERY active in trying to corrupt, and undermine democracy in order to extract even more wealth from Americans.
    
    *edit*. Despite being BFF’s with Larry Summers, and loads of political giving, I guess Ellison is pretty harmless, at least in comparison to the others in this rogue’s gallery.
  - ChickieD
    
    As someone who has worked in the software biz, there’s a certain kind of “any problem can be solved” mentality that you get when you work in this field. Its one of the reasons I won’t go into programming – I work with programmers, I can program, but I won’t actually program for a living – because coding all day makes you see everything as a problem to be solved. I, personally, end up being hyper rational in my day to day life when I program a lot. So, I avoid it because I don’t like being like that all the time and I can’t turn it off when I leave work. I am already like that a lot. People don’t really cozy up to someone so cooly rational; you seem like you are ignoring their feelings and over-thinking everything.
    
    I think that Gates is looking at these big, seemingly insolvable issues and saying, if we were to take a programmer’s approach and we were to have enough money to try a bunch of ideas out, we could solve these problems.
    - wysinwyg
      
      Heh, working in software gives me the opposite — having seen what can go wrong with even the most trivial interventions into a piece of production software I have more of a “nothing ever works except by accident” mentality.
      
      My impression of Gates is a little different from yours. It seems to me that with the amount of money he has he could approach some smaller problems and solve them outright instead of straining at really big ones.
      
      Though on second thought that approach is consistent with Microsoft philosophy — never take responsibility for a problem you could actually solve.
http://noctilucent-studios.blogspot.com/ Noctilucent Studios

Real question. What would happen if one of them went to the bank and asked to make a withdrawal of, let’s say, $5 million. How long would it take for the cash to be delivered and how would they do it?
- wysinwyg
  
  Real answer: they would never go to the bank. They would call their accountant, the accountant would trade in the least promising $5 million in investment assets owned by that person, and someone else would drive it directly to their door — or wherever else they might want it to go.
  
  Edit: Actually, they would probably tell their personal assistants to call their accountants.
http://twitter.com/valiumnation TRex

Where is Putin? And for sure the House of Saud is not adequately represented here.
- Nylund
  
  I was wondering about Putin as well. I think the answer is “shhhh, he doesn’t officially own/control those things.”
TheMudshark

I now know there is a billionaire named Ka-Shing.
welcomeabored

Most of those billionaries are white. Some are brown and some are olive-skinned. Yet all are depicted as a whiter shade of pale. As usual, the ‘news’ does not like to muck up their stories with inconvenient facts.
Navin_Johnson

According to the report, the combined income of the world’s 100 richest persons in 2012 — roughly $240 billion — would be enough to end global poverty four times over. With the wealthiest 1% having seen a 60 percent earnings increase in the last 20 years despite major international financial crises, Oxfam calls for a “Global New Deal” that would curb this trend through measures such as comprehensive employment laws and closing tax havens.

100 Richest People Could End Poverty, Says Oxfam Report
- GyroMagician
  
  This is what I was thinking about. The incredible things that are possible with that amount of cash. Immediately. Or would be possible, if the richest 100 weren’t so concerned about their position on a stupid, meaningless list.
  - Cowicide
    
    Megalomania seems to have no cure. Once these scumbags get it, they never really lose it.
- eviladrian
  
  Yeah, apparently asking someone to give away something they already have but don’t need is unfair. Telling someone they can’t have something they do need but haven’t been able to get before is totally ok though!
http://www.aarongilliland.com/ Aaron Gilliland

What does this have to do with information design? What information are we meant to glean from cartoon heads that we will not get from names?
http://www.facebook.com/people/Rick-Adams/100000053021803 Rick Adams

When I was a kid my mother used to tell me that if you have a million dollars, and you spend a thousand dollars-a-day, you’d run out of money in three years. If you have a billion however, and you spend a thousand-a-day, it will take you almost three thousand years.

Obviously it’s a little off but I always think of that whenever I’m reading about billionaires.

Many of these people could spend one-thousand-dollars-a-day for a longer period of time than humans have existed.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  A thousand dollars a day? That’s a not-quite-top-tier hooker and no blow, dude.
  - http://www.facebook.com/people/Rick-Adams/100000053021803 Rick Adams
    
    Yeah, I guess when you think about it, even poor old Zuckerberg could only keep a $10,000-a-day habit going for a paltry eighteen-thousand years. (If he stopped making money entirely that is.)