The number of people who may think a banana costs $10 has exploded in the last few decades. The US has 902 billionaires this year, up from 66 in 1990, when the economy was less than half of its current size and $410 million was equivalent to $1 billion in today’s dollars.

US billionaires are collectively worth about $7.6 trillion, according to Forbes data analyzed by Americans for Tax Fairness. That accounts for ~4.5% of all wealth held by Americans, while making up just .0003% of the population.

Who (and where) are they?

The US leads the pack, home to almost one-third of the world’s 3,028 people with a $1+ billion net worth, followed by China (450), India (205), Germany (171), and Russia (140), per Forbes.

The folks for whom a Ferrari impulse buy is roughly the financial equivalent of your last-minute decision to Uber to the airport tend to cluster in cities. Forbes found that the leading billionaire hubs are New York City (home to 123 billionaires), Moscow, Hong Kong, London, and Beijing.

It’s a boys club, with women accounting for just 13% of the world’s billionaires, according to the Altrata Billionaire Census—though that number is growing.

Tracing the benjamins

Some routes are more likely than others to land you in the exclusive club that includes Bill Gates, Ronaldo, Selena Gomez, French fashion executives, and Russian oil tycoons:

• The most common way to achieve billionairehood is to be born into a wealthy family or by marrying into wealth, with a third of billionaires having inherited much of their net worth.
• The likeliest professional path to billionaire status is to follow in Warren Buffett’s footsteps, as 15% of billionaires derive their net worth from the finance and investment industry.
• Tech minted 13% of billionaires, followed by manufacturing (11%), fashion and retail (10%), healthcare (7%), food and beverage (7%), real estate (7%), diversified industries (7%), media and entertainment (4%), and energy (4%).

Most can’t fully cash out: Billionaires typically aren’t able to build a castle out of hundred-dollar-bill stacks, since 66% of their net worth is tied up in stocks (often in a company they started), which they can’t sell easily, according to Altrata.—SK

You’re familiar with their games, but probably not their names. For every prominent billionaire dominating your news feed, there are hundreds more running the world whom you wouldn’t recognize if they bumped into you on the street. According to Bloomberg, that includes:

The richest non-royal family in the world: Siblings and Walmart heirs Jim, Rob, and Alice Walton are worth a combined $387 billion thanks to the retail giant that Papa founded in 1962. Alice—the wealthiest woman alive—has largely stayed out of the family business and focused on the arts, opening a museum in Arkansas to display her private art collection.

Spain’s wealthiest person: The puffer jacket you just grabbed from Zara because it’s suddenly getting cold in the afternoon contributed to Amancio Ortega’s $118 billion treasure chest. Ortega is the founder and majority-owner of Inditex, the world’s largest clothing retailer, which owns seven brands, including Zara.

The “father of digital trading”: After immigrating to the US from Hungary at 21, Thomas Peterffy made his way to Wall Street and pioneered some of the first electronic trading tech. He built his own company, Interactive Brokers, which became one of the most popular brokerages for advanced US traders and amassed him an ~$82 billion fortune.

TikTok’s original creator: One of the wealthiest people in China is 42-year-old Zhang Yiming, the co-founder of TikTok parent company ByteDance. He told the South China Morning Post that when he was CEO (until 2021), he required “all management team members to make their own TikTok videos” and do pushups if they didn’t get a certain number of likes. He’s worth ~$60 billion.

Real-life Wonkas: Brother and sister John and Jacqueline Mars are the third generation to help lead their family’s eponymous food conglomerate. All those M&Ms, sticks of Orbit, and bags of Pedigree kibble add up to ~$100 billion in combined net worth for the Mars siblings.

Mark Mateschitz: With $38 billion, the 56th-wealthiest person on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index is Mark Mateschitz, the son of the late Red Bull co-founder Dietrich and beneficiary of his 49% stake in the company. Inheritance gives you wings.—ML

One of the biggest differences between you and a billionaire is that your ideal vacation might involve lounging on the sand, while their ideal Tuesday entails buying the whole beach.

Billionaires be shopping for waterfront property:

• A stretch of land in Palm Beach, Florida, nicknamed Billionaires’ Beach, is home to the mansions of 58 billionaires, according to Fortune. About 70 miles down the coast, Jeff Bezos and 88 other very rich residents live on the tightly surveilled private island of Indian Creek Village, which has been dubbed Billionaire Bunker.
• In Hawaii, Oprah Winfrey has a pad, Michael Dell recently bought the land that his Four Seasons Resort sits on, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff quietly amassed ~600 acres for unclear purposes, and Mark Zuckerberg is building a compound.

Why share when you can have the whole island to yourself? Oracle CEO Larry Ellison paid $300 million for the 90,000-acre Hawaiian island of Lanai in 2012, Google co-founder Larry Page bought a large Puerto Rican island in 2018 (his fifth tropical isle on record), and Virgin Group’s Richard Branson owns—you guessed it—one of the Virgin Islands (Necker).

Hosts and their guests spare no expense traveling between houses, either. Yacht and private jet sales grew 13% last year, according to Bain.

Billionaire decor may include: extensive art collections, trophies won by the pro sports teams they own, a first-edition copy of the US Constitution, and a 14-foot shark preserved in formaldehyde.—ML

Like that friend who buys rounds whenever you go out, some billionaires don’t mind giving away their wealth. The 400 richest Americans collectively donated $319 billion to charitable causes such as health, education, and political advocacy in their lifetimes as of last year, according to Forbes.

While that may sound like a lot, Forbes found that it amounted to just 4.6% of their collective net worth at the time, down from 5% of billionaires’ wealth donated the previous year—an indication that their philanthropy hasn’t kept up with asset growth.

Many of the top donors are members of the Giving Pledge, a campaign started by Bill and Melinda Gates with Warren Buffett in 2010 to encourage the ultrawealthy to donate at least half of their net worth in their lifetimes.

While most signatories aren’t on track to hit that goal, there are exceptions:

• Buffett is the most generous billionaire in absolute terms, having donated almost $65 billion to various causes through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and his own organizations.
• George Soros has given away $32 billion, or at least 75% of his fortune, making him the most generous living billionaire in relative terms.
• But they’re all misers compared to Duty Free Shoppers co-founder Chuck Feeney, who donated virtually his entire net worth of $8 billion to charity before he died in 2023.

There are tax benefits

Philanthropic giving reduces taxable income, so, while it doesn’t actually save billionaires money, it lets them give some of it to charity (of their choosing) instead of the government.

But not all “giving” is the same: Some ultra-wealthy philanthropists have been criticized for parking their cash in private tax-advantaged foundations, which are only required to disburse 5% of their holdings to charity annually.

Meanwhile, donor-advised funds (DAFs) allow the wealthy to invest their assets with no yearly disbursement requirement and donate them with less scrutiny. Over a third of DAFs didn’t give any money to charity in 2020, according to a study by the Council of Michigan Foundations.

Billionaires are just a small slice of charity: Despite their outsize contribution, gifts from the top 400 US billionaires accounted for just over 5% of America’s charitable giving last year, according to Morning Brew’s analysis of data from Forbes and Giving USA.—SK

It’s pretty easy to tell which of your friends has money: stories about skiing as a child, Venmo requesting you $6.53 for half of their fries, and no attempt to find their lost Yeti water bottle. It’s much harder, however, to figure out the precise fortunes of the mega wealthy.

That doesn’t stop journalists and analysts from digging through documents and pestering ex-wives to give them the details, though.

The big two estimators: While several media companies offer regional and national wealth rankings, there are two main billionaire lists: the Forbes Real-Time World Billionaires List and the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

• Forbes compiled its first list of international billionaires in 1987. It managed to find 140 of them, with just 44 in the US.
• Bloomberg first rolled out its own list—which updates daily after the market closes—in 2012.

Rob LaFranco, former global editor of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, said that the Bloomberg team uncovered 400 hidden billionaires in just the first five years of compiling the list.

Nothing is 100%. The journalists who compile these lists are the first to tell you that the process of calculating wealth is not an exact science. It’s easiest to verify an individual’s fortune if most of it is held in shares of a publicly traded company. Beyond that, researchers comb through divorce filings and other court documents, as well as speak to business associates and industry experts, to try to get an accurate number for private companies and closely held assets.

These compilers also sometimes just ask wealthy people how much money they have, but that’s not always reliable. Some billionaires overvalue their net worth for hype, while others undervalue it for privacy.—MM