How the index is built

The index measures private wealth — the estimated market value of each person's assets minus disclosed debt — expressed in whole U.S. dollars. It is a ranking of individuals, not of families or companies. Values are stored in dollars and only shortened to $421.5B for display.

A net worth is an estimate, not an audited balance sheet. It answers “what would this person's disclosed assets be worth at today's prices?” — not “how much cash do they hold?”. We publish a figure because the underlying stakes and valuations are public; we do not claim precision beyond that.

Two kinds of entry share one ranking, and they are not equivalent. Each profile states its own origin:

The live entries come from the public Forbes Real-Time Billionaires feed, which reports a universe of 3,397 billionaires. This site publishes the 401 names in our captured window.

Currently the site reads from the bundled JSON snapshot. Both serve the same records; the storage layer is an implementation detail and does not change any value.

Portraits are served from Forbes' public image CDN, or from the site's own storage bucket. When no portrait is published, the site renders a monogram generated from the person's initials rather than substituting a different image.

In its simplest form, every figure is built the same way:

For live entries, public stakes are marked to market and private companies are valued from reported funding rounds, comparable transactions and the feed's own estimate. The feed supplies the net worth; this site does not re-price the companies itself.

The holdings breakdown on each profile is rebuilt from the disclosed public stakes plus a residual “private and other holdings” line, so the visible stakes always sum to the reported net worth. A residual is a balancing line, not a separately valued asset.

Changes are derived, never typed in by hand, for live entries. Daily and monthly movements are the difference between the current value and the prior close or prior month's value; percentages use the starting value as the denominator.

The list is sorted by net worth, highest first. A person's published position is their place in that ordering, re-derived whenever the feed changes.

Equal fortunes share a rank. The number shown is the ordinal position in the sorted list, so two people tied at No. 1 are followed by No. 3 — places are not compressed into a dense 1, 1, 2 sequence.

The index is not filtered or curated by newsworthiness. Filters on the landing page (country, industry, age, gender, search) change what you see, never the underlying rank.

“Today” compares the latest value with the previous trading close; “past month” compares it with the value one month earlier. Percentages are calculated against the earlier value, so a +$1B move on a $100B fortune reads as +1.00%.

Both figures move with the feed during the trading day. On days when markets are closed, or when a private valuation is unchanged, a profile can legitimately show no movement.

The feed publishes exactly three windows, and the chart offers exactly those — nothing is back-filled or inferred:

• 1D — intraday, sampled about every five minutes.
• 1W — hourly samples for the last week.
• 1M — daily samples for the last month.

For feed entries every point in those series is a real observation. There is no interpolation between days, no synthetic weekend data and no longer history than one month.

The ranking is only as fresh as the last snapshot. This site rebuilds cached reads every 60 seconds, but it does not pull the feed on its own — a refresh job rewrites the snapshot and re-seeds storage, typically every 15–30 minutes. The masthead's “last updated” line and the timestamp on each profile show when that snapshot was captured.

Values therefore lag the market by at least one refresh cycle, and longer if the job is paused. Private valuations only change when the feed revises them.

• Estimates, not audited accounts. Undisclosed debt, trusts, private art and other assets may be absent or valued coarsely.
• Public stakes move with the market; private marks can be stale by months or years between funding rounds.
• Non-U.S. assets are converted to dollars by the source; exchange-rate movements can change a net worth without any asset changing hands.
• Values update on a schedule, so intraday figures can lag live trading prices.
• Rankings are snapshots of one moment. Two people can swap places between refreshes without either fortune changing materially.
• The feed is a public, unauthenticated endpoint that can change or be withdrawn. If a refresh fails, the last valid snapshot is served rather than a partial one.

If a figure looks wrong, check it against the source the profile cites. Corrections belong upstream in the Forbes feed; this site picks them up on the next refresh.

Data corrections that change a published figure are applied to the snapshot and its history together, so a profile's chart and its headline number stay consistent.

Net worth figures are estimates published by Forbes. They are provided for information only and are not investment advice.