Data: Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report 2018 for worth numbers -2 through 8. Bloomberg Billionaires Index for 9-11. Federal Reserve, Bloomberg Reporting, Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Go to businessweek.com for a complete version of the table.–2 through 2
3 4 5 6 7 8 910
11Your number Bottom of
your bracketHow many adultsin the world are in Who
your bracket
1.5b
1.7b
1.3b
436m
40m
1.7m
49,000
2,700
150
21 ¢ to $100
$1,000
$10,000
$100,000
$1m
$10m
$100m
$1b
$10b
$100bSubsistence farmer
Median renter
Median family with no college education
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (in a year or two)Boris Johnson
Ginni Rometty
Rex Tillerson
Silvio Berlusconi
Elon Musk
Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.
Really, just those two.72
ILLUSTRATION BY GEORGE WYLESOLBloomberg Businessweek(USPS 080 900) October 7, 2019 (ISSN 0007-7135) H Issue no. 4632 Published weekly, except one week in February, April, June, July, September, and two weeks in December by Bloomberg L.P. Periodicalspostage paid at New York, N.Y., and at additional mailing offices. Executive, Editorial, Circulation, and Advertising Offices: Bloomberg Businessweek, 731 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10022. POSTMASTER: Send addresschanges to Bloomberg Businessweek, P.O. Box 37528, Boone, IA 50037-0528. Canada Post Publication Mail Agreement Number 41989020. Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to DHL Global Mail, 355 Admiral Blvd., Unit 4,Mississauga, ON L5T 2N1. Email: [email protected]. QST#1008327064. Registered for GST as Bloomberg L.P. GST #12829 9898 RT0001. Copyright 2019 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Title registered in the U.S. Patent Office. Single Copy Sales: Call 800 298-9867 or email: [email protected]. Educational Permissions: Copyright Clearance Center at [email protected]. Printed in the U.S.A. CPPAP NUMBER 0414N68830The world needs a more precise way to describe wealth.
“Millionaire” is too broad, covering everyone from ran-
dom pikers with a scant $1 million in net worth all the way
up to people just shy of billionaire status. “Billionaire”
has the same problem. There’s a huge difference between
your local anonymous rich person who just clears the
$1 billion mark and, say, Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates. The lan-
guage down the scale of wealth is even more impoverished.
“Thousandaire” isn’t even an accepted word.
We have a solution. It’s a scale of net worth based on
scientific notation, or powers of 10. As with the seismic
scale for earthquakes, it squeezes a lot of variation into a
compact set of numbers. The poorest of the poor, at –2, are
only 13 units away from the richest of the rich, the 11s who
have unimaginable wealth and power.
The numbers of people in each group are rough esti-
mates. Bloomberg calculates there are more than 2,800
adult billionaires (Nos. 9-11, combined) in the world, while
Credit Suisse estimates there are about 1,600. Credit Suisse
Group doesn’t break things down for numbers below 3,
simply estimating that about 1.5 billion adults worldwide
have net worth less than $1,000. It’s best to view the num-
bers as ballpark figures subject to change. The academics
who put together the World Inequality Report 2018 edition
write that “available data sources make it impossible at this
stage to properly estimate the level and evolution of the
global distribution of wealth.” The purchasing power fig-
ures are likewise intended to be illustrative, not hard data.
It’s a bit appalling that disparities in wealth have gotten
so big that we need logarithms to describe them. But that’s
the world we live in. <BW> �With Tom Maloney◼ LAST THING
● METHOD
One million is 10 to
the sixth power, so
a basic millionaire
is a 6 on our scale.
Someone with $1 is
a zero. Anyone with
liabilities exceeding
assets is undefined
on this scale,
because there’s
no such thing as
a logarithm of a
negative number.
But for simplicity,
we throw them into
–2, which is for
people with 1¢to 9¢
of networth.With Bloomberg OpinionBy Peter Coy
What’s Your
Net Worth Number?
Your Net Worth Number