The Sunday Read: ‘How Many Billionaires Are There, Anyway?’

The Daily

The New York Times

News, Daily News

4.5 • 97.8K Ratings

🗓️ 24 April 2022

⏱️ 35 minutes

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Summary

America is home to 735 billionaires with a collective worth greater than $4.7 trillion, according to Forbes. There were just 424 billionaires in 2012, Forbes found, and only 243 a decade before that. The billionaires keep multiplying. In this article, Willy Staley uses information from the first billionaire count — commissioned in 1981 by the entrepreneur Malcolm Forbes for his own magazine — to consider the reasons behind the rapid increase in American billionaires, but also the changing attitudes on publicizing the details of one’s wealth. Many factors enabled American entrepreneurs to amass such enormous fortunes, including the Reagan administration’s policies, the arrival of computer technology, the creation of a more globalized economy and the rise of the developing world. Yet despite the conspicuous consumption this level of wealth often encourages, Staley finds that few billionaires want to be discovered. So how do you keep tabs on America’s billionaires?

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0:00.0	I don't know if you know about Scrub Daddy.
0:07.0	It's a fantastic product.
0:09.0	It's a little yellow piece of synthetic steel bowl and with a big smiley face on it.
0:15.5	And it's for scrubbing pots and pans and whatever else.
0:19.1	And I didn't know this until I started sitting down to write this story, but it was actually
0:24.3	introduced to the world via Shark Tank, the show on ABC.
0:28.1	Hi, sharks.
0:29.1	I'm Aaron Kraus from Philadelphia.
0:31.2	And I'm known as the daddy of the Scrub Daddy, the cutest but most high tech scrubbing tool
0:35.7	in the world.
0:36.7	It's a popular show where people with small businesses come before a panel of the sharks
0:41.7	and they have to make a pitch to them, these ultra wealthy investors.
0:45.3	It's this fantasy ritual in which you get to witness the capitalist class investing in
0:52.3	small American businesses and making them grow and bringing their expertise as wealthy
0:58.6	capitalists to bear on these small, you know, struggling businesses that need capital
1:03.3	and expertise.
1:04.3	I'm changing my offer actually.
1:07.3	$100,000, but for 25%, the experience, the connections, everything that I have.
1:15.9	But this is not what most people like Mark Cuban are doing.
1:19.3	You know, for the most part, our billionaires come out of technology, out of finance.
1:24.2	They are not in the business of investing in small businesses.
1:27.6	That's not how people are getting ultra wealthy in this country anymore.
	...

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