Billionaire Hunters
Shortly before 10 p.m., my hotel-room telephone rang, and a stranger’s voice relayed a random Houston address. “Meet me in the parking lot.” The tough-looking bald guy in the polyester shirt stuffed me in his car and whisked me to a place called Luke’s Hamburgers, where he bought me coffee, complained about the price—and began haranguing me. I was a 24-year-old reporter for Forbes, and Jerry J. Moore, the biggest strip-mall developer in America, was determined that we declare him a billionaire.
He took me to his house—an 18th-century French château that he had ferried to Houston brick by brick—and then into his vast underground garage, which housed 26 of his 700 or so antique cars. Moore instructed his accountant to churn out fanciful estimates for his 12,172,606 feet of Houston mall space. When I still wouldn’t bite, Moore got more direct, offering me a P.R. job, at quadruple my salary, “with lots of golf.”
Poor Jerry never made our billionaires list. It’s a designation we take seriously, and
Forbes’ Wealth Team, led by Kerry A. Dolan and
Luisa Kroll, guard the gates better than anyone in the world. Dolan and
Kroll oversee 13 full-time reporters, 54 part-timers and the 14 Forbes licensees across the world who feed us data. They take the same hands-on approach that I did as a rookie reporter, evaluating all 2,208 billionaires one by one and combing through our database of suspects that includes 5,000 more. “We dig deep,” says Kroll. “And each year we build on the previous year and go deeper.” It’s one of the great reporting engines in journalism, the springboard for generations of Forbes stars.
Are all our estimates correct? Of course not, though we strive to err on the conservative side. Have we found every billionaire in the world? Not even close: Many, many hundreds remain hidden. It’s a pursuit we relish, rooted in a simple philosophy: that free, fair markets crave transparency and people everywhere deserve to know who controls vast fortunes. Billionaire-hunting carries another dividend: Most on our list are self-made, providing the kind of lessons that inspire 10(and 11-, and 12-) digit fortunes. The global road map starts on page 75.