Wealth Mavens
In 1981, the great Malcolm Forbes came up with the audacious idea to compile and rank the richest Americans, choosing 400 in a nod to Caroline Astor’s fabled ballroom, and perhaps also to alliteration. Forbes continues to put the resources, time and talent into this iconic journalistic enterprise, a public service that provides some transparency on those who influence so many spheres of life in the U.S.
For this year’s list, 40 reporters made calls, met with billionaires, scrutinized documents, read footnotes and talked with analysts and experts to come up with the numbers. And for the past nine years, this massive project, as well as the even more massive challenge of tracking every billionaire in the world, has been jointly overseen by assistant managing editors Kerry A. Dolan and Luisa Kroll.
“We pound the pavement and put in the hours to come up with the best, most defensible list out there,” Kroll says. “And each year we begin anew trying to improve our numbers from the previous year.” Adds Dolan, “These titans of industry are used to calling the shots—some don’t like it when Forbes doesn’t just fall in line.”
Between them, this dynamic duo, with perches on both coasts, has almost a half-century of experience at Forbes dissecting the fortunes of the richest and most powerful. Kroll remembers spending hours as a young reporter on her first wealth assignment figuring out how to value a South African billionaire’s game park, down to how much a zebra was worth versus a lion. A few years ago, Dolan wrote an award-winning exposé on Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed that famously correlated how his holding company’s thinly traded stock magically spiked each year right before Forbes finalized its rankings.
Valuation is both science and art—the ultimate value of any private asset, after all, is what someone is willing to pay. But Dolan and Kroll have a few hard-and-fast rules: Take no one solely at their word. Get documentation. And when in doubt, err on the low side. Taken collectively, The Forbes 400 offers incredible insights into how to succeed in America. And what about those list members who often inquire about getting off the list? “My answer: Give away enough money that your net worth falls below the cutoff,” says Dolan. “Very few do so.”