METHODOLOGY
This is the 38th edition of the flagship Forbes 400 list. Though we’ve been at it a long time, our reporters always dig deep to uncover new details. This year we started with a list of more than 700 candidates and got to work.
When possible, we met with Forbes 400 members and candidates in person or spoke with them by phone. We also interviewed their employees, handlers, rivals, peers and attorneys. Uncovering their fortunes required us to pore over thousands of SEC documents, court records, probate records and news articles. We took into account all types of assets: stakes in public and private companies, real estate, art, yachts, planes, ranches, vineyards, jewelry, car collections and more. We factored in debt and charitable giving. While some billionaires provided documentation for their private assets and companies, others were less forthcoming. To value private businesses, we couple revenue or profit estimates with prevailing price-to-sales or price-to-earnings ratios for similar public companies and apply a 10% discount, or more in cases where information is scarce.
We purposely excluded dispersed family fortunes, but we did include wealth belonging to a member’s immediate family if the wealth could be traced to a living founder of the fortune. In that case you’ll see “& family.” We also include married couples who built fortunes and businesses together if their combined net worth was enough for each person to make the $2.1 billion cutoff. In those instances, we list both names. Besides wealth, we also ranked each member based on their generosity and self-made prowess.
Philanthropy score: First, we estimated each billionaire’s total lifetime giving, delving into public filings, tax forms, press reports and more. Next we looked at what percentage of their wealth they had given away. We weighed these two factors equally and scored people accordingly. Some individuals were then bumped up or down based on several other factors, including whether they had signed the Giving Pledge, whether they had pledged significant donations, how personally involved they were in their charitable giving, and how quickly and effectively their private foundations distributed dollars.
We didn’t count pledges or announced gifts that have yet to be paid out. Some billionaires worked with Forbes; others refused to cooperate, citing privacy concerns and/or religious beliefs. List members about whom we could find no charitable giving information received an N.A. (not available). Some of our lifetime-giving estimates may be low due to a lack of transparency and anonymous gifts. For a complete methodology of each philanthropy score, please visit www.forbes.com/philanthropy-score.
Self-made score: The list members are also ranked on a scale of 1 to 10 to acknowledge that some individuals have traveled further in their life’s journey to make it into the ranks and to capture how self-made they really are. A 10 is reserved for people who not only grew up poor but overcame significant obstacles in their climb to the top, such as Oprah Winfrey, who was born to a single teen mother and survived sexual abuse as a child. People like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates who came from middle or upper-middle class families rank as 8s, while someone who completely inherited their fortune and has done nothing much with it ranks as a 1. For a full explanation of each self-made score, please go to www.forbes.com/ self-made-score. The Forbes 400 is a list of American citizens who own assets in the U.S. Our estimates are a snapshot of each member’s wealth as of September 6, 2019; we used closing stock prices and currency exchange rates from that day. Some of The Forbes 400 will get richer or poorer within weeks or even days of publication. We track those changes online in our Real Time rankings at www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires.