How Forbes counts a billionaire, and why Bloomberg gets a different number for the same person

Forbes counted 3,428 billionaires in 2026, worth $20.1 trillion between them.¹ Bloomberg, tracking many of the same people, publishes a different number for almost every one of them. Neither is lying. They are doing the same arithmetic with different assumptions, and the assumptions are the interesting part.

The easy half

A fortune held in listed shares is not hard to value. Company filings say how many shares a person owns, the market says what a share is worth, and the two multiply. Forbes leans on exactly that: filings with the securities regulator, property records, court documents, and interviews with the person, their staff and their rivals.² Bloomberg does the same and marks the public part to the closing price every trading day.³

That is why the people at the very top of both lists are the same people. Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg and the rest hold most of their money in companies with a ticker, and a ticker is a fact.

The hard half, where the lists part company

Then there is everything without a price: a private company, a stake in a fund, a portfolio of buildings. There is no market quote for a business nobody can buy today, so both publishers estimate one. They compare it to public companies in the same trade and apply a multiple of earnings or revenue.²

Then each applies a haircut, because a stake you cannot sell on a Tuesday afternoon is worth less than one you can. Forbes discounts private holdings by about 10%. Bloomberg uses about 5%, and adjusts for the country the business sits in.² On a $40 billion private company, that five-point difference is $2 billion of disagreement before anybody argues about the multiple.

Bloomberg goes further in one place. A hedge fund that depends on one person's judgement gets a 25% discount, on the reasoning that the fortune walks out of the building when they do.² Forbes has no equivalent line.

What counts as yours

Both count the obvious assets: houses, art, cars, boats, planes, and stakes in companies public and private.² Both subtract known debts. After that the definitions diverge in ways that move billions.

Money given away is gone for Forbes: charitable foundations and donor-advised funds are not counted.² Bloomberg excludes what it cannot verify, including closely held assets it has no documents for, and it explicitly does not guess at personal debt.²³ So a person who has borrowed heavily against their shares, which is how a lot of billionaires actually get spending money, can look richer on one list than on the other for no other reason.

Families are the other fork. Forbes will list a founder and their immediate relatives together, which is why so many entries end with the words "& family", and it does not roll up fortunes that have scattered across cousins.² Bloomberg credits a family fortune to whoever controls it.² The same money, attached to a different name.

The part people leave out: a list is a photograph

Forbes's annual list is a snapshot. The 2026 edition priced every fortune on 1 March 2026 and published nine days later.¹ Bloomberg's index updates after the close of each New York trading day.³ Both also run rolling real-time figures, which is where most of the numbers quoted online come from.

So three different figures for one person can all be correct on the same afternoon: the annual list price, the daily index price, and the real-time price. They are answers to three different questions. Quoting one without its date is how a number becomes wrong without anybody editing it.

This site uses the annual list on purpose, and prints the date beside the figure, because a board that mixes the three would be a ranking of nothing.

Income is a different question again

Forbes also publishes earnings lists, and they are not the same measurement at all. Its creator ranking counts gross income over twelve months and explicitly leaves out the value of shares somebody holds in their own companies.⁴

So one person can appear on two Forbes lists with two figures that look contradictory and are not: one is what came in over a year, the other is what they own. MrBeast earned an estimated $300 million in the year to March 2026 by the first measure, while the second measure, applied to the company that money flows through, is a different number entirely.⁴ Mixing the two, which happens constantly online, produces a fortune nobody has.

What it cost, and who pays it

Estimating a stranger's wealth is adversarial work. Forbes interviews the subjects and cross-checks what they say against people who have reason to disagree with them.² Some billionaires lobby to be higher on the list; others hide, because a public number is a target for tax authorities, kidnappers and ex-spouses. The published figure is the end of an argument, not a reading from an instrument.

And the estimate is wealth, not money. Almost none of it is sitting anywhere. It is the current opinion of a market about assets that mostly are not for sale, which is why a fortune can fall by a fifth in a week without anybody selling anything.

One honest takeaway

When two lists disagree about somebody's wealth, neither is wrong. They are two estimates with different haircuts, different definitions of a family, and different clocks. The useful question is never "what is the real number". It is "what was counted, by whom, and on what day". A figure that cannot answer those three is just a big number in a headline.

If you would like your own number published, with the working shown and nothing checked, there is a list for that.