Forbes

Where are the billionaires?

by Catherine Mulbrandon on July 21, 2010

Found via FastCoDesign

Each circle represents a billionaire but when appropriate the company that they associated with is labeled. And of course United States leads the way with number of billionaires. I liked seeing the data presented on a map; having a geographic distribution shows off the number of non-US billionaires. It would have been nice to see their net worth included in the infographic.

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Annual income of three billion dollars?

by Catherine Mulbrandon on January 21, 2008

Reading the Wealth Report I stumbled across The $3 Billion Payday

…hedge-funder John Paulson, who made somewhere between $3 billion and $4 billion last year. That’s right, between $3 billion and $4 billion. In one year.To put that in perspective, Mr. Paulson’s salary equals the incomes of 62,500 Americans earning the national median income of $48,000 a year. It also puts him instantly among the top 150 richest Americans, as measured by Forbes. Mr. Paulson made more in one year than The Donald has made in a lifetime.

I have tried to graph hedge fund manager income in the past but it is difficult to compare income of $50,000 with $3 billion on the same graph. Alternatively, I have compared CEO and hedge fund managers.

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2005 US Income Distribution part 3

by Catherine Mulbrandon on February 15, 2007

I went back to my 2005 US Income Distribution graph but this time I looked at the income of everyone above $250,000. Although one can find lists of high income earners it is very difficult to find a graph plotting their earnings as compared to everyone else. The scale of the graph is so extreme that most of the population ends up looking like a dot at the bottom of the graph.

Below I have created 3 graphs that try to show the relationship between the bottom 99.99% and the top 0.01%.

{Click on each graph to take a closer look}

2005 Income Distribution Less than 5 million magnifying glass

2005 Income Distribution Less than 1 billion magnifying glass

The original Census data can be found at Table HINC-06. Income Distribution to $250,000 or More for Households

The bottom 99.99% I estimated from data found at Emmanuel Saez’s web site

The CEO and Celebrity income estimates came from Forbes magazine

And finally the income for the top hedge fund managers was first published at Alpha magazine but I found it via the New York Times

See Also: Part 1 and Part 2
[tags]US Income Distribution, High Income, Census Income, Income Inequality [/tags]

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Is $1.5 billion the highest income in the World?

by Catherine Mulbrandon on May 28, 2006

It is official. I am astonished by the size of some of the incomes reported for hedge fund managers. When I first heard about the $150 to $200 million dollar incomes for CEOs and Celebrities (reported by Forbes magazine) that was impressive. But apparently that is barely enough to make the top 25 incomes for hedge fund managers in 2005:

This time there are two who break the billion-dollar barrier: James Simons of Renaissance Technologies Corp. and BP Capital Management’s T. Boone Pickens. In 2005 math whiz Simons, we calculate, earned a staggering $1.5 billion, edging out oil tycoon Pickens, who took home an equally astounding $1.4 billion from two hedge funds he quietly launched ten years ago. . .

. . .One thing that never seems to change for this exclusive club: The cost of admission keeps going up. A manager had to earn at least $130 million in 2005 to qualify for a place among the top 25 money earners, compared with $100 million in last year’s survey and just $30 million in 2001 and 2002. The 26 managers on the list made, on average, $363 million in 2005, a 45 percent jump from the $251 million the top 25 earned in 2004. The average, of course, got a boost from the billion-dollar boys, Simons and Pickens. But the median earnings also grew, jumping by a third, from $153 million in 2004 to $205 million last year.

[tags] hedge fund managers, income, James Simons, T. Boone Pickens [/tags]

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