Count each company once
Alphabet is one claim, not separate claims for Page, Brin, and every later executive.
The public wealth creation index · v0.1
Who created the most wealth for everyone else?
A first-pass ranking of business builders by the value of their companies—minus the equity they still hold themselves.
Market snapshotJuly 14, 2026 · 10:20 a.m. PTValues move with the market
The list
Value created. Ownership shared.
Held by othersBuilder retained
- 01
Jensen Huang
NVIDIA
$4.96Tfor othersHigh - 02
Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak & Tim Cook
Apple
$4.62Tfor othersLow - 03
Larry Page & Sergey Brin
Alphabet
$3.80Tfor othersMedium - 04
Bill Gates & Satya Nadella
Microsoft
$2.85Tfor othersLow - 05
Jeff Bezos
Amazon
$2.46Tfor othersHigh - 06
Morris Chang
TSMC
$2.19Tfor othersMedium - 07
Elon Musk
Tesla + SpaceX
$2.10Tfor othersHigh - 08
Henry Samueli & Hock Tan
Broadcom
$1.81Tfor othersMedium - 09
Mark Zuckerberg
Meta
$1.47Tfor othersHigh - 10
Warren Buffett
Berkshire Hathaway
$931Bfor othersHigh
Bars show total credited company equity, scaled to the largest claim. The dark segment is the equity retained by the credited builders.
How it works
A deliberately narrow measure.
The index asks one specific question: how much of the current equity value associated with a builder's work is owned by somebody else?
The formula
Wealth for others=Total company equity−Builder equity retained
Group real contributors
Founder and operator eras can be credited together when the current value clearly spans both.
Subtract company equity
We subtract only the builders' holdings in the credited companies—not their unrelated assets or total net worth.
Read with care
Market value is not moral value.
This is a ranking of externally held equity attached to a builder's work. It is not proof that one person created that value alone, and it is not a ranking of social benefit.
Employees, cofounders, later executives, investors, suppliers, public infrastructure, and luck all matter. Market value can also reflect scarcity, market power, expectations, and speculation.
Sources & uncertainty
Open methods, visible caveats.
Market values use live prices at the snapshot time and the latest available share counts. High-confidence rows rely on recent ownership filings; medium and low rows still need a full filing-by-filing cap-table audit.
Download the v0.1 dataset