A few weeks ago Forbes published in their website a list of the 100 top billionaires on the planet. They published graphs of these people’s net worth over time, a lot of background information and could even link every one of them to other important billionaires, in a way that it is clear to the readership that fortune also depends on networking. Still, the most obvious visualization just wasn’t there: a world map to show where are these posh individuals, so global imbalances and surprising dots can tell other interesting stories.
So here it is. With this map you can make comparisons much more easily. California has as many billionaires as Russia. More than Germany. You can see Britain has less people in the billion club than France, Brazil, Italy, Mexico, Colombia, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia… Africa has one billionaire — the same number of Australia, Japan and Chile.
It took me four hours to get the data in an Excel spreadsheet and publish them in Batchgeo. World maps are always useful when you have international lists like the one Forbes publishes every year. And having even better ones is surely something such a gigantic publication can do. It is worthy service.
View Billionaires of the world 2013 in a full screen map
I am a journalist. But that is not my fault, I assure you. I am also from Sao Paulo, Brazil. That is probably my fault.