Just in case you needed another depressing statistic about our local surroundings, San Francisco now has a greater density of billionaires than any other city in the world.
This latest data point comes from WealthX, which has been conducting an annual "billionaire census" for the past five years. They say that there are now 2,604 billionaires worldwide, with 750 of them residing in North America. There are still more billionaires scattered across Europe (792), but the number of Asian billionaires dropped to 677 last year, and the US still has the largest share of the richie-richest, with 705 of them calling America home.
This is the 2019 billionaire census, and it's all based on 2018 data — the sources of which are a bit mysterious because WealthX claims to have "proprietary data assets and specialized research capabilities."
As of 2017, San Francisco leapfrogged over Moscow and London as a city with a large billionaire set. As of 2018, our city was allegedly home to 75 billionaires (1 more than the previous year, though 2017 saw a 14-billionaire leap over 2016), and that put us in third place overall behind New York (105), and Hong Kong (87). But given how small a city SF is, this still ranks us #1 for billionaires per capita, as Vox points out. There's now a billionaire for every 11,600 of us in the city.
This figure is essentially unchanged from the previous billionaire census data in 2017, so this title for San Francisco is not new.
Via Forbes and elsewhere we know who a bunch of those 75 billionaires are here in town: Mark Zuckerberg (net worth estimated $62.3 billion), Oracle founder Larry Ellison ($62.5 billion), Google co-founders Larry Page ($50.8 billion) and Sergey Brin ($49.8 billion), Laurene Jobs ($18.6 billion), WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum ($10.5 billion), WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton ($6 billion), former Google chairman Eric Schmidt ($13.4 billion), Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey ($4.9 billion), Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg ($1.7 billion), cryptocurrency guy Chris Larsen ($4.7 billion), and Salesforce founder Marc Benioff ($5.6 billion). SF Luxe has a whole running list, and yes many of these people technically live in Woodside or Palo Alto.
Previously: Atherton Is Still, Pretty Definitively, America's Most Expensive Zip Code