Wealth Mavens
In 1981, the great Malcolm Forbes came up with the audacious idea to compile and rank the richest Americans, choosing 400 in a nod to Caroline Astor’s fabled ballroom, and perhaps also to alliteration. Forbes continues to put the resources, time and talent into this iconic journalistic enterprise, a public service that provides some transparency on those who influence so many spheres of life in the U.S. For this year’s list, 40 reporters made calls, met with billionaires, scrutinized documents, read footnotes and talked with analysts and experts to come up with the numbers. And for the past nine years, this massive project, as well as the even more massive challenge of tracking every billionaire in the world, has been jointly overseen by assistant managing editors Kerry A. Dolan and Luisa…