To live in San Francisco, you’ve got to have deep pockets, or at least that’s what most of us believe. There’s some truth to that though – you just have to scheme through the California city’s statistics with particular interest on its cost of living.
According to a recent study carried out by Wealth X, San Francisco comes third after the Big Apple and Hong Kong where the population of billionaires residing in major cities across the world is concerned. Apparently, 75 of the world’s billionaires call San Fran home.
Top Spot
It may be ranked third on the basis of the exact number of billionaires living there, but adjusting for per capita concentration in regards to the city’s entire population, SF shoots to top spot. How so, you ask?
Well, on this metric, there’s one billionaire in every 11,600 San Fran residents, meaning that the city’s billionaire concentration is greater than in all other wealthy cities in the world, and that’s including the UAE’s Dubai.
In fact, SF outshines them by quite some margin, seeing that in NYC, Hong Kong, and Dubai, the figure is 1 billionaire in every 80,000 residents in the city.
In 2018, the city’s billionaire population registered an increase of just 1, this being the least growth that has been seen in the city for the past ten years. What could have gone wrong this time around?
Wealth X offered an explanation, saying that the year wasn’t all that great for tech stocks, creating a bump in the creation of wealth. All the same, the ongoing world digitalization was a perfect platform for some entrepreneurs to make money, and let’s face it, a single addition to the billionaire populace is still an addition, right?
Thinking about it, you’d assume that you probably wouldn’t recognize these San Fran billionaires, right? But you’d be wrong. Some of them are exactly the ones that come to mind whenever you think of the world’s richest individuals, with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg probably being the most famous of them all.
Bay Area
Most of these guys reside in Bay Area, including Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and Oracle CTO (chief technology officer) Larry Ellison.
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick also calls the city his home, as so does Dustin Moskovitz. If you have no idea who this guy is, he was Zuckerberg’s roommate during their Harvard days, and he did help the Facebook CEO launch his social media platform.
Marc Benioff is the Saleforce.com CEO, and do you want to guess what he has in common with all these other individuals on this article? Pretty sure you got it – another billionaire who resides in the great California city.
You’ve definitely heard of Doris Fisher, right? She has a reported net worth of around $2.9 billion, and the lady is the very definition of a self-made billionaire. Her journey to being ultra-rich began way back in 1969 when along with her husband, Fisher founded Gap, the retail clothing line. She too, calls SF home.
And while the city saw just one billionaire added among its population in 2018, it did better compared to the rest of the world, where there was a 5.4% decrease in the overall number of billionaires.