🤖💉🕳👾🧬™⚽
PLUTOCRACY, n. A republican form of government deriving its powers from the conceit of the governed—in thinking they govern.
Here’s the Forbes 2026 top 100 richest people as a simple text list (net worth approximate, March 2026):
Elon Musk – $627B – Technology
Larry Page – $270B – Technology
Jeff Bezos – $255B – Technology
Sergey Brin – $251B – Technology
Larry Ellison – $248B – Technology
Mark Zuckerberg – $233B – Technology
Bernard Arnault & family – $205B – Consumer
Steve Ballmer – $170B – Technology
Jensen Huang – $156B – Technology
Warren Buffett – $151B – Diversified
Michael Dell – $141B – Technology
Jim Walton – $137B – Retail
Amancio Ortega – $136B – Retail
Rob Walton – $135B – Retail
Alice Walton – $134B – Retail
Bill Gates – $118B – Technology
Carlos Slim – $112B – Diversified
Mukesh Ambani – $106B – Energy
Françoise Bettencourt Meyers – $92.5B – Consumer
Gautam Adani – $83.0B – Industrial
Thomas Peterffy – $78.3B – Finance
Julia Flesher Koch & family – $77.7B – Industrial
Zhong Shanshan – $79B – Beverages
Charles Koch – $76B – Industrial
Masayoshi Son – $76B – Telecom
Michael Bloomberg – $109B – Finance/Media
MacKenzie Scott – $35B – Diversified
Phil Knight & family – $29.7B – Consumer
David Sun – $29.5B – Technology
John Tu – $29.5B – Technology
Sunil Mittal – $29.4B – Media/Telecom
Zhang Xuexin – $29.0B – Industrial
Azim Premji – $27.5B – Technology
Jorge Paulo Lemann – $27.3B – Food & Beverage
Henry Cheng – $27.2B – Retail
Stan Kroenke – $26.8B – Real Estate
Peter Thiel – $26.8B – Finance
Alexey Mordashov – $26.2B – Industrial
Izzy Englander – $26.2B – Finance
Adam Foroughi – $26.0B – Technology
Elaine Marshall – $26.0B – Industrial
Jaime Gilinski – $25.8B – Finance
Giovanni Ferrero & family – $42B – Food
Ken Griffin – $41B – Finance
Stefan Persson – $40B – Retail
Jacqueline Mars – $39B – Food
John Mars – $39B – Food
Lukas Walton – $38B – Retail
Alain Wertheimer – $37B – Consumer
Gerard Wertheimer – $37B – Consumer
51-100: Len Blavatnik, Dustin Moskovitz, Stephen Schwarzman, Ray Dalio, David Thomson, Lee Shau Kee, Takemitsu Takizaki, Kumar Birla, Colin Huang, Dieter Schwarz, and others.
Note: Exact rankings/net worth fluctuate daily. For live data, check Forbes Billionaires or Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Foreword
This book is a scrapbook of sorts. It’s the result of some of the material I sifted through while writing PostScarcity, a goal, a tool, and a mindset. There I propose an usury-free energy currency for global trade—fringe back then, albeit once championed by Henry Ford and later by various crypto proponents. Lately it was touted by Elon Musk as the future of money, so it will get some attention it deserves.
Locally, I propose complements like the Brixton Pound or time equity à la Richard Kiersky. This comes after, and briefly summarized on researchgate, the 2008 crisis, when Brazilian researchers found that regions that had such financial tools available did experience less harsh consequences and did recover more speedily from said crisis.
So here I present some nuggets (pun intended) of 4,000 years of money and finance. Like the invention of usury, supposedly in ancient Babylon, and its taming by kings like none other than Hammurabi, who would usher in debt reliefs poetically called jubilee every seven years to prevent his people being coerced into debt slavery—a real thing at that time. Like the infamous “Schuldentürme” in medieval Europe, where this jubilee instrument was forsaken partly for theological reasons but partly for simple greed as well. Only recently, with thunderous voices like the late David Graeber or Michael Hudson, has this been declared a tool to prevent the debt spiral from turning into a death spiral again. (I totally agree, but with a twist as laid out in Postscarcity .. : )
Then add usury-free energy currency as I propose in the aforementioned book. So here is my wandering random walk through my notes. To balance the somewhat snarky tone, the glossary and appendix are strictly scholarly.