Willy Staley writes:

In 1981, Malcolm Forbes, the eccentric and fabulously wealthy magazine publisher, came to his editors with a request: Could they pull together a special issue about the 400 richest Americans? The idea was inspired by Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, the doyenne of Gilded Age New York, who regularly hosted the city’s high society in her Fifth Avenue ballroom, which was said to fit about 400 people. It’s quite possible Forbes saw something of himself in Astor. This was a different era of magazine publishing; Forbes — who wound up making the cut on his own list — lived like a sultan. He entertained celebrities and politicians on a 126-foot yacht called the Highlander. By the end of his run he owned a chateau in Normandy, 12 Fabergé eggs and a collection of hot-air balloons in fantastical designs — one shaped like the Sphinx, one like a bust of Beethoven, one like a Fabergé egg, one like the chateau in Normandy and, of course, one in the image of a sultan, about as tall as his yacht was long.

According to a brief history of the magazine written by Malcolm Forbes Jr., better known as Steve, the editorial staff was not pleased with his father’s idea. They conducted a feasibility study and told him it wouldn’t be possible to figure out who these 400 people were. The elder Forbes replied if they wouldn’t do it, he’d find some other journalists who could. “Edit capitulated,” writes his son. The resulting reporting project took a year, dozens of flights and thousands of interviews. At the top of the very first Forbes 400 list was Daniel K. Ludwig, a shipping magnate, estimated by the magazine to be worth more than $2 billion.

If you simply adjusted for inflation, that’s now at least $5.8 billion, a fortune that would land Ludwig in a seven-way tie for the 182nd spot on the last Forbes 400 list, alongside Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx; Gary Rollins, chief executive of Rollins, Inc., which owns several pest-control companies; and who could forget Peter Gassner, the head of a cloud-software company called Veeva. Fortunes at this tier hardly seem to merit media coverage anymore. [Continue reading…]