Members of the Forbes 400 lived 0.0 years longer than Americans of the same age.

The solid line shows the share of members still alive in each year after they first appeared on the list. The dashed line shows the share that the official life tables predict for people of the same sex, age and birth year. The gap opens in the first years and stays open for four decades.

Each dot is one traced member of the first list, published in 1982. Move the slider to step through the years. A dot empties when that person dies. Gold dots mark people who were still alive although the life tables expected that many deaths by then.

A mortality ratio of 1.0 means members died at the same rate as other Americans of their age, sex and birth year. A ratio of 0.5 means half the rate. Between 55 and 64, members died at roughly a fifth of the expected rate. Past 95 the difference is gone.

Each line is one person. It starts at the age of the first appearance on the list and ends at death, or at the end of 2025 for the living. Lines are sorted by where they end, so the right edge traces how long members lasted.

Members born before 1926 would all be 100 or older today, so their story is almost complete: of the have died. They died at on average. The life tables gave them until from the day they joined the list. of them reached 90, against predicted.

The grey dot is the average age at death the life tables predicted on the day of first listing. The green dot is our estimate for members. People who joined the list before 50 gained the most years. Women on the list also outlived the tables, but by less than men.

The lists. Names, ranks and net worth come from the Forbes 400 panel in the replication files of Gomez (2023), "Decomposing the Growth of Top Wealth Shares", Econometrica. The panel holds 400 people a year. different people appear between 1982 and 2000.

Births and deaths. Every name was searched in Wikidata and English Wikipedia. Each proposed match was then read and accepted or rejected by hand. people were matched this way. For people with no entry, obituaries, archives and reference databases were searched, which settled more. remain unresolved. The panel records who left the list through death, which gave an independent check on death dates.

Life tables. Death probabilities by single year of age, sex and calendar year come from the Office of the Chief Actuary of the Social Security Administration (2024 Trustees Report, historical values to 2021 and intermediate projections after). Following one birth year along the calendar gives the cohort life table for a person of that age and birth year.

Follow-up. Each person is followed from 1 October of the first year on the list to death or to 31 December 2025. people with a known birth date but no later trace are followed only to their last year on the list.

Statistics. The mortality ratio is observed deaths divided by the deaths expected from the life tables. Survival curves are Kaplan-Meier estimates, and the expected curve is the Hakulinen estimate. The years gained are the difference between two averages of remaining life at first listing. One uses each member's life table. The other multiplies that table by the mortality ratio seen at each age (under 55, 55 to 64, 65 to 74, 75 to 84, 85 to 94, 95 and over).

Files. The dataset is in forbes400_longevity.csv, the survival curves in survival_curves.csv and all results in analysis.json. The code is in the src folder of the project repository and the steps are listed in README.md.