Methodology & disclaimers

Please read: Net worth and today's change are pulled from Forbes' real-time billionaires estimates — still estimates, not verified fact, and not financial advice. Charts, holdings breakdowns, and weekly / monthly figures are illustrative. Don't make decisions off this. Moods are a joke, not a diagnosis.

How real wealth trackers work

Most of a billionaire's fortune sits in public company stock, which has a known share count and a public, constantly-updating price. Multiply the two and you get a live estimate of that slice of their wealth. Private companies, real estate, and cash are estimated from the latest available information and updated far less often. Reputable trackers like Forbes and Bloomberg employ analysts to research the private pieces — that research, not the arithmetic, is the hard part.

How Oops, Lost a Billion works

Net worth and today's move are pulled live from Forbes' real-time billionaires feed and refreshed while markets are open, so the headline numbers track the same source you'd see on Forbes. The 30-day chart, holdings breakdown, and weekly / monthly figures are illustrative estimates. If the live feed is briefly unavailable, the board falls back to simulated movement around the last known values.

The mood engine

Each mogul's mood is a pure function of their daily percentage change:

EcstaticDaily change ≥ +3%

HappyDaily change between +0.2% and +3%

NeutralDaily change within ±0.2%

SadDaily change between -0.2% and -3%

DevastatedDaily change ≤ -3%

Photos & credits

Portrait photographs come from Wikimedia Commons and remain the copyright of their original authors. The images themselves are never altered — "mood" is conveyed purely by an overlaid emoji and color. Per-image attribution is listed below.

Elon Musk — photo by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Larry Page — photo by Stansfield PL, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Sergey Brin — photo by Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Jeff Bezos — photo by U.S. DoD / SECWAR, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Mark Zuckerberg — photo by The White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Larry Ellison — photo by Oracle PR / Hartmann Studios, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Warren Buffett — photo by U.S. International Trade Administration, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Bernard Arnault — photo by Jérémy Barande, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Steve Ballmer — photo by Martin Olsson, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Bill Gates — photo by Bogdan Hoyaux / European Union, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Oops, Lost a Billion is an independent, unofficial project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by any person featured. If you are a rights holder and would like an image removed, it can be swapped for an initials avatar instantly.