No. of Recommendations: 68
Group size 50.
Upper bound $30m.
Lower bound $2m
Result, about $900m total net worth using perplexity.
It is quite a bit larger. There are 700 active accounts, even if only 50 regular authors in any one week on the Berkshire Hathaway board. This 700 number doesn't count the far larger number that read the posts without signing up (similarly as you or I read from Seeking Alpha or other value boards without signing up).
The rate of new users signing up has not slowed over the last year. It keeps growing, which is good because it more than compensates for anyone leaving and I the rate of churn is sufficiently small that I expect we can maintain the excellent culture here.
The vast majority of all users with accounts do not post, but read regularly, and the number of people reading without an account is really enormous. There one or two requests each second, on average, and most of the requests are loading (thus reading) a post, and lot of the requests being to read a whole thread.
I don't closely know many of these 700 lovely people but 5 have indicated (and 3 for which I know for sure) having a net worth ranging from $20m to $100m. That's from a sample size of about 20 (out of 700) that have directly stated or indirectly implied their net worth. Taking the $160m known sum, and extrapolating from the 20 sample, that is 160m * 700 / 20 = approx. $6 billion in net worth over those with accounts. The figure will be a lot larger than that over the entire readership (including those without accounts).
Also, extrapolating with averages greatly underestimates the sum, because wealth distribution is not Gaussian but scalable, so one or two outliers can already be multi-billionaires, larger than the other 699 combined. Such people almost invariably find it distasteful, or at least distracting, to bring their enormous wealth up within posts, so they (almost) never do.
Another thing that might not be obvious is that there are a lot more true friendships amongst the board with people meeting privately, but not mentioning it. This is one of the really wonderful things about Shrewd'm (and its ancestry) - the "Privately email" option when writing posts, allowing people to maintain contact over email, develop friendships that also go beyond only finance discussions. It is pretty sad how other media platforms try to keep people locked in within the platform, discouraging direct contact or making it impossible. Shrewd'm must be one of the few places left in which direct email communication is a bit part of the community fabric, so the "Privately email" feature is definitely staying.
- Manlobbi
