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Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google cofounders and billionaires. (Photo by JOKER/Martin Magunia/ullstein bild via Getty Images)
ullstein bild via Getty ImagesA total eclipse and the men’s championship game to cap off March Madness? What a start to the week! There should be plenty to discuss around the proverbial water cooler.
In other news, Forbes released its annual list of billionaires last week, highlighting the richest people in the world. Tech remained a major contributor to the wealth on the list, with artificial intelligence startups minting two new billionaires in Ivan Zhao of Notion and Brett Adcock of Figure.
And what about the billionaires who started, own or run the products and software most of us use during the workday? Take Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, worth $114 billion and $110 billion respectively. From Google search to the Google Workspace offerings that include Gmail, Drive and Google Docs, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t use at least one of the company’s applications during their day-to-day work. It’s similar with the billionaires coming out of Microsoft, including cofounder Bill Gates and creator of Microsoft Word and Excel Charles Simonyi, worth $128 billion and $7.3 billion.
Then there’s the people behind the products used within the job market itself, like David Duffield, who Forbes estimates is worth $14.2 billion largely from his role as cofounder of HR software Workday and PeopleSoft. His Workday cofounder, Aneel Bhusri, is worth $3.1 billion.
I find it fascinating to think about the companies—and people—behind the products we use every day, especially at work. You can check out the full billionaires list here, as well as a look at some of the list’s surprising numbers.
WORK SMARTER
Practical insights and advice from Forbes staff and contributors to help you succeed in your job, accelerate your career and lead smarter
Toying with the idea of becoming a “supercommuter”? Here are some things you should keep in mind.
Consider these tips as you decide if a job relocation is right for you.
Take a look at the pros and cons of taking a sabbatical.
Reconnecting with old coworkers can be difficult. Here’s some sample messages to start.
Wondering which job titles make up the C-suite at your company? We broke down who is part of the top roles in most organizations.
SPOTLIGHT: A Diversity Report Card
A group of researchers from the University of Chicago and University of California, Berkeley, identified employers that favored white applicants over Black applicants, based on the callback return of thousands of résumés. Companies that were more likely to be biased against applicants favored their white counterparts by 24%. Some of the biggest takeaways from the research? Companies with centralized HR operations tend to be less biased, and gender discrimination fell in line with industry stereotypes–e.g. auto services were more likely to favor men than women when hiring for entry-level positions, while apparel stores were more likely to favor women. I spoke with one of the researchers, Patrick Kline of UC Berkeley, about the research. Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Macro shot of A- on white results sheet. Extremely shallow focus.
gettyHow did this research come about?
A lot of the debate both inside the ivory tower among economists and in the outside world is about macro trends. That debate has missed the boots-on-the-ground questions about how discrimination actually manifests in particular organizations. There was a big debate about, you know, is it because the labor market thinks Black workers are worse? Or is it because people don't wanna work with them? These debates have missed the more fundamental question of: What are the practices that can give rise to bias leaking systematically into an organization's patterns nationwide? So that's what we were trying to study in this series of papers: Is it really true that there's just some background level of bias and it's the same everywhere? Or is it that some companies are able to take biased people and somehow make, on average, unbiased decisions as an organization?
Why look at entry-level positions only?
If you start talking about more sophisticated jobs that are further up the totem pole, it might not be sufficient to just look at a CV; completing an application might require a reputation where you have a LinkedIn page and you have to go through more steps even to be able to apply. So we wanted just the regular jobs that lots of people have had exposure to at some point in their lives. Those jobs are the ones that we think are probably heavily influenced by corporate culture and HR departments, because they just have to mount this huge amount of effort to deal with a huge inflow. Whereas when you're talking about upper management, those issues are very interesting, including promotions. But you're talking about a more rarefied bunch, and it's more difficult to credibly build an application that's taken seriously and elicit the bias that you're interested in.
You found that organizations with established HR practices tend to do better in terms of not discriminating against applicants than those that don’t. I wonder if there's anything to take away from that when it comes to startup culture and small companies that haven't yet prioritized having an established HR department.
Part of the problem is that, especially in the tech world, it's really hard to know because they're so secretive. You can't really get data out of most of these companies about who they currently employ, much less which applications they passed over. While some companies are spending time with their own internal assessments, my impression is that they haven't interacted with economists or academics in general. I find it a bit ironic that tech companies are so defensive about outsiders having access to their data and partnering with them, given that they deal with that. To give you an analogy, you could think about what we're doing as kind of like what the tech companies do for their own cyber security. They hire teams to act as “whitehat hackers” that test the security system in order to make it stronger. What we're trying to do as researchers is to basically do the same type of whitehat audit of the fairness of a recruiting system and see whether there are ways to improve it.
So beyond a centralized HR operation, what else matters when it comes to how companies behave during the hiring process?
Yes, the strongest, most suggestive argument for why practices are important is callback centralization. Then, whether they're a federal contractor, which makes total sense because federal contractors are held to a higher standard and the federal government audits them every year for compliance with equal opportunity laws. Two is how profitable they are. So the more profitable you are, the less biased.
Oh wow, so there’s the business case!
Economists make a big deal about how discrimination is unprofitable and discriminatory firms should be put out of business. So it’s costly to discriminate. But it could just be that better-run companies discriminate less and are more profitable.
TOUCH BASE
News from the world of work
Are there any lucky March Madness bracket winners reading this? Company brackets have been a popular way to bring the office together, and companies spent 69% more on March Madness-related expenses this year, ranging from prizes for bracket winners to trips to championship games, according to data collected by fintech Brex. One company, for example, spent $1,500 on custom-made March Madness Nike sneakers.
U.S. unemployment fell to 3.8% in March, extending its longest streak of sub-4% unemployment in six decades, according to a report by the Labor Department. The U.S. also added 303,000 new jobs, well above economists’ expectations of 200,000.
Relief from late work calls and emails could soon be coming to California. A proposed bill would make it legal for workers to ignore after-hour calls, texts and emails from their bosses. The “right-to-disconnect” bill would eliminate the pressure for employees to always be online, author of the bill Assemblyperson Matt Haney told Forbes contributor Jack Kelly. And it may be for the best: A 2023 study by Slack’s Workplace Labs found that employees who send messages after work hours tend to be less productive, not more.
Forbes released its annual 30 Under 30 Europe list on Tuesday. From tech to finance, media to manufacturing, the founders of this year’s list raised a total of $1 billion in funding. While 70% of listers are (co)founders of their own companies, some like Jasmine Yeo, fund manager at Ruffer and Finance lister, have risen through corporate ranks to stand out amongst their Under 30 peers.
VIDEO
Money comes, money goes. Here are five people who dropped off the billionaires list in 2024.
NUMBER TO NOTE
90,309
That’s the number of jobs cut in March, the highest since a January 2023 peak. Leading the way? Cuts in the U.S. Army and Veterans Affairs department.
QUIZ
Which tech company laid off 600 workers after scrapping its plans to build self-driving cars?
A. Waymo
B. Nvidia
C. Google
D. Apple
Check if you got it right here.
