The Forbes 400 Comes Alive: The World’s Wealthiest Come Together Around Philanthropy

The original Forbes list, The Forbes 400 ranking of America’s wealthiest people, has now entered its fifth decade, and it’s still achieving its original mission: to inform our readers about who owns what in this country, and to motivate them with a few hundred success roadmaps. A full 70% of the 2023 Forbes 400 can fairly be called self-made, up from 55% in 2003; 17% got rich in tech and 14% are immigrants. The American Dream manifests itself through this list.

Over the past decade-plus, however, we’ve turned The Forbes 400 into something more dynamic—an in-person club dedicated to solving the world’s most intractable problems. During The Forbes 400 Summit on Philanthropy, roughly 100 people from this echelon gather each year to learn and teach, inspire and collaborate, laser focused on using the tremendous wealth and influence they’ve accumulated to serve the public through scalable giving and investing.

The summit’s godfather, Warren Buffett, was behind it from the beginning, infusing the event with his philosophy on wealth: that money above a certain level has no inherent personal utility, and thus should be put to work for a higher purpose. “Let the rich people of tomorrow solve the problems of tomorrow,” Buffett has told the group on multiple occasions. This cohort of The Forbes 400, and all of us, really, should tackle this today, giving sooner, deeper and more actively. It is something we measure with the philanthropy score we assign to everyone on the list.

Countless innovations and things that make our lives better come from the individuals on The Forbes 400. But that’s just act one—once you’re successful, how do you apply that same skill set to take on ever bigger social challenges? Many cite the credo that “with great power comes great responsibility.” In gathering and measuring this group, we seek to emphasize exactly that.