For each country in the world, research was conducted on the leading entrepreneurial families. The search was not limited to the current entrepreneurs, but also to families of the 18./19th century. The data includes both current and historical data.
From this basic data, the 11,000 families with assets> $ 300 million were filtered out and categorized into different categories in Excel. For 3,200 families, the family offices have already been identified.
Unlike in rankings of e.g. Forbes individuals are grouped into families, e.g. several members of the Mars family, which appear separately in the Forbes list, count in the database only as 1 profile.
All global and local wealth rankings from different countries were evaluated. In part these rankings have been evaluated for 20 years. In 2019 all wealth rankings with up-to-date data were entered in the database.
Evaluations of all available country rankings for private companies / family businesses as well as various industry enterprise rankings.
Evaluations of M & A deals of the past years.
2019: Evaluation of a shareholder database of all listed companies worldwide.
Years of intensive Internet research
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Current news monitoring
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Virtually all wealthy German families have been recorded in the basic database since the Middle Ages. In addition the millionaire lists from 1913, which number several thousand people, were completely recorded and the further course of asset development researched. The data includes family history, business development, and company / ownership data.
In an excel list, the currently 4,500 richest families were grouped by different categories for further analysis. For more than 3,500 families, the contact details of asset management and family offices have already been researched.
In addition to the above sources such as corporate and industry rankings, wealth rankings and M & A deals, the following sources for Germany were also evaluated:
For the database the the Hoppenstedt handbooks of medium and large enterprises were completely evaluated for each decade (1964, 1973, 1984, 1994, 2002). This analysis, followed by an internet search for the corporations, provided clues to a very large number of families who had sold their businesses since the 1960s and are barely appearing in rankings today.
In addition, the compact reference works of Commerzbank (“who belongs to whom”) were evaluated for the same period.
The multi-volume “Yearbooks of Millionaires” of 1913 published a list of all millionaires in Germany shortly before the First World War, based on tax lists. For each individual an asset including income was published. In total 9,000 to 10,000 people are listed.
These people are recorded in the database and it was researched whether the families are still wealthy today. The data are also fundamental to the research of family trees of old entrepreneurial families.
Main chronicler of the large companies and entrepreneurs of the 1950s / 60s was Kurt Pritzkoleit, who provided in his numerous books very detailed facts. Definitely the best data base and an important intermediate step to research family trees and the history of the companies.
Important publications of this time provide important insights, e.g.
