I was listening to the Founders podcast a few weeks ago. John Mackey was on, the guy who started Whole Foods. Self-proclaimed hippie. Started as a shirtless hitchhiker who wanted to open a little natural food store. Built it into a $13 billion company and owned 0.05% of it by the end.
Mackey is one of the most aggressively pro-capitalism people you'll hear in a podcast. Which is funny coming from a guy who devoted his life to selling organic groceries. But his argument is hard to argue with: 250 years ago, 94% of humanity lived on less than $2 a day. Capitalism changed that. Entrepreneurs are the engine. And the wealth they create for other people dwarfs what they keep for themselves.
Then he brought up an idea Jeff Bezos pitched him. Bezos said: forget the Forbes 400. Why do we rank people by how much wealth they have? Why don't we rank them by how much wealth they've created for everyone else?
"Why don't we have a list for how much wealth these people have created for others? Out of that two trillion, I might own 150 billion of that."
The host, David Senra, said: "Next time you see Bezos, tell him we should call it the Bezos 1000."
So I built it. I'm calling it Capitalopolis. A city where every building is a founder, and height is how much wealth they created for everyone else.
300 founders, ranked by Other-Shareholder Value: the total market cap of their company minus their personal stake, plus dividends paid to everyone else. The whole skyline adds up to $72 trillion.
Jensen Huang is the tallest building. He owns 3.3% of NVIDIA. The other 96.7% of a $4.4 trillion company belongs to everyone else.
Short answer: Claude Code and 10 rounds of iteration.
I started with a formula. Other-Shareholder Value = market cap times (1 minus founder ownership percentage), plus cumulative dividends paid to non-founders. Simple math, but the data collection is the hard part. You need current market caps, current founder ownership percentages from SEC proxy filings, and dividend histories going back decades for some companies.
I used Claude Code to spin up 5 parallel research agents for the first pass. Each one pulled market caps, ownership stakes, and dividend data from SEC filings, Bloomberg, and Yahoo Finance. That first batch came back with 64 founders and $22.3 trillion in OSV.
Then I ran it through a loop. The pattern is basically Karpathy's autoresearch applied to data instead of code: agent looks at the current state, finds what's wrong or missing, fixes it, checks if the result improved, repeats. Each iteration, the agents would review the existing list, find gaps (missed founders, missing co-founders, wrong ownership numbers, entire sectors underrepresented), fix what they could, and add what was missing.
The loop ran 10 times:
Loop 0: 64 entries, $22T. The initial fan-out.
Loop 1: 74 entries, $30T. Caught Steve Jobs (somehow missed on the first pass). Fixed the Page/Brin formula. Added founder categories.
Loop 2: 90 entries, $41T. Found co-founders who own 0% (Wozniak, Paul Allen). Filled the pharma gap.
Loop 3: 123 entries, $49T. Historical founders (JPMorgan, Ford, Coca-Cola).
Loop 4: 146 entries, $56T. Curtis Priem, NVIDIA's co-founder, showed up at $4.35 trillion.
Loop 5: 146 entries, $56T. No new entries. Just accuracy corrections. First sign of convergence.
Loop 6: 196 entries, $66T. Expanded again. Eduardo Saverin and Dustin Moskovitz (Meta co-founders) each at $1.5 trillion.
Loop 7: 194 entries, $65T. Removed duplicates. Quality sweep.
Loop 8: 214 entries, $66T. Final coverage push.
Loop 9: 282 entries, $72T. Three parallel research batches to close sector gaps.
Loop 10: 300 entries, $72T. Final 18 to hit 300. Converged.
64 founders to 300. $22 trillion to $72 trillion. The methodology corrected itself along the way: the co-founder formula changed, founder categories got added, ownership data got updated as I found better sources.
The hardest part was knowing when to stop adding and start correcting. Loop 5 was the first sign.
For the visualization, I wanted something that made the scale intuitive. A table is accurate but you can't feel $72 trillion in a spreadsheet. So I built a city. Each building is a founder. Height is OSV. You can see immediately that NVIDIA's co-founders tower over everything, and that there's a long tail of founders who created tens of billions for others but barely register visually next to the giants.
Built with Three.js, WebGL shaders for the window lights, and a water shader for the bay. The whole thing is a single HTML file.
| Rank ▲ | Name | Company | Type | Mkt Cap ($B) | Own % | OSV ($B) |
|---|