CUE Research · Study 1

The World’s Top 100 Billionaires

Life Paths, signs and birthdays of the Forbes 2025 top 100, at every level from the top 10 to the top 100.

The question: Do the world’s richest people share numbers or signs more often than chance would give?

Testing CUE’s claim

CUE teaches that 28 is the number of wealth.

The claim was stated before this data was examined, so each test asks one narrow question: how often would random birthdays from the same years give that value as many people as it really has?

Born on the 28th Strong evidence in this data

In the top 20, 4 of 20 people have it, against about 0.7 expected. Random birthdays give that many about 1 in 267 times.

GroupPeopleExpectedShareExpected shareBy luck
Top 10 2 of 10 0.3 20.0% 3.3% about 1 in 26
Top 20 4 of 20 0.7 20.0% 3.3% about 1 in 267
Top 30 4 of 28 0.9 14.3% 3.3% about 1 in 91
Top 50 5 of 46 1.5 10.9% 3.3% about 1 in 62
Top 100 7 of 92 3.0 7.6% 3.3% about 1 in 32

Life Path 28 No evidence

Life Path 28 appears about as often as chance gives, in every group.

GroupPeopleExpectedShareExpected shareBy luck
Top 10 0 of 10 0.7 0.0% 6.6% about 1 in 1
Top 20 2 of 20 1.4 10.0% 6.8% about 1 in 3
Top 30 2 of 28 1.9 7.1% 6.8% about 1 in 2
Top 50 4 of 46 3.1 8.7% 6.7% about 1 in 3
Top 100 6 of 92 6.3 6.5% 6.9% about 1 in 2

Read this honestly

  • This is one list from one year, and the groups overlap: the top 20 is inside the top 100, so the rows are not separate confirmations.
  • If CUE’s belief in 28 was first inspired by noticing wealthy people born on the 28th, this list cannot confirm it: a pattern cannot be tested on the data that suggested it. The clean test is new data, which is why this study will be re-run on Forbes’ 2026 list and on other wealth rankings.
  • A strong result describes where the wealth sits; it does not show that a birthday causes wealth.

What stands out

No clear differences. Across every group of 50 or more and every measure, the numbers are within what chance produces.

Worth watching, not enough to claim

  • Day energy

    Top 100: 1 day energy appears 22 times against about 12.1 expected (1.82×).

Top 100: every birth quarter is within normal variation of random birthdays from the same years.

Top 100 Expected, random birthdays 1928–1992 Clear difference Worth watching

Context What explains it

With 100 people, only large differences can show up clearly. Most apparent patterns in a group this size are chance, and the study says so when that is the case.

Source The data

  • Forbes World’s Billionaires List 2025. Retrieved 2026-09-27. View source
  • Ranks and net worth as published by Forbes. Birth dates are used where Forbes and Wikidata agree to the day, or where CUE’s source review established an exact date. Where Forbes lists “& family”, the date is the named person’s.
  • Verification: 92 of 100 included. A Forbes birth date is accepted only when Wikidata records the same date at day precision for the matched person. Matching: English label search, restricted to humans with a net-worth statement, then to humans with a business occupation. Manual source review by CUE of every top-100 record that failed the Forbes–Wikidata day match. An exact date is accepted with its confidence grade and basis; partial dates are kept to the month or year and not assigned a day; unresolved records are left out.
  • Expected values: every day of the years each group was born in, weighted by how many people were born in each year, run through CUE’s engine. Weighting matters for Chinese signs and Life Paths, which depend on the year.
  • A difference is called clear only in groups of 50 or more and at least three standard errors from expected. Because each study tests about a hundred values, a clear difference needs 3.5 standard errors; 2.5 to 3.5 is only “worth watching”.

Reproduce it: the raw data snapshots and build scripts are in CUE’s code repository (scripts/data and scripts/build-*-study.mts).

Further reading

  • Forbes, The World’s Billionaires 2025