CUE Research · Study 7

Founders of the World’s Most Valuable Companies

The people who founded the 500 most valuable listed companies, by head count and by the company value behind them.

The question: Do the people who build the world’s biggest companies share numbers, signs or birthdays?

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

  • Birth month

    U.S. companies: Apr appears only 3 times against about 13.3 expected.

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

All founders Expected, random birthdays 1621–1987 Clear difference Worth watching

Context What explains it

Unlike an inherited fortune, founding a company is something a person did. That makes founders a closer test of personal traits than a rich list.

The money view splits each company’s value equally between its recorded founders, so a company with five founders is not counted five times.

Founder records are incomplete: many companies are very old, state-owned or formed by mergers, and some famous co-founders are not recorded as founders at all. The study uses only what the records show.

Source The data

  • Founders of the 500 most valuable listed companies. Retrieved 2026-09-27. View source
  • Companies ranked by market value on companiesmarketcap.com. Founders are the people Wikidata records as having founded each company; companies with no recorded founder (often very old, state-owned or formed by merger) add no one. Wikidata’s founder records are incomplete, so some well-known founders are missing.
  • Verification: 211 of 262 included. A founder is included when Wikidata records one birth date at day precision. Company matched to Wikidata by stock ticker.
  • 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

  • companiesmarketcap.com, companies ranked by market capitalisation
  • Wikidata, “founded by” records