CUE Research · Study 4
The Forbes 400: America’s Richest
A second, independent wealth list: the 400 richest Americans in 2025, by head count and by share of their wealth.
The question: Does what the world list showed about the 28th hold up on a different, larger list?
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 No evidence
Born on the 28th appears about as often as chance gives, in every group.
| Group | People | Expected | Share | Expected share | By luck |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top 20 | 2 of 20 | 0.7 | 10.0% | 3.3% | about 1 in 7 |
| Top 50 | 2 of 45 | 1.5 | 4.4% | 3.3% | about 1 in 2 |
| Top 100 | 3 of 69 | 2.3 | 4.3% | 3.3% | about 1 in 3 |
| All 400 | 5 of 179 | 5.9 | 2.8% | 3.3% | about 1 in 1 |
Life Path 28 No evidence
Life Path 28 appears about as often as chance gives, in every group.
| Group | People | Expected | Share | Expected share | By luck |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top 20 | 3 of 20 | 1.4 | 15.0% | 6.9% | about 1 in 6 |
| Top 50 | 5 of 45 | 3.0 | 11.1% | 6.7% | about 1 in 6 |
| Top 100 | 6 of 69 | 4.8 | 8.7% | 6.9% | about 1 in 3 |
| All 400 | 15 of 179 | 12.5 | 8.4% | 7.0% | about 1 in 4 |
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
- Life Path
All 400: Life Path 4 appears 26 times against about 15.6 expected (1.66×).
- Day energy
Top 100: 11 day energy appears 13 times against about 6.7 expected (1.95×).
Top 20: the most common birth quarter is Jan–Mar (7 of 20). A group this small can’t show a real pattern.
Context What explains it
The Forbes 400 overlaps with the world list at the very top (the same few Americans lead both), so the top tiers are not fully independent. The wider list, down to rank 400, is mostly people who never appear in the world top 100.
That makes this the fairest re-test of CUE’s 28 claim available today: stated in advance, tested the same way, on hundreds of new people.
Source The data
- The Forbes 400, 2025. Retrieved 2026-09-27. View source
- Ranks and net worth as published by Forbes in September 2025. Where Forbes lists “& family”, the date is the named person’s.
- Verification: 179 of 400 included. A Forbes birth date is accepted only when a Wikidata human found by name search records the same date at day precision. Otherwise, an exact date from CUE’s billionaires source review.
- 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 Forbes 400, 2025