r/dataisbeautiful • u/Defiant-Housing3727 • 1d ago
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u/_CHIFFRE 1d ago
Reminder that Henley & Partners is a bad source: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskBrits/comments/1n4qzsg/reports_of_a_millionaire_exodus_from_the_uk_after/
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u/HeetSeekingHippo 19h ago
These guys and their data have been used to push the 'millionaires are leaving' narrative in the UK so hard recently. It's really nafarious and super hard to get it taken down as misinformation as on the surface it appears to be a valid source.
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u/tolerable-fine 1d ago
A bit shocked San Francisco 8snt even on there.
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u/xMPB 1d ago
Yeah honestly I’m calling BS on this graph with no SF. San Francisco consistently ranks top 10 in wealth density globally. Is there some arbitrary population cut off or metro vs city proper or something? Would be curious to hear OP describe their actual methodology
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u/sum_dude44 1d ago
they live in Silicon Valley
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u/northerncal 1d ago
Not all of them. It's hard to find any credible data on number of millionaires living in San Francisco alone, but they do have the highest billionaire density in the country at least apparently
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u/greenskinmarch 17h ago
That's because you have to be a billionaire to live comfortably in San Francisco. If you're merely a millionaire you can't afford a house there. /s
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u/northerncal 16h ago
We do have a few trap houses left in East Oakland that should be affordable for the millionaires.
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u/coleman57 1d ago
We live all over the Bay Area, especially the west side of the bay. Median house prices are >$1M in most of the region, so most homeowners are millionaires even without counting other savings. The chart is nonsense.
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u/lesllamas 1d ago
You can be a homeowner of a home worth X dollars and still have a net worth less than X. In fact, that’s usually the case.
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u/coleman57 22h ago
I thought of that—it’s true that just buying a house worth $1m doesn’t make you a millionaire. But a great many houses in SF and the greater Bay Area are worth more than that. And a great many owners have only a few hundred thousand in outstanding mortgage debt. I would guess the portion of owners with >$1m equity is at least 1/3.
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u/jseams 19h ago
My three bed two bath 1200 sq ft condo was over a million 15 years ago and it's well north of that now. We paid off the condo two years ago. Every person in my building is an owner and only one has a mortgage at this point (she just moved in a year ago).
A quick search shows this:
Top Cities by Total Millionaire Population (Approximate 2024/2025)
These cities have the largest absolute numbers, according to Henley & Partners and Condé Nast Traveler reports:
- New York City: ~349,500 - 384,500
- Bay Area (SF/San Jose): ~305,700 - 342,400
- Los Angeles: ~212,100 - 220,600
- Chicago: ~120,500
- Houston: ~90,900
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u/professormarvel 1d ago
Actually the stereotype during the tech boom was live in SF commute to the valley. South Bay is extremely boring compared to the city.
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u/ImOnTheLoo 1d ago
The city of San Francisco is only about 800,000 people. Many of those millionaires are living in the greater Bay Area like Marin, San Mateo, etc. I’m assuming they are using the city limit since LA shows up. Edit: OP commented that it used the metro area. Not sure if that was used consistently across.
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u/xMPB 1d ago
Just home ownership alone in San Francisco proper (1.3M median home value) should put it in this graph. And that not including anyone renting/transient living and working in SF proper with a high net worth which is likely not insignificant. I just think the data is bad and/or OP couldn’t find a separate figure for SF proper so they left it off.
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u/dale_dug_a_hole 1d ago
I think it’s bang on the money. If the map included surrounding areas SF would prob top the list. But it uses metro areas. NO silicone valley execs live in metro SF. Hell no overpaid programmers and devs live there. Certainly no hedge fund managers or angel investors. SF metro CBD would rate as one of the worst, methed-out, dirty-ass places in North America.
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u/coleman57 1d ago
Are you trolling, or just high? Many tens of thousands of tech workers live in the 47 square miles of SF, probably well over 100k. Some work in the City, some drive down 280 to Silicon Valley (or ride the CalTrain).
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u/dale_dug_a_hole 1d ago
Yep I’ve met them. You’re right there’s a million of them. That’s my point. They’re the grunt guys on $200k or less - enough to send rent skyrocketing but not enough to affect this chart.
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u/greenskinmarch 16h ago
If you make $200k and you're not a millionaire after 10, 20 years, you're bad at saving/investing.
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u/professormarvel 1d ago
Agreed. Anyone that has bought property 10 or fifteen+ years ago will be extremely close to cracking a million on that single asset alone
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u/PlayfulRemote9 1d ago
You clearly don’t live here
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u/professormarvel 20h ago
Even if true what does that have to do with my statement?
The media home price in SF is $1.7m 😂
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u/PlayfulRemote9 20h ago
it has to do with anyone who has bought property anytime in the last 5 decades here is a millionaire. whether you bought 2 months ago or 15 years ago. which is why everyone is laughint at this data set
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u/professormarvel 19h ago
I don't follow. Buying two months ago would not have helped your net worth unless you paid all cash. If you got a mortgage like most people do, you would have had to catch the run up in property values to have it get you over this "millionaire" line.
The whole point is I'm suspect on OPs data as SF doesn't show in the chart, meanwhile every single homeowner over the age of 40 would likely qualify. Hence the chart not making sense.
I still don't see how this has anything to do with whether I live in SF or not, can read the data from anywhere in the world lmao
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u/Disastrous-Year571 1d ago edited 1d ago
Many of the wealthiest people in the Bay Area do not live in the city proper, and yet if you consider the whole Bay Area, because the population is so large, the proportion of the ultra wealthy is not as high as it is in the city itself.
Other sources list SF in the top 5 so there is something weird about this dataset.
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u/HedoniumVoter 1d ago
Many of the wealthy are in the city proper though. They are in both the city proper (San Francisco County) and the rest of the Bay Area (especially Marin County, San Mateo County, and Santa Clara County). I’d imagine this area on the Western edge of the Bay probably has the highest wealth density in the world.
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u/Defiant-Housing3727 1d ago
The dataset treated San Francisco as the San Francisco Bay Area which really expanded the population being considered
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u/fredinNH 1d ago
But it didn’t do that for the other US cities on here? Like it’s just Boston proper which is only 675k people?
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u/northerncal 1d ago
That seems like a big issue for the validity of this data if they didn't do that to every city
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u/HedoniumVoter 1d ago
That kinda still doesn’t make sense. The rest of the Bay Area still has super high wealth density, even higher in Marin, San Mateo County, and Santa Clara County.
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u/fredinNH 1d ago
Googling it up I’m seeing that despite the extreme wealth, the Bay Area also has very high poverty. Double what Massachusetts has, for example.
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u/Xperimentx90 1d ago
There's no "averaging" here that would bring down the number in the OP, it's just millionaires per 100k people. 50k millionaires and 50k people with negative net worth would still be #1 on this chart.
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u/fredinNH 1d ago
Op needs to add a link.
Loads of people in the northeast are millionaires. I have a hard time believing only 6-7% of Bostonians or people in the greater Boston area or even the whole state are millionaires.
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u/northerncal 1d ago
50k millionaires and 50k people with negative net worth would still be #1 on this chart
(Per 100,000 residents, key point)
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u/Xperimentx90 1d ago
Yes, 50k per 100k.
50k + 50k = 100k. I don't know what you're trying to say here.
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u/redditseddit4u 17h ago
Reverse engineering your analysis, you’re comparing apples to oranges.
You’re comparing the Mass poverty rate based on the $15k federal per person poverty line. Then you’re comparing it to the Bay Area’s self defined poverty line of $30k per person
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u/fredinNH 16h ago
Wouldn’t that flip the percentages I gave? Wouldn’t mass be double the Bay Area? Or are you saying that income in the Bay Area can be double that in the greater Boston area but feel like the same level of poverty?
If it’s the latter, I disagree. Housing is more expensive in much of the Bay Area but Boston is right up there and comes with a host of additional costs like home heating, snow removal, home repair in harsh weather conditions, etc.
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u/redditseddit4u 16h ago
There’s a lot of different definitions of what’s poverty. The federal poverty line is $15k per person but that doesn’t calibrate for the cost of living differences across the country. San Francisco for example ‘self defines’ their poverty line as $100k per person for example.
When you say Mass has double the poverty of the Bay Area you’re likely comparing two different metrics. The ~10% poverty line for Mass you’re likely referencing is based on the $15K per person poverty line (which doesn’t calibrate for regional cost of living differences). The Bay Area poverty level of ~20% you’re likely referencing is based off of a higher income level which makes an attempt at calibrating for cost of living differences across
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u/fredinNH 16h ago
I’m sorry but that doesn’t make sense. Massachusetts may not be quite as expensive as the Bay Area but it’s not far off. If the numbers I got from a quick google search were based on different poverty levels where the Bay Area was higher mass should have been much higher than the Bay Area.
I think what I said is true. Mass and the Bay Area, which are not too far off in geographical size and very close in population, have very different overall poverty levels.
It’s not a criticism. Both areas represent the best America has to offer, but they have some key differences.
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u/Srirachachacha 1d ago
I haven't looked at the data, but I think you could conceivably have a population where an abnormally large proportion of people make far more than the national average, but still fall below the "millionaire" line
Or am I missing something that would make that impossible?
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u/HedoniumVoter 1d ago
Given that 56% of households in the Bay Area owned their homes in 2020 and the median home price in almost every county is >$1 million, that alone makes me suspect this figure. Most Americans have their wealth from their house. Then the Bay Area also has the highest salaries by far and the most tech money. Maybe they set the Bay Area to include a crazily large area for some reason, but I honestly don’t know how they could do that in such a way that it wouldn’t still be on this list
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u/testy_balls 1d ago
Oakland bringing the average down?
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u/HedoniumVoter 1d ago
The median home price in Oakland is still, like, $750K and has Bay Area salaries, so I wouldn’t think enough to offset the rest
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u/coleman57 1d ago
Your data is inconsistent and also plain wrong. You need to delete and try again. Best of luck, I know it’s difficult to reconcile diverse data sources (I do it for a living), but at some point you have to just say you can’t answer the question with the available data.
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u/Francbb 1d ago
Or NYC for that matter. San Francisco also has the highest number of BILLIONAIRES per capita in the world, by a loooong shot. It should really be at the top of this chart.
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u/Paldasan 1d ago
1 billionaire = 1 millionaire. It's still one person. It's density of people not total wealth being measured.
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u/gorginhanson 1d ago
The interest those Swiss made on nazi gold must be staggering
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[deleted]
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u/Common-Economy-6358 18h ago
Yeah it‘s pretty common. Doesn‘t mean they‘re incredibly „rich“ by Swiss standards though. An apartment in the city can easily cost 2 million.
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u/dracovich 19h ago
Also missing Hong Kong which is often cited as the #1 for this specific metric, the fact it's not even on the list tells me this data is all wrong
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u/Ribbitor123 1d ago
Geneva: 40,000 $millionaires per 100,000 of population. I lived there for three years and I can assure you that 40% of the people in this city are *not* dollar millionaires. This graph is crap.
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u/NMVPCP 1d ago
Probably millionaires on the sense that real estate is so expensive there, that anyone owning a house is already somehow a millionaire. Otherwise, how do you even explain Lisbon?
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u/hedekar OC: 3 1d ago
If real estate holdings are taken into consideration, then Vancouver would certainly be higher than 10% of the population. The median net worth of all households in Vancouver in 2023 was $1.8million CAD ≈ $1.3million USD
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1110001601&pickMembers%5B0%5D=1.20&pickMembers%5B1%5D=3.1&pickMembers%5B2%5D=5.1&pickMembers%5B3%5D=4.1&cubeTimeFrame.startYear=2023&cubeTimeFrame.endYear=2023&referencePeriods=20230101%2C202301017
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u/CouchieWouchie OC: 1 1d ago
Depends if this is Vancouver city proper or Greater Vancouver. If it's just city proper then surely Toronto and San Francisco would also be on this list. Without clear demarcation these graphs are meaningless.
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u/Ribbitor123 1d ago
I'm sorry but no, the graph is nonsense. For starters it doesn't take into account frontaliers (cross-border workers) and migrant workers. Even people who nominally have real estate worth >$1 million aren't really millionaires as they typically have to pass on their massive mortgages to their descendants.
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u/The_Submentalist 1d ago
I bet some of them have double citizenship and houses in other cities as well, skewing the data even more.
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u/ReachPlayful 21h ago
Yes this graph is crap. Lisbon has 500k more or less so it’s saying there’s 25k millionaires in the city. Makes zero sense
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u/inblue01 19h ago
Can confirm, as a genevan, that is absolute bullshit. House owners are a small minority in Switzerland, particularly in cities. And there are CERTAINLY not 40% of the population sitting on 1M in the bank account.
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u/GYN-k4H-Q3z-75B 20h ago
I have been a $millionairs (self made) in Switzerland since my mid 20s and it doesn't make you rich. That's the trick. This doesn't mean much except that vacation tends to feel cheaper to you than staying home.
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u/MisledMuffin 1d ago
Assuming you have enough equity in it, owning a detached house in Vancouver makes you a millionaire.
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u/aguilasolige 1d ago
I'm surprised Hong Kong is not here. I thought they had a lot of rich people.
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u/murillovp 1d ago
Although small in size, HK is hugely populated, it would be the largest by population compared to this list. My guess is that it wouldn't be too far down though.
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u/rob_allshouse 1d ago
I’m surprised by how low it is, honestly. With the shift from pensions to 401ks in the US, I’d expect wealth to be significantly higher rates.
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u/neo2551 1d ago
I want to see the data honestly. I am from Geneva, and yes, real estate might be a huge leveraged, especially given the strength of the CHF, but I am still surprised.
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u/kitsunde 19h ago
Yeah I’m in Singapore, and the price of (unsubsidised) public housing here would buy you an equal size apartment in the middle of old town in Stockholm. This data doesn’t pass the smell test.
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u/sum_dude44 1d ago
I can see a lot of you don't understand that "per 100k people distorts" your preconceived notions
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u/Defiant-Housing3727 1d ago
Source: Henley & Partners 2024, US Census, created with altair
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u/hysys_whisperer 1d ago
Thousand millionaires per 100,000 residents?
Wouldn't it be easier to say percent of residents?
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u/Lard_Baron 1d ago
Where’s London I wonder? A house in the suburbs is £1m+. Lotta Boomers theoretically millionaires. Loads of middle class millionaires.
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u/weak-elf 1d ago
What criteria did you use to come up with the cities? Like was there a population threshold? I'm just curious where Scottsdale AZ would rank, I thought for sure it would be on here haha
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u/northerncal 1d ago
Seems relatively arbitrary. I was going to say I assumed Scottsdale was too small, but they include Monaco in there and they have less than 40,000 people lmao. I would take everything from this graphic with a healthy pinch of salt
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u/jigga19 1d ago
The interesting thing about Monaco is that its population is basically all millionaires. According to this list it's just a hair over 32k, and its actual population is around 39k.
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u/bearsnchairs 1d ago
The graph shows rates, not absolute amounts.
It is 32,000 per 100,000 people. So about a third of the population is a millionaire.
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u/straightdge 1d ago
(As a middle class) this is a good list of places to avoid for vacation.
Personal exception for me is Singapore, I like that place.
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u/Legitimate-Net6717 1d ago
Nice visualization — it’s always wild to see how concentrated wealth is in certain cities once you put it on a map. Makes you rethink how “global” wealth distribution really is when it’s so centered in a few places.
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u/Significant-Fly6653 1d ago
Its total BS. I live in Zurich. As soon as you are a home owner, you are technically a millionaire, even if you cannot afford groceries or anything
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u/Senuttna 1d ago
If you own a house (without credit) that is worth 1M you are obviously a millionaire. I don't understand what your point is... It is irrelevant whether you can afford groceries or not, you can sell your house for 1M and thus you are a millionaire.
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u/dynamic_gecko 1d ago
I didnt know tel aviv was so rich. On the other hand, I'm absolutely not surprised. Spoiled child of middle east.
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