I don't think that's true at all - it seems like Finance, Fashion, and Politics people are the richest in general, with geeks coming tied for 3rd or even 4th overall. Of the richest (known) 25 in the world [1], only 4 or 5 can be said to be "nerds", with some financiers and magnates in the tech industry doing fairly well also. The rest are all financiers, inheritors, politicians, etc.

1 https://www.therichest.com/top-lists/top-250-richest-people-... idk how reliable this is, and family/endowed fortunes like the medicis, the papal trust, eastern european organizations etc aren't counted at all apparently.

I think you are using a pretty narrow definition of the word “geek” - and I would probably classify 7 of the top 10 of having some level of “geekiness”.

They are just different kinds of geek - Warren Buffett is a geek, just a “securities-pricing geek” rather than a “tech-geek”

Exactly. There art geeks, shoe geeks, food geeks, finance geeks, ad geeks, etc…

But my initial comment was really a reference to how far Excel needs have come, being featured on ESPN and all ;)

You are talking about private wealth held in things like bank accounts, etc. These are always subordinate to the actual sovereign owners of the property. I think those who can ultimately control final disposition of resources are far richer.

The Medicis actually ran Florence. If you're wealthy in Russia or China or the USA today, you don't actually get to decide what happens with your biggest assets, push comes to shove, that's up to Putin or Xi or the CIA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio

Unless you have an army, you're not really "rich" in the way people have used that term for the last few thousand years.

I'm not. I'm talking about assets controlled directly. Things do get blurry with eg MBS or Putin, or the weird finances of Thailand etc.