About Billionaire Army

You already know the number is obscene. That isn't the problem.

The problem is what happens ten seconds later. You read that somebody sold nine figures of stock in an afternoon, you feel the thing you always feel, and then you do the only thing there is to do - you screenshot it, or you post about it, or you close the tab. The anger goes somewhere, and the somewhere is nowhere. Tomorrow there's a different number and you do it again.

That loop is the actual problem. Not the money. The loop.

But you know what's different this time? There are receipts.

Every billionaire on this site carries a public file: net worth, federal political donations, foundation assets and grants, insider stock sales, and an open score for how much of their wealth they actually give away. Every number links to where it came from and the date we pulled it. Estimates say they're estimates. Where we don't know, we say we don't know. And you can check all of it - the code that produces every number is public. It is a Skylark Creations project.

That's the whole trick. There isn't a second one.

Service is the price of the palace

Concentrated wealth carries a public obligation. That's the belief underneath this entire site, and it is much older than any of us. Every society that has let a small number of people hold most of the things has had some version of the same argument about what they owe for it.

Nobody has ever sent them the invoice.

About the name

“Army” is doing two jobs here, and both of them are true.

The first army is them. A thousand or so people with more capacity to move the world than most governments have, enlisted - ranked, scored, compared, and competing in public at the thing many of them already say they're doing. That's the cheerful version. It's also the one this site is actually built to make possible.

The second army is everybody else.

Here is the part that is neither a threat nor cheerful: every time in recorded history that wealth has piled up like this, it has eventually come back down, and the record on how is bleak. The economic historian Walter Scheidel went looking for every case he could find and came back with essentially four mechanisms - mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state collapse, and catastrophic plague (The Great Leveler, Princeton University Press, 2017). That's the list. Peaceful reform almost never makes it onto it.

That's not a threat. It's a bibliography.

So there is going to be an army. There always is. The only open questions are which kind, and how much warning everybody gets. We would rather it be the first one. History mostly delivers the second.

This is not a new idea, and it is not ours

In 1889 Andrew Carnegie - then among the richest men alive - published a pair of articles in the North American Review, later collected as The Gospel of Wealth. His argument was that the rich are mere trustees of their fortunes, obliged to live unostentatiously, provide moderately for their families, and spend the rest on the common good - and that a man who reaches the end still holding it has failed. His own line for that: “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.”

He was not a radical. He was the era's biggest industrialist, writing about himself. We have simply built the ledger he described and left it open.

What this is, honestly

A site that asks you to check its sources doesn't get to be vague about itself.

You write the goals on this site, and a published heuristic suggests which billionaires are positioned to move each one. A match is a suggestion about fit. It is never a claim that someone could have solved it - and the score is not calculated from goals. The Public Benefit Score is giving relative to net worth, plus transparency - nothing else. If commitments against goals ever become part of the score, this section changes and says when. We put it here because the whole site rests on not overstating; it would be strange to start on this page.

The score also doesn't measure whether someone is a good person, whether their company is useful, whether they pay their taxes, or how they treat the people who work for them. It measures giving against capacity - one narrow question that happens to have a checkable answer. A high grade is not absolution.

Facts and opinion never share a container. Facts are sourced and moderated. Commentary is labeled as commentary, always.

We do not publish home addresses, family details, or anything touching a person's physical safety. Not once, not for anyone, no matter what they have done.

And this is not about hating rich people. I'm not interested in dunking on anybody. Dunking is just the loop again with better production values.

Who's writing this

I'm David Kooi. I should say where I'm standing. I'm not poor, I have an MBA, and I got to spend my time building this instead of working a second job. Take that for whatever you think it's worth. I think it's worth something.

As for why this. For years I owned a bike shop in Woodland Hills. The hardest thing about that business was never taxes, or regulations, or the competition - it was how many people walked in, wanted a bike, and couldn't afford one. You learn to recognize them. The guy from the grocery store. The server down the block. That did more to rearrange my thinking than my economics degree ever did.

Amazon wouldn't be Amazon without Jeff Bezos, and he deserves to be rich for it. But Amazon also doesn't exist without language, mathematics, electricity, the transistor, and a few thousand years of people working things out and handing the answer forward. That inheritance isn't his. It's the most valuable thing any of us owns, and all of us own it. So the question I keep landing on isn't how much the government should take from anyone - it's how much of what we built together any one person should keep, and what they do with the rest. I made something out of nothing too, on a much smaller scale, and the same question applies to me. This site doesn't answer it. It keeps the receipt so you can.

What it costs

Nothing. It's donation-funded, capped at $100 per person per year - a hard cap, not a suggestion, because a site about concentrated money should not be funded by concentrated money. No ads. No premium tier. Nothing sold, including you. The code isn't public yet - it goes up under an open licence before launch, and then you won't have to take my word for any of that either.

If we got something wrong

Tell us. Email hello@skylarkcreations.com. You don't need an account, and you don't need to explain who you are - if a number here is wrong, we want it fixed more than you do.

Corrections to sourced facts are taken seriously and reviewed.

A site whose entire argument is “go check the receipt” doesn't get to be precious when somebody checks ours.

Start here

Pick one. The billionaire you're angriest at, or one you've never heard of - the second is usually more interesting. Read the file. Then follow a single source link all the way down to the actual document.

You'll come back with the thing the group chat never gives you: the real number, and where it came from.

Service is the price of the palace. Consider this the itemized bill.