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Methodology
Below is not a statement of intent. Each rule is implemented, most of them in a way that makes breaking them impossible rather than merely discouraged — which is the difference between a promise and a guarantee.
The rules
Not 'is discouraged' — cannot be constructed. The type that carries a net-worth figure requires an absolute source URL and the calendar date the figure describes, and rejects anything else, including a citation-shaped placeholder like the word 'Forbes'. A person with no figure meeting that bar shows as unknown.
Not the date it was fetched. Those are different facts and the catalogue stores both. Everything on the site quotes the former, because that is the one that tells you whether the number is any good.
When two sources disagree, both are kept and one real figure is displayed — the freshest, weighted by how firmly its source states it. An average would be a number no publication stands behind and no reader could click through to check, which breaks the rule above.
Recency is the main signal, because large fortunes move daily. It is not the only one: a short, published list of outlets that report on large fortunes as a matter of record — Forbes, Bloomberg, Reuters, the FT and a handful of others — is recognised, and anything outside it cannot outrank a recognised publication on freshness alone. This exists because the newest claim on file for one person cited an insurance blog, and recency alone put that ahead of every Forbes figure. It is not a judgement about any other outlet; unlisted sources still count, and are still shown with their name attached.
Where sources differ by more than a quarter of the headline figure, the spread is printed next to it. Large fortunes are genuinely uncertain, and pretending otherwise is the failure mode this whole site is built against.
391 of 835 people have a photograph. That ceiling is a property of the source data, not a gap being worked on, and it is why a person with no portrait is set as a picture block of the same shape rather than as a hole in a row. A photograph whose licence requires an author and records none is removed rather than shown unattributed, and every credit that remains is printed in full in the register on the sources page.
A decided pair writes one matchup row and moves both ratings in a single transaction. Nothing else writes a rating — there is no editorial weighting step between a cast vote and the board.
The catalogue spans about a billion dollars to several hundred billion. On a linear score every wrong answer outside the top ten looks identical. Scoring by how many TIMES out you are means a near miss on a small fortune counts the same as a near miss on a large one — which is what a player's intuition is actually doing.
'71% voted this way' is a count over the append-only matchup log. Where nobody has voted on a pair, the site says nobody has voted on it. No counter here is padded to look busier than it is.
The refusals
The question is which name is bigger, and which fortune is larger. Neither is a claim about anyone's character or conduct, or about how any fortune was made. There is no 'who deserves it' here and there will not be.
Public figures only, ranked on public record.
Including in the social images and the page descriptions, which are the places a number travels furthest from its context.
Forbes and Bloomberg both forbid automated collection. Adapters for them exist and are switched off; enabling one is a deliberate act recorded in configuration. Their figures reach this site only where an open source cites them, with the citation linked.
Two boards
The fame board records which name people picked more often. The fortune board orders the same people by their sourced figure. They disagree constantly, because being well known in connection with wealth and having the larger fortune are not the same thing.
The distance between someone’s place on the two boards is a comparison of two lists — one of votes, one of published figures. It is not a verdict, and the site does not draw one from it.