Richest Texans

[rogramjet]

Forbes released their 2007 richest Americans list. Texas and Dallas/Fort Worth in particular are well represented:

http://www.forbes.com/lists/2007/54/richlist07_The-400-Richest-Americans-Texas_7Rank.html

[AeroD]

Yeah. Dallas is billionaire central in Texas. 14 compared to Houston's 8.

Include Fort Worth's 9...there are 23 billionaires in DFW. Put their wealth together I am sure its greater than GDP of many countries.

[Lakewooder]

Well what do the Houston people have to say about that?

[I45Tex]

Well, not many of them read this board, and since I am a Dallas native I'm considered such on the Houston forums, but since I have lived 60 miles south of Houston for the second half of my life and have come to love that city as much or more than Dallas, I suppose that for the purposes of our fun I can presume to speak for the Houston people.

First we would agree that "DFW is the billionaire capital of Texas", and pout. Then, no less aptly, someone would point out that while very wealthy people are a function of a society's economic dynamism, their presence isn't necessarily a boost in achieving further economic dynamism or even prosperity. The very pinnacles of wealth are reached by managing to exploit opportunities that others are excluded from, by jealously guarded information asymmetries or by complexity (deep-water drilling, for instance, or financial derivatives); while this is not a value judgment, it can still mean that the total benefit extracted would have been greater had access been wider and the threshold prices extracted would have been more reasonable and open to more business.
The amount of pride one should have in one's economy is probably a function of one specific part of the entire income distribution: the middle class. However, the amount of pride one should have where pride is understood to be referring to something exceptional is a function of two parts of the income distribution: first, the number of very successful (multimillionaire? or even less? certainly doesn't have to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars) workers, and second, the number of lower-income families successfully ascending into the middle class in your urban area over time. Oil and engineering sectors generate wider numbers of very prosperous entrepreneurial operations than semiconductors, aviation and banking do, so I don't think Houstonians would be uncomfortable with the possibility that they have many more dozen-to-hundred-millionaires than Dallas. Lest you think that the tallies are the important thing, be reminded: Dallas' 14 billionaires are less rich (and that *is* the criterion going) than Fort Worth's 9. That means that, as it turns out, less than half of the Metroplex's billionaire wealth, who could live anywhere they wanted, wanted Dallas. In fact, above the $1.5-bil plateau, there's only 75% as much capital residing in Dallas from billionaires as there is in little Fort Worth. If that is supposed to be minimized (and realistically, it should be) by the fact that Dallas basically draws even from pocketbooks farther down the billionaire list, and that Dallas outright surpasses FW personal wealth by leaps and bounds once you get down into the ranks of multimillionaires, then we must either admit the likelihood of Houston having the exact same advantage, or quit talking about this and go straight to Texas' cities' overall economic success.

[AeroD]

At least according to Quick Facts from Census Bureau, using 2000 numbers, Dallas (city) had a higher per capita income than Houston (city).

[I45Tex]

Also usually has had a higher median housing price than Houston, if I recall correctly.

[mgd323]

It's a little old, but I didn't see this article anywhere else on here.

http://www.forbes.com/2008/04/30/billionaires-london-moscow-biz-billies-cz_cv_0430billiecities.html

The U.S. has more cities in the top 10 than any other country: four including Los Angeles, home to 24 billionaires, including director Steven Spielberg; Dallas, home to 15, including oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens; and San Francisco, with 19 billionaires, including tech wunderkinds like Google's (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) Larry Page (his co-founder Sergey Brin and the world's youngest billionaire Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg live close by in Silicon Valley).

From Slideshow (http://www.forbes.com/2008/04/30/billionaires-london-moscow-biz-billies-cz_cv_0430billiecities_slide_3.html?thisSpeed=1500 0)

9. Dallas, Texas

Number of billionaires: 15

Average net worth: $2.6 billion

This southern city is swimming in oil billionaires like T. Boone Pickens and Ray Lee Hunt. But Dallas has room for Texas-sized fortunes from all sectors. Other wealthy Dallas denizens: Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, known more for his courtside antics than his background in technology, and 1992 presidential spoiler H. Ross Perot, whose fortune is derived from data supplier Perot Systems. Where do Dallas' wealthiest dine? World-class chefs like Top Chef's Tom Colicchio and sushi maestro Nobu Matsuhisa have set up lavish outposts in this unlikely gourmet destination.