Methodology

Confidence engine

• Source authority — 35%
• Source independence — 20%
• Recency — 15%
• Cross-source agreement — 15%
• Directness — 10%
• Manual verification — 5%

Displayed as Very high (90+), High (75–89), Medium (55–74), Low (35–54) and Unverified.

Wealth estimation

Wealth is built from components — listed equity, private marks, disclosed compensation, career earnings, property and liabilities — each labelled REPORTED, CALCULATED, ESTIMATED or UNVERIFIED. We publish a range and a midpoint, never false precision, and where sources disagree the dispersion widens the range rather than being resolved silently.

FGR Score (0–100)

A single measure of current public significance, normalised across every published profile. It is relative to the people PUBLICFGR covers — not an absolute claim about the world — and it never enters the database as a fact about a person.

• Global reach — 25%Combined verified following across official accounts, log-scaled so scale advantages do not swamp the score.
• Media prominence — 20%Volume and diversity of indexed headlines from tier A to C publishers.
• Career significance — 20%Profile completeness, documented career events and awards weighted by evidence quality.
• Economic significance — 15%Midpoint wealth estimate, log-scaled and only counted when the estimate is source-backed.
• Search demand — 10%First-party search demand over a rolling window with anomaly filtering.
• Momentum — 10%Rate of change in coverage, audience and search rather than absolute level.

Historical wealth

Checkpoints are published every 15 years from 1850, every 50 years from 1700 to 1850 and every 250 years before that. Each entry carries its valuation method, an estimated share of contemporary economic output, an evidence reference date, a source tier and a confidence grade.

• Mark-to-marketMark-to-market valuation of disclosed listed holdings plus estimated private assets, net of known liabilities.
• Rebased nominalContemporary nominal estimate rebased to modern currency using long-run price and output series.
• Economic shareEstimated share of contemporary economic output. No defensible exact modern-currency figure exists for this entry.

Personal wealth, dynastic wealth and state or imperial resources are labelled separately and never merged into one ranked number. Snapshots are immutable: revisions create a new record rather than overwriting history.