Show HN: I put employees inside S&P 500 market-cap bubbles

Number of employees isn't a straightforward calculation.

- A lot of companies have part time, seasonal and contract workers (e.g. Amazon and Walmart). For some this even makes up the majority of their workforce.

- Some companies operate on a franchise model, and corporate employees are very limited. For example the 414K employees listed for Marriott aren't directly employed by them. But then you don't apply the same logic to McDonalds, where you are only counting the corporate employees.

- Holding companies (like Berkshire Hathaway) show the full employee count of their portfolio companies even through they may only own a small share. And again the logic isn't consistent because you are only counting 714 employees for Welltower, which is also a holding company.

Collecting incomplete or incorrect data and adding a hunded disclaimers at the end of the report is standard LLM behavior. Actually valuable analysis of this sort needs a lot more human effort.

Alphabet and Meta are misclassed, they are information technology.

Tesla should (probably) be in industrials, as a car and battery tech company.

Amazon is hard to class, you might check if they break out to subsidiaries for AWS versus consumer retail. Part is definitely competing with Walmart.

Definitely some strange inclusions and exclusions. "Information technology" has NetApp but not Everpure, even though they have the same market cap and are in the same space. Qnity and Jabil are included with half the market cap.

Curious why the comment by the poster got flagged but not the full post. I like when the poster includes a comment describing the content and reasons why he liked it.

1. The legend uses different icons than the visualization 2. Why would you purposefully make every bubble empty? Change the scale to 1000 employees otherwise it’s deceptive. 10k employees is arbitrary.

There's a linear relationship between revenue and employees across sectors. The desired visualization is the linear fit where outliers can be seen.

Market cap is a function of earnings and earnings growth.

TIL that Broadcom is a 1.6T company.

Very cool! It would be nice to have a constant dollars option. I always like to be able to correct for inflation.

Offtopic: It's infuriating how I clicked the site and it wasn't loading. Scrolled the comments looking for a "hug to death" mention but found none, then realized I live in Spain and today is football day...

I'll check the site when a football private company decides allows me to.

how do I zoom? there's no + and - buttons and I don't see people icons

[delayed]

What will this look like after the coming AI investment crash/growth stagnation inflection point?

It’s gonna be a wild ride to 2030.

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I was playing around with visualising the S&P 500 by market cap and decided to add employees to each company's bubble.

What surprised me was how empty some of the biggest companies looked.

Nvidia is worth $5.2 trillion but employs only 42,000 people. That's around $124 million in market cap per employee. Meanwhile, Accenture employs 814,000 people and is worth $146 billion.

Each stick figure represents 10,000 employees. You can zoom in and explore individual companies.

I wrote a bit more about what I found here: https://bigwhalehunting.com/blog/workforce/

Would be interested to hear what you think.

Welltower and Palantir are doing an amazing job! A comparison with NVIDIA in terms of market cap per employee isn't realistic here, but perks to them for the utility that each employee is bringing to the table.