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.
What they actually need to do is scale the size of the stick people correctly.
For example, one meaningful measure might be to scale it so that one stick person fits inside a circle with area corresponding to the amount of money they have to earn in total for that number of people to cover all their living expenses and some amount of savings left over. I am sure some statistical bureau has some meaningful dollar amount of some sort that makes sense to use.
- 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.
It’s gonna be a wild ride to 2030.
It’s funny to read that from this becuase I read it as these companies are so good at exploiting capitalism that they can make this much profit and benefit so few actual people in the country. It’s like they’re a leech on the country, rather than companies to be proud of.
If we have hundreds of hyper-successful companies but we have people going into medical bankruptcy for a cancer diagnosis, I’d say America is failing at taxing these companies enough to fund what actually matters in society.
People seem to think Nvidia’s gpus are the be all and end all of enabling large models but there isn’t a large model out there that runs on a single gpu.
Broadcom sells things like pcie switches. They allow you to plug your in about a hundred gpus into one big switched pcie plane that can all communicate at full pcie bandwidth to each other. Nvidia has nvlink which is similar. You need this technology to enable large models and they sell for even higher margins than the gpus and ram.
I'll check the site when a football private company allows me to.
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.
From a finance perspective I think they’re a _little_ weird but functional (NVDA moves with semis, MSFT with software, etc) whereas from a tech perspective I’d say very weird until you learn about the backstory and what motivated it.
Market cap is a function of earnings and earnings growth.
I was gonna say "could you add a stickman per instance of Claude" but I guess there's no data on that.
> I was aware of that and mention it
I'm confused.
> Employee counts come from company reports via Yahoo Finance, with Wikipedia used where figures weren't available. They're not necessarily from the same date, and companies don't all count employees in exactly the same way.
> As the McDonald's and Welltower examples show, a company's reported workforce doesn't necessarily represent everyone whose labour contributes to its business.
Well, alright. I'm just not sure how useful this is. There's no way to normalize them but the data's presented as though they were. You also sum employees across sectors which compounds the errors.
Or it's classic modern journalism that gets clicks. LLMs are just mimic'n human behavior.
fhdkweig•2h ago
dmayle•2h ago
codingdave•2h ago
Such comments also encourage the idea that people "own" the threads they start. I've seen people get mad when people take the conversation in a direction they did not want, or add instructions telling people what to talk about and putting constraints around discussion. Such things stifle interesting conversation.
So I land heavily the opposite direction. Just post, and leave it at that. If the community finds it interesting, discussion will ensue.
Now, Show HNs are their own thing. An initial explanation is absolutely appropriate for a show HN. But it should be part of the post, not a comment.
fwipsy•2h ago
ThrowawayR2•1h ago
eterm•43m ago