Billionaire Life DLC
Year-by-Year Billionaires
The world’s richest people change as the decades pass — climb a ranking that reflects the real era you’re playing in, instead of one frozen list.
Normally the Billionaires 100 ranking uses a single fixed list for an entire game: the same names, in the same order, whether it’s 1990 or 2020. Year-by-Year Billionaires replaces that with real historical data for each year, so the people you’re competing against are the people who were actually at the top at the time.
Requires the Billionaire Life DLC. Turn it on from the Career tab of the wealth options when starting a new game. With the DLC disabled, or the option off, the ranking behaves exactly as it always has.
What changes
Open the Billionaires 100 report at different points in a long game and you’ll see a genuinely different world:
| Year | At the top of the ranking |
|---|---|
| 1990 | Yoshiaki Tsutsumi, Taikichiro Mori — the peak of the Japanese property boom |
| 1996 | Bill Gates has taken first place as software wealth arrives |
| 2010 | Carlos Slim Helú leads on telecoms |
| 2018 | Jeff Bezos, as online retail overtakes everything else |
| 2026 | Elon Musk, at a scale no earlier entry approaches |
Fortunes rise and fall in between. A name can enter the list, climb for a decade and drop away again — and because the figures are the real ones, the sheer growth is visible too: the fortune that made someone the richest person in the world in 1990 would not even reach the bottom of the list by 2026.
Where you fit in
Your own character is ranked against these people, using your live in-game wealth. That makes the target move:
- Starting in 1990, a few billion dollars puts you near the top of the world.
- The same fortune in 2020 barely registers — the bar has risen enormously.
- Playing a long game from an early start, you have to keep growing just to hold your position, because the list is climbing underneath you.
This is the real appeal of the option. With a fixed list, reaching number one is a one-time achievement you keep forever. Year by year, it’s a position you have to defend against a world that keeps getting richer.
Past the end of the data
The shipped data runs to 2026. In a game that continues beyond it, the final year’s ranking carries forward and then grows with your game’s own economy, tracking inflation from that point on. The list keeps rising rather than freezing, so a late-game fortune still has something to measure itself against.
