An example is the House of Saud. They are incredibly wealthy, but I believe Forbes doesn't look at _families_ only _individuals_, even if, say, the head of the family would technically make the list.
Also, they're unlikely to put out public accounting statements
The Forbes list of 100 wealthiest people will exclude people that ask to be excluded. All of the excluded people have inherited their wealth and all of them are so wealthy they would push out anyone without inherited wealth.
The real problem with those lists is that they only include people whose wealth is known and can be reasonably valued based on public sources. It's often not easy to trace the net worth of old-money families. It also means you won't find people from countries with very low transparency or dictators on the list. For example, you won't find Putin or any of the Saudi royals on the Forbes list even though they are among the wealthiest people in the world. Perhaps even competing for #1 depending on what estimate of their wealth you find to be the most reliable.
It's impossible to draw any firm conclusions from those lists because they aren't representative samples of wealthy people. They're a sample of wealthy people with public assets, and of course that's going to skew heavily towards people who founded large publically traded companies who live in countries with high degrees of financial transparency.
It is in fact an authoritative list. It's extraordinarily difficult to hide $3-$5 billion in personal wealth (enough to land firmly on the Forbes 400) in the US.
The companies - both public and private - that can contain or produce that level of wealth are very well known and almost impossible to hide. It's rare for Forbes or Bloomberg to find new stray billionaires that had been hiding for a long time. It does happen [1], it's just quite rare, especially versus the size of the known list. You don't magically quietly generate or inherit billions in wealth, you move things when you do that and it makes headlines (either over time or when a liquidity event occurs), it garners a lot of attention.
I'm rather disappointed PG would think that the Forbes wealth list could support any kind of conclusion whatsoever. One of the biggest reasons that the top of the list is filled with tech billionaires is that their wealth is relatively transparent, being mostly in the form of stock holdings in publicly traded companies and often directly disclosed. This makes it much easier for Forbes to estimate their net worth with some degree of confidence. Older wealth is often more opaque and diffuse, hidden behind various complex financial structures or stored in assets that are difficult to value or rarely change hands. Whether Forbes is aware of how much wealth there is and in what form, depends largely on the desire of the possessor to make it known. Some would want to disclose (or even inflate) their wealth for ego or branding reasons. Others would likely prefer to remain off the Forbes list altogether. So the Forbes list is a poor starting point even for a discussion soley about the wealthiest people. To draw any kind of inference from it to the broader economy is just downright ridiculous.
This list is strange because their methodology excludes :"The ranking excludes first-generation fortunes and those fortunes controlled by a single heir."
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