I put employees inside S&P 500 market-cap bubbles
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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.
HN · launched Oct 25, 2026 · 177 upvotes (top 5%) · 0 views
Niche: investment and equity research platforms · 226 launches, 13 in the last 7 days ▼ -24% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Analytics & BI
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 226 launches in investment and equity research platforms →
Could you build this?
Yes This is an interactive D3-style chart of S&P 500 market caps against employee counts, built from public filings and market data. The main work is data collection and front-end visualization.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: NetApp, Everpure
Concerns raised: Alphabet and Meta misclassified as tech sectors, Tesla arguably belongs in industrials, Employee counts not comparable across corporate structures, Inconsistent S&P sector categorizations for mega caps, Contract workers may be undercounted
Feature requests: Constant-dollar (inflation-adjusted) option, Visible zoom controls and people icons, Revenue per employee view
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 88 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #6 of 89 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 360 days after the earliest competitor.
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