Who's the biggest Megalomaniac?

We analysed over 300 million data points to create a game about the the good, the bad and the ugly that rule our world.

Megalomaniacs is a card game about billionaires, tech moguls, CEOs, politicians, warlords and celebrities designed to initiate conversations about wealth, power and modesty in today's world.

Is Kim Kardashian perceived as more powerful than Elon Musk?
How visionary is Anna Delvey?
Who's more delusional than Sam Bankman-Fried?

It’s time to find out.

A bit of context

Earlier this year we got approached with the idea of making a card game about those that are obsessed with wealth, power and a passion for grand schemes. It was fairly easy to come up with a list of names. What we didn't know yet was how to score them. How do you come up with a system and categories to compare all these personalities?

We ended up working with management consulting firm TD Reply to devise a method of using social listening tools and proprietary algorithms that scraped the (English-speaking) Internet over a period of one year. A list of 58 of the world's wealthiest and most powerful people resulted in over 300 million data points that we analysed based on keywords such as power, vision, delusion and modesty.

The category that turned out most interesting was the one we called Noise. Noise describes the total amount of data points we found across the social internet on any one person. Elon Musk dominates this one, his noise score being 172000000 - that is, 172 million entries (posts, tweets, articles) existing combining our key metrics (power, delusion, ...) to his name, in the past 12 months. His score makes more than a half of the total data points we've gathered, and more than double than his successor in the category: Donald Trump, obviously, followed by Cristiano Ronaldo. And for the data nerds out there - yes, TD Reply created the scoring index using normalized distribution.

So did we find the truth about what people really think about the power, vision and delusion of these Megalomaniacs? To a certain extent, yes. But the discourses we analysed are biased towards those who generate the most noise. The ones who stay under the radar – like Ruja Ignatova, the crypto queen behind one of the biggest scams in history, or Richard Sackler, the billionaire who has his hands in an opioid epidemic – score fairly average.

But public opinion isn't objective. It is made – predominantly online these days.

Megalomaniacs was created by a group of artists, designers, writers and researchers who question dominant power structures as tools to create individual and collective agency.