Project Showcase: Big Whale Hunting

This project explores the intersection of corporate valuation and human capital by placing employees inside market-cap bubbles for S&P 500 firms.

📊 The Visual Logic

The visualization uses a geometric approach to represent corporate scale. The fundamental relationship is defined as:

$\text{Bubble Area} \propto \text{Market Capitalization}$

Inside these bubbles, individual stick figures represent the workforce. This creates a visual shorthand for efficiency and valuation:

• High Density: A bubble packed with figures indicates a lower market value per worker.
• Low Density: A large bubble containing only a few figures indicates a massive valuation per employee.

"A bubble crowded with small figures is worth little per worker and a big bubble with a handful of figures is worth a lot."

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🛠️ Technical Implementation & Filtering

To maintain clarity, the dataset is filtered. All companies are shown Only a specific subset of the S&P 500 is included based on these criteria:

• Minimum employee threshold met.
• Minimum market capitalization reached.
• Inclusion of specific outliers (e.g., Palantir and Welltower), which are represented by half-size figures due to lower staff counts.

The data is sourced from the most recent annual reports, meaning the employee_count variable may lag by up to one year.

{
  "company": "Example Corp",
  "market_cap": "1T",
  "employees": 150000,
  "sector": "Technology",
  "visual_element": "bubble_with_figures"
}

Data Flow Process

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🖱️ User Interaction & Interface

Users can navigate the data using the following actions:

• Click a specific company to view detailed metrics.
• Scroll or Pinch to zoom into the smaller, less dominant bubbles.

Available Data Views

The interface provides several toggleable info tables and graphs: