The CEO Murder Map

For the past two weeks, the United States has been reeling from the shocking murder of Brian Thompson in New York. As a data scientist, my instinct is always to ask how data can help make sense of what, on the surface, appears to be a senseless act of violence.

To that end, I have created the CEO Murder Map, to identify potential geographical patterns in the murders of millionaire executives. The map includes an interactive timeline that allows users to filter CEO murders in the United States by year.

My murder map was partly inspired by the K-12 School Shooting Database's Interactive Map of School Shootings , which documents 2,973 shootings across the United States. Disturbingly, this year alone, school shootings have occurred, on average, almost every single day. It is almost a bigger problem than the murder of CEOs.

The tragic reality is that the shooting of young school children in the United States has become a near-daily occurrence. Yet, these events seldom receive the same sustained media attention as the death of a CEO. The American media appears far less concerned with understanding why school children are being shot daily in classrooms than with the loss of one multi-millionaire, which has prompted endless analysis and soul-searching. I hope my CEO Murder Map can help provide some much-needed perspective on the broader context of violence in corporate America.

The K-12 School Shooting Database was established in 2018 following the Parkland High School Shooting. It now contains data on nearly 3,000 school shootings in American schools, spanning from 1966 to 2024. The Interactive Map of School Shootings includes powerful filtering options, allowing users to explore data by year, number of fatalities, school level, and time period.