Meanwhile, the charitable Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which aims to create tools to help cure or manage all diseases, announced a new Chicago Biohub in March. In late March the Oracle of Omaha, a veteran of market crises, reportedly advised the Biden administration on bank runs and discussed possible investments in regional banks. The founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, became billionaires at age 30. We used stock prices and exchange rates from March 11, 2022 to calculate net worths. Still, Forbes found more than 1,000 billionaires who are richer than they were a year ago.
And 236 newcomers have become billionaires over the past year—including the first ever from Barbados, Bulgaria, Estonia and Uruguay. Nine of the top 20 are worth $100 billion or more, the most ever, and up from just four last year. The minimum net worth needed to crack the top 20 is now $38.9 billion, up from $37 billion a year ago.
In September, Walter Isaacson’s bombshell biography of the mercurial mogul revealed fresh details on Musk’s involvement in the war in Ukraine, as well as the existence of a third child with his on-and-off partner, musician Grimes. The members of The Forbes 400 list of the nation’s richest people largely got richer this year, adding a collective $500 billion to their net worths. But most of those gains—totaling some $310 billion—came from just the top 20 people on the ranking. Elon Musk is once again the richest person in the world with a net worth of $246.1 billion, Forbes reported in July 2023. Musk is the founder of SpaceX and The Boring Company and co-founder of PayPal and brain technology company Neuralink among other companies.
Or Prince Al-Walid bin Talal, president of the Kingdom Holding Company. And finally we also find Masayoshi Son, founder of the multinational financial holding SoftBank. It also wouldn’t hurt to have been born into wealth; however, the greatest fortunes on this list started as good ideas that people with creativity, drive, and connections used to build some of the world’s largest companies. Sergey Brin was born in Moscow, Russia, moving to the U.S. with his family when he was six in 1979.
Gates stepped down from the board of Microsoft in 2020 but still spends 10% of his time working with teams at the software firm–including those at OpenAI, which Microsoft has backed. “This is every bit as important as the PC, as the internet,” Gates told Forbes in February, referring to generative artificial intelligence tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Meanwhile, he and his former wife, Melinda French Gates, are boosting spending by the Gates Foundation, which they co-chair and plan to wind down within 25 years. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, four years after starting the company, joined the list at 23 to become the youngest self-made billionaire.
In addition to its line of electric automobiles, Tesla produces energy storage devices, automobile accessories, and, through its acquisition of SolarCity in 2016, solar power systems. Musk is also CEO and chief engineer of Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), a developer of space launch rockets. Billionaires play an outsized role in shaping the global economy, politics, and philanthropy. Forbes puts the number of billionaires in the world at 2,640 in 2023. The wealthiest among them is Elon Musk; CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and owner of X (formerly Twitter). It hasn’t been easy, especially amid AI competition and tech layoffs, including 21,000 job cuts at his Meta Platforms since November.
Paul Allen, founder of Microsoft together with Bill Gates and recently deceased in 2018, was one of the richest men in the world. Although he gave up his position at Microsoft in 2000, he remained a major shareholder for years. The Forbes list of the world’s wealthiest people in late 2022 is a mix of technology and business moguls. Forbes catalog of the wealthy started in 1982 with the Forbes 400, which lists the 400 richest Americans. In current iterations, Forbes includes the person’s net worth, a philanthropy score and a self-made score. Both George Soros and Rihanna have self-made scores of 10, citing their underprivileged backgrounds before working their way into wealth.
If in the chapter above we saw who are the 10 richest people in the world in 2021, who were the richest people 20 years earlier in 2020? In 2020, Larry Ellison was the second richest man in the world thanks to Oracle Corporation. Oracle Corporation is one of the largest software companies in the world. In addition to being co-founder and CTO, he was CEO of this company until 2014 and then became its executive chairman.
The CEO of Berkshire Hathaway earlier this year revealed that he is “halfway” toward his stated goal of giving away the vast majority of his fortune, but the performance of his company’s stock isn’t helping. This year, 91-year-old Oracle of Omaha added $21 billion to a fortune he has described as “an almost incomprehensible sum.” The former Microsoft CEO and owner of the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers is $41 billion richer at the end of 2021 than he was at the start of the year.
Gains by Zhong-led beverage producer Nongfu Spring offset a decline in shares of his Covid test supplier Beijing Wantai Biological Pharmacy after the country eased pandemic restrictions at the end of last year. The secretive Mars siblings own an estimated two-thirds of Mars Inc., the business behind M&M’s, Snickers, Ben’s Original rice and Iams pet food. Lately the $47 billion (2022 revenue) private company, founded by their grandfather in 1919 https://1investing.in/ and run since 2001 by non-family CEOs, has been on a buying spree. It snapped up veterinary equipment firm Heska for $1.3 billion in June, added health brand Kevin’s Natural Foods in July and agreed to acquire a European specialist veterinary company called Synlab Vet in August. Shares of Dell Technologies are up 87% since last year, largely thanks to an insatiable demand for servers from AI companies and possible inclusion in the S&P 500.
The database program proved so popular that SDL would change its name to Oracle Systems Corporation in 1982. He joined Tesla’s board in Dec. 2018 and stepped down in June 2022. These billionaires can, however, still borrow against that wealth to avoid selling stock, deferring (or eliminating for heirs) taxes on unrealized capital gains in the process. Multi-billionaires can also take advantage of a panoply of tax deductions to offset reported income, leaving some on this list paying no income tax in recent years. The only member of the top 10 under the age of 40, 37-year-old Zuckerberg’s wealth increased by $24 billion this year.
The gains mark the best half-year for all the billionaires on the index since the second half of 2020 when the markets rebounded from the COVID-19 pandemic, per Bloomberg. The world’s top 500 billionaires had a bumper start to 2023 thanks to a broad market rally. Page was among early investors in Planetary Resources, a space exploration and asteroid-mining company. Established in 2009, the company was acquired by blockchain firm ConsenSys in 2018 amid funding problems. He has also shown an interest in flying car companies, investing in both Kitty Hawk and Opener, although Kitty Hawk ceased operations in 2022. After acquiring Android in 2005, Google released the Android mobile phone operating system in 2008.
Meanwhile, Zuckerberg added nearly $60 billion to his net worth this year, following a nearly 80% rise in Meta’s stock price amid the tech giant’s “year of efficiency.” Musk and Arnault have been swapping positions as the world’s richest person since late 2022. These billionaires collectively added $852 billion to their fortunes in the first half of the year — or about $14 million each day during the period — according to Bloomberg’s calculations based on its Billionaires Index. Her net worth is derived from her holdings in L’Oréal, the world’s largest cosmetics company.
The brotherly relationship between the two became strained when Ballmer started pushing the tech company into hardware, such as the Surface tablet and the Windows mobile phone, during his tenure as CEO. Like several of the tech billionaires on this list, Larry Page embarked on his path to fame and fortune in a college dorm room. While attending Stanford University in 1995, Page and his friend Sergey Brin came up with the idea of improving Internet data extraction. The duo devised a new search engine technology they dubbed Backrub after its ability to assess links to a page. In the run-up to the buyout announcement, Musk sold 9.6 million shares of Tesla, valued at roughly $8.5 billion.
The former Microsoft CEO’s fortune is down $10 billion in the past year, primarily due to the slump in Microsoft shares. Next time you Google anything, remember Page, who is one of its co-founders. The U.S. still tops all countries with the most billionaires at 735, followed by China’s 607.
