- Overview
- Mukesh Ambani
- Jeff Bezos
- Bernard Arnault
- Bill Gates
- Warren Buffett
- Larry Page
- Sergey Brin
- Larry Ellison
- Steve Ballmer
- Elon Musk
Overview
There is no question that billionaires have an extensive impact on the global economy, politics, and philanthropy. A lot of these billionaires founded technology giants, and most of their wealth remains invested in those companies to this day. Their wealth is largely based on publicly traded stocks, so their net worth can fluctuate as the market fluctuates.
Such as how Tesla Inc.’s shares rose in price in 2021, boosting the net worth of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and placing him 1st in the world ranking of billionaires.
On the other hand, in February 2022, Meta Platforms Inc.’s share price plunged after a disappointing earnings report, pushing Mark Zuckerberg out of the top 10.
Below are the top 10 richest people in the world as of today according to Forbes World’s Billionaires List.
10. Mukesh Ambani
Age: 65 Years Old
Country: India
Industry: Technology
Affiliation: Reliance Industries
Net Worth: $90.7 Billion
Last on our list of the top 10 richest people in the world is Mukesh Dhirubhai Ambani. Born in a humble household, Ambani is the chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries Ltd, one of India’s most valuable companies as measured by revenue.
Reliance Industries is a family business that deals in refining and petrochemicals, as well as retail and telecommunications. It is the first Indian company to achieve $100 billion in revenue and 104th on the Fortune Global 500. Dhirubhai Ambani, his father, initially started Reliance as a small textile manufacturing company in 1966 as a yarn trader. The company was divided after the death of Ambani’s father in 2002 between brothers Anil Ambani and Mukesh Ambani.
Indians often credit Mukesh Ambani with bringing the country’s digital revolution forward. He also plans to invest $80 billion in renewable energy over the next 10-15 years and build a new refinery complex nearby as part of his green initiative.
9. Steve Ballmer
Age: 66 Years Old
Country: United States
Industry: Technology
Affiliation: Microsoft, Los Angeles Clippers
Net Worth: $91.4 Billion
Steve Ballmer is best known as Microsoft’s former CEO, who led the company from 2000 to 2014. Following Bill Gates’ encouragement, Ballmer left Stanford’s MBA program in 1980 to work at Microsoft. Eventually, he was elected president in 1998, and he succeeded Gates as CEO on January 13, 2000.
A good friend of Bill Gates, Ballmer even served as best man at his wedding to Melinda French. Ballmer is also credited for one of the biggest acquisitions in Microsoft’s history – the $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype that enabled Microsoft to compete head to head with Google’s Voice and Apple’s FaceTime. Additionally, Ballmer is an avid fan of Basketball as seen from his multiple investments in various sports franchises. His $2 billion purchase of the Los Angeles Clippers came the same year as his retirement from Microsoft after he won the bidding.
8. Larry Ellison
Age: 78 Years Old
Country: United States
Industry: Technology
Affiliation: Oracle Corporations,
Net Worth: $ 106 Billion
Lawrence Joseph Ellison is the co-founder, executive chairman, and chief technology officer of Oracle Corporation, which placed him in the 8th position among the top 10 richest people in the world. Although Ellison stepped down from the position of CEO in 2014, he still holds 35% of the shares. On the sidelines, he also owns 98% of Lanai Island in Hawaii. While about 75% of his income is sourced from his shares at Oracle, Larry Ellison also holds a $15 billion stake in his fellow billionaire Elon Musk’s company, Tesla Inc. After purchasing 3 million Tesla shares earlier in 2018, Ellison was elected to Tesla’s board of directors.
In 1977, Ellison formed Oracle after being inspired by the work of Edgar F. Codd on relational database design for IBM. Soon after, in 1989, Forbes listed Ellison as one of the top 10 richest men due to Oracle’s massive success as a database vendor for mid to low-range systems.
7. Sergey Brin
Age: 49 Years Old
Country: United States/ Russia
Industry: Technology
Affiliation: Google Inc., Alphabet Inc., PageRank
Net Worth: $ 107 Billion
The second half of the duo, Sergey Brin joined Larry Page in the creation of Google after joining a graduate program at Stanford University. Born in Moscow, Russia, Sergey Brin, and his family moved to the U.S. when he was 6.
With Page, Brin designed and built a search engine in his dorm room and created a simple search page for users with the former’s basic HTML programming skills and thus began the journey of expanding Google.
Additionally, Brin invests $4.5 million in Space Adventures, a Virginia-based company that offers space tourism services. In 2019, Brin spent much of his time at Alphabet’s moonshot research lab X, rather than attending public Alphabet events. Like Page, Brin also stepped down from his position as the president of Alphabet Inc., in December of 2019. Although, he still owns shares and remains a controlling board member of the company.
6. Larry Page
Age:49 Years Old
Country: United States
Industry: Technology
Affiliation: Google Inc., Alphabet Inc., PageRank
Net Worth: $111 Billion
Among the top 10 billionaires in the world is Michigan-born Larry Page, who is a computer scientist, internet entrepreneur, and business tycoon, famously known for co-founding Google.
As a Ph.D. student at Stanford, Larry Page, co-created Google with Sergey Brin in 1998. Today, Google is the world’s leading search engine, representing 92% of global searches and a name people from all corners of the world recognize.
To make information accessible and usable, the duo devised a new search engine called “Backrub,” which analyzes “backing links”.
In the days following Google’s founding, Page became the company’s CEO while Brin served as its president. He served as CEO of Google until 2001, when Eric Schmidt took over, then from 2011 until 2015, when he became Alphabet’s CEO. In December 2019, Larry Page stepped down as Alphabet’s CEO, although he remains an active board member and controlling shareholder.
5. Warren Buffett
Age: 91 Years Old
Country: United States
Industry: Finance & Investments
Net Worth: $117 Billion
American businessman and philanthropist Warren Edward Buffett is widely regarded as the most successful investor of the 20th century.
Buffett was born in 1930, the second of three children and the only son of Leila (née Stahl) and Congressman Howard Buffett. He began his entrepreneurial and investment ventures at a young age and made money delivering newspapers, selling golf balls and stamps, and detailing cars.
He worked for Buffett-Falk & Co. from 1951 to 1954, Graham-Newman Corp. from 1954 to 1956, Buffett Partnership, Ltd. from 1956 to 1969, and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. from 1970 to the present.
In 1962, Buffett became a millionaire because of his partnerships, and in 1965 he took control of a textile manufacturing firm, Berkshire Hathaway. In 1966, Buffett closed the partnership to new money, and in 1969 he liquidated the partnership and transferred his assets to his partners.
Even as the owner of a huge amount of wealth, Warren Buffett opted to live a more frugal lifestyle compared to other billionaires. A philanthropist and a frugality guru, Buffet promised to donate 99 percent of his fortune to philanthropic causes, after he founded The Giving Pledge in 2010 with Bill Gates, which encourages billionaires to donate at least half their wealth.
4. Bill Gates
Age: 66 Years Old
Country: United States
Industry: Technology
Affiliation: Microsoft, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Net Worth: $129 Billion
In 1975, Bill Gates joined his childhood friend Paul Allen in developing new software for the original microcomputers while attending Harvard University.
Bill Gates was an active software developer in Microsoft’s early years and was responsible for Microsoft’s product strategy from 1975 until 2006, but his primary role in most of the company’s history was as a manager and executive.
Gates announced his transition out of Microsoft on June 15, 2006, and placed Ray Ozzie and Craig Mundie in charge of management and product strategy.
Bill Gates currently owns about 1% of Microsoft after leaving the company in March 2020.
Gates is a major shareholder in several companies, including AutoNation, bgC3 LLC, Canadian National Railway (CN), Cascade Investment LLC, Carbon Engineering, SCoPEx, EarthNow, Eclipse Aviation, Impossible Foods, and Ecolab.
He is also co-founder of several companies, including ResearchGate, TerraPower, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Ginkgo Bioworks, Luminous Computing, and Mologic. As part of their creation of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill Gates and his wife Melinda Gates put together three family foundations and contributed $5 billion worth of stock
3. Bernard Arnault
Age: 73 Years Old
Country: France
Industry: Fashion & Retail
Affiliation: LVMH, Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Sephora
Net Worth: $158 Billion
The French national Bernard Arnault oversees LVMH, one of the world’s largest luxury goods producers with an empire of 70 fashion and cosmetics brands under its belt such as Louis Vuitton, Hennessy, Marc Jacobs, and Sephora.
In 1987, he invested in LVMH and two years later was named majority shareholder, chairman of the board, and CEO.
Arnault began his career at his father’s construction firm, Ferret-Savinel, gaining ownership and later converting it into a real estate company named Férinel Inc. in 1979.
He acquired the Financière Agache, a luxury goods company, and won the bidding war for Boussac Saint-Frères. In 1987 he sold nearly all of the company’s assets, keeping only the Christian Dior brand and Le Bon Marché department store.
The company was transformed into one of the world’s largest luxury groups under Arnault’s leadership after he took over.
He acquired Céline, Berluti, Kenzo, Marc Jacobs, Sephora, and La Samaritaine over eleven years. Arnault decided to develop a center in New York to manage LVMH’s presence in the United States and bought a stake in Gucci before being detected. The largest luxury brand acquisition ever took place when LVMH acquired Tiffany & Co for $15.8 billion in January 2021.
2. Jeff Bezos
Age: 58 Years Old
Country: United States
Industry: Technology and E-commerce
Affiliation: Amazon, Blue Origin
Net Worth: $171 Billion
Born Jeffrey Preston Bezos, in New Mexico, United State, the entrepreneur founded e-commerce giant Amazon in 1994 out of his garage in Seattle.
Amazon started as an online bookstore before expanding into an e-commerce site and eventually into video streaming, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and cloud computing. The company went on to acquire Whole Foods in 2017.
After selling out $8.8 Billion worth of shares, Bezos stepped down from the CEO position to become an executive chair in July of 2021. Now he owns a total of 10% shares in the company.
Jeff Bezos was the first person to reach a total of $100 Million in net worth after Bill Gates in 1999. He ventured into the paths of Space exploration through Blue Origin, an aerospace manufacturer and sub-orbital spaceflight services company, in 2000.
In July 2021, Jeff Bezos and his brother Mark Bezos took flight in a rocket produced by Blue Origin.
Bezos co-founded Altos Labs with Yuri Milner, founder of Mail.ru, in September 2021.
Through his venture capital firm, Bezos Expeditions, he also manages many other investments, including the major American newspaper The Washington Post, which he purchased in 2013 for $250 million.
1. Elon Musk
Age: 51 Years Old
Country: United States
Industry: Technology and Automotive
Affiliation: Tesla Inc., The Boring Company, Neuralink, Open AI, SpaceX
Net Worth: $219 Billion
Born in Pretoria, South Africa, Musk displayed a talent for Computers and entrepreneurship at age 12 when he created a video game and sold it to a computer magazine.
In 1995, he enrolled at Stanford University but later decided to pursue his business career instead. Elon Musk and his brother Kimbal Musk found the web software company Zip2 before selling it off to Compaq in 1999 (for $307 million). His earnings from this startup led to the creation of X.com, an online payment system that was eventually purchased by eBay Inc. (for $1.5 billion) and transformed into PayPal Holdings.
Musk was greatly interested in space exploration and believed humans to be capable of living on other planets of the solar system. Eventually, the high cost and low efficiency of space rockets lead to him founding Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) to produce affordable and reusable rockets, where he serves as CEO and Chief Engineer. SpaceX is now worth $127 billion.
In 2004, he became an investor in electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla Motors, Inc. After serving as its chairman and product architect, he eventually became CEO in 2008. Tesla later acquired SolarCity and transformed it into Tesla Energy, a solar power company. A quarter of Tesla’s stock is owned by him in stock and options, and more than half of that stock is pledged as collateral.
He went on to found several other companies such as Neuralink (a neurotechnology company), OpenAi (a nonprofit research company promoting artificial intelligence), and The Boring Company (a tunnel construction company).
Lastly, in April 2022, he proposed a buyout of the giant social media company Twitter, where they reached an agreement to sell Twitter for $44 Million, however, he eventually backed out of the agreement leading to lawsuits from both parties.
Due to Tesla’s share price surge in 2021 and private transactions boosting SpaceX’s reported valuation, Musk’s wealth lead has grown tremendously, hitting a high of $340 billion in November 2021.
