Forbes Billionaires 2018: Meet The Richest People On The Planet

Rounding out the top five is Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, worth $71 billion. Spanish clothing retailer Amancio Ortega (best known for the Zara fashion chain) in at No. 6, drops out of the top 5 for the first time since 2011. Ortega’s net worth is $70 billion, a $1.3 billion decrease from 2017. The gap between the rich and the really rich continues to grow as fortunes sky-rocket to new heights. The world’s richest people now have an average combined net worth of $9.1 trillion – a huge 18 percent increase over 2017, according to Forbes.

American business magnate and investor Warren Buffett sits at the third spot on the list with $84 billion. The English businesswoman owns 23 percent of Heineken, the Dutch brewing company. She inherited the fortune in 2002 from her late father, longtime CEO Freddy Heineken. Johnson owns an estimated 24.5 percent stake in Fidelity Investments, a mutual fund giant that has more than has $2.3 trillion in assets.

Forbes pinned down 259 newcomers who made their fortunes in everything from tech and aerospace to private aviation and wedding dresses. China has the most new faces with 89, while the U.S. is next with 18. Altogether the U.S. has more billionaires than any country in the world with 585, while greater China (mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan) has 476. Donald Trump’s ranking dropped to No. 259 on the list but his net worth remained the same from last year at $3.1 billion. As part of the Forbes 400 package, Forbes unveils a new in-depth analysis of how President Donald Trump’s businesses have been affected by his Presidency – How Trump is Trying, and Failing to Get Rich Off His Presidency. The Chinese property developer owns 57 percent of Country Garden Holdings, a real estate development company.

Bernard Arnault and his family have a reported combined net worth of $220.4 billion. They’re based in Paris.

As a result of the market crash caused by the Dot-com bubble, 83 billionaires dropped off the list from the previous year. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, four years after starting the company, joined the list at 23 to become the youngest self-made billionaire. Her net worth is derived from her holdings in L’Oréal, the world’s largest cosmetics company. Google also offers a variety of electronic devices, including Pixel smartphones, computers, and tablets, Nest smart home devices, and the Stadia gaming platform. Sergey Brin was born in Moscow, Russia, moving to the U.S. with his family when he was six in 1979. After co-founding Google with Larry Page in 1998, Brin became Google’s president of technology when Eric Schmidt took over as CEO in 2001.

Record results at his luxury goods empire LVMH and a deal to buy out nearly all of Christian Dior helped boost Arnault’s fortune by $30.5 billion. He is the richest European for the first time since 2012 and number four richest in the world. Mark Zuckerberg first developed Facebook (now Meta) alongside fellow students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes while attending Harvard University in 2004. As Facebook began to be used at other universities, Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to focus entirely on his growing business. Today, Zuckerberg is the CEO and chair of Meta, which had 3 billion monthly active users as of Q1 2023.

He held the same post at the Alphabet holding company after it was established in 2015, stepping down in 2019 when Sundar Pichai took over as CEO. After acquiring Android in 2005, Google released the Android mobile phone operating system in 2008. Google reorganized in 2015, becoming a subsidiary of Alphabet, a holding company.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.

One notable loser was President Donald Trump, whose fortune fell $400 million since March 2017 to a current $3.1 billion. Two tech entrepreneurs from mainland China climbed into the top 20 for the first time. Ma Huateng (also known as Pony Ma) is Asia’s wealthiest person, ranked number 17 in the world, thanks in part to his firm Tencent’s WeChat, a ubiquitous social-messaging app with nearly 1 billion active users. Tencent also has stakes in Tesla, Snapchat parent Snap and music-streaming service Spotify. Jack Ma, the 20th richest person, is the chief of another e-commerce giant Alibaba, whose shares increased 76% in a year.

#54 Tadashi Yanai & family

China had 319 (not including Hong Kong, Taiwan or Macau), Germany had 114, and India had the fourth most with 101; India reached over 100 billionaires for its first time. Centi-billionaire Jeff Bezos seizes the top spot for the first time. Bezos has a fortune of $112 billion, up $39.2 billion from 2017, the biggest one-year gain ever. Bill Gates, who has been the richest person in the world for 18 of the past 24 years, drops to No. 2 on the Forbes billionaires list.

He made his fortune by investing in Berkshire Hathaway, a multinational conglomerate that encompasses dozens of smaller companies. «There are 72 self-made (women), which is just really exciting because that’s always been a huge lag,» Kroll said. As of Aug. 2, 2023, the world’s richest man is Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. Steve Ballmer joined Microsoft in 1980 after Bill Gates convinced him to drop out of Stanford University’s MBA program. Ballmer oversaw Microsoft’s 2011 purchase of Skype for $8.5 billion. From there, Page and Brin went on to found Google in 1998, with Page serving as CEO of the company until 2001, and again between 2011 and 2019.

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Gates has a fortune of $90 billion, up from $86 billion last year. This is the biggest gap (in dollars) between the top 2 spots since 2001. Bernard Arnault, with a fortune of $72 billion, ascends 7 spots in the ranks to No. 4. Thanks to his $30.5 billion gain in the past year, Arnault is the richest person in Europe for the first time since 2012.

• Like several of the tech billionaires on this list, Larry Page embarked on his path to fame and fortune in a college dorm room.
• Cascade is a privately-held investment vehicle that owns a variety of stocks including Canadian National Railway (CNR), Deere (DE), and Republic Services (RSG), as well as private investments in real estate and energy.
• The Top 20 billionaires have a combined net worth of a record $1.2 trillion, up from $968.8 billion in 2017.
• He first bought shares in a textile company called Berkshire Hathaway in 1962, becoming the majority shareholder by 1965.

The duo devised a new search engine technology they dubbed Backrub after its ability to assess links to a page. The individuals on this list belong to an even more exclusive club and wield still more power. Many are founders of technology giants, with much of their wealth still invested in the companies they started. It is based on an annual assessment of wealth and assets by Forbes and by data from the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

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The company spans several industries, including retail, oil, telecom, and petrochemicals. She’s been on the board since 1997, and currently, she serves as chairperson. He famously made his fortune through Microsoft, which he co-founded in 1975. top 100 richest people in the world 2018 He stepped down from the board in 2020 but retains ownership of approximately 1.3% of the company’s shares. In total, the top 20 billionaires on the list have a combined $1.2 trillion, unchanged from last year and still the highest amount ever.

Their aggregate wealth represents 13% of all 2,208 billionaires. The minimum net worth to make the cut into the Top 20 is now a record $39 billion, up from $30.4 billion in 2017. For the first time ever, we scored members of The Forbes 400 based on how philanthropic they were. Forbes looked at a number of factors, including their lifetime giving and lifetime giving as a percentage of their fortune. At No. 5 is Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, with an estimated $71 billion. No. 4 is chairman and CEO of luxury goods company LVMH, Bernard Arnault, and his family, with $72 billion.

Three years later, Ellison moved to Precision Instruments, serving as the company’s vice president of research and development. Click here for the full ranking of the Forbes World’s Billionaires list. He’s chairperson and CEO of LVMH, the 75-brand strong cosmetics and fashion empire. Companies under him include Tiffany & Co, Sephora, and Louis Vuitton.

Larry Ellison was born in New York City to a 19-year-old single mother. After dropping out of the University of Chicago in 1966, Ellison moved to California and worked as a computer programmer. In 1973, he joined the electronics company Ampex, where he met future partners Ed Oates and Bob Miner.

A record 2,208 billionaires made Forbes’ 32nd annual ranking of the world’s billionaires. Altogether they are worth a record $9.1 trillion, up 18% from a year ago. The 20 richest people on the planet are worth a staggering $1.2 trillion, a sum roughly equivalent to the annual economic output of Mexico. In aggregate, they may represent less than 1% of total billionaires but their riches amount to 13% of the total fortune of all billionaires worldwide. The U.S. had the most billionaires in the world, with a record of 565.

Following this project’s success, Gates dropped out of Harvard during his junior year and founded Microsoft with Allen. Arnault remained Férinel’s chair for another six years, until he acquired and reorganized luxury goods maker Financière Agache in 1984, eventually selling all its holdings other than Christian Dior and Le Bon Marché. He was invited to invest in LVMH in 1987 and became the majority shareholder, chair of the board, and CEO of the company two years later. In 2004, Musk became a major funder of Tesla Motors (now Tesla), which led to his current position as CEO of the electric vehicle company. 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.

She joined it the company after receiving an MBA from Harvard University in 1988. She took over from her father as CEO in 2014 and as chairman in 2016. Ballmer owns an estimated 4% of Microsoft, making him the software giant’s largest individual shareholder. 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.