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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.

The wealthiest among them is Elon Musk; CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and owner of Twitter. 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. He’s the founder and chairperson of Reliance Industries, which he grew from the modest textile manufacturer his dad founded in 1966.

The magazine highlights the more than 2,200 billionaires around the world who hold a combined net worth of $9.1 trillion. The daughter of high profile iron-ore explorer Lang Hancock, Rinehart took over her late father’s bankrupted estate and transformed it into something much bigger. The largest piece of her fortune comes form Hope Downs, an iron ore mine. She is also Australia’s third-largest cattle producer, with 23 properties across the country, according to Forbes. The well-known philanthropist owns one third the world’s largest candy manufacturer Mars, whose brands include M&M’s, Skittles and Snickers. In addition to running the candy company, Mars serves on six boards, including the National Archives and the Smithsonian.

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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.

Chinese entrepreneur Zhou Qunfei is the richest self-made woman on the list with a net worth of $7.8 billion. Klatten, the richest woman in Germany, owns 19.2 percent of the automobile company BMW. The economist helped change her grandfather’s chemical company, Altana AG, into a world renowned pharmaceutical and speciality chemical corporation. Oracle is the world’s second-largest software company, providing a wide variety of cloud computing programs as well as Java and Linux code and the Oracle Exadata computing platform. Oracle has acquired numerous large companies over its history, such as Sun Microsystems and Cerner. In 1977, Ellison founded Software Development Laboratories alongside Oates and Miner.

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.

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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.

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 top 100 richest people in the world 2018 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.

#67 Iris Fontbona & family

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.

In some cases siblings and couples are listed together if the ownership breakdown among them isn’t clear, however they still must be worth on average a minimum of $1 billion apiece to make the cut. Sixty-seven percent of the 2018 list are self-made billionaires and a record 255 women are included in this year’s rankings. Musk planned to fund the deal with $21 billion of his own capital. In the run-up to the buyout announcement, Musk sold 9.6 million shares of Tesla, valued at roughly $8.5 billion. While the vast majority of the world’s billionaires added to their fortunes in the past 12 months, 16% had fortunes that slipped.

Jeff Bezos

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. 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.

He was born in South Africa and attended a university in Canada before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned bachelor’s degrees in physics and economics. Two days after enrolling in a graduate physics program at Stanford University, Musk deferred attendance to launch Zip2, one of the earliest online navigation services. He reinvested a portion of the proceeds from this startup to create X.com, the online payment system that was sold to eBay (EBAY) and ultimately became PayPal Holdings (PYPL). His other investments include real estate, mining, construction, and consumer goods in Mexico. The founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, became billionaires at age 30.

#121 Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken & family

The Forbes World’s Billionaires list is a snapshot of wealth using stock prices and exchange rates from February 9, 2018. Some people will become richer or poorer within weeks—even days—of publication. For example, Jeff Bezos’ net worth climbed more than $12 billion in the two weeks between our measuring date for stock prices and when this issue went to press. We list individuals rather than multigenerational families who share large fortunes, though we include wealth belonging to a billionaire’s spouse and children if that person is the founder of the fortune. In some cases we list siblings or couples together if the ownership breakdown among them isn’t clear, but here an estimated net worth of $1 billion per person is needed to make the cut. We value a variety of assets, including private companies, real estate, art, yachts and more.

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.

Musk is also CEO and chief engineer of Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), a developer of space launch rockets. We used stock prices and exchange rates from March 11, 2022 to calculate net worths. His wealth comes from Inditex, the clothing company he co-founded with Rosalia Mera, his ex-wife, in 1975. As the granddaughter of Eugène Schueller, who founded L’Oreal, her wealth is inherited. His money comes from Bloomberg LP, a financial information and media company, which he put in the seed money for and co-founded in 1981. He currently serves as a board member and controlling shareholder for Alphabet, Google’s parent firm.

Widely known as the Oracle of Omaha, Buffett is a buy-and-hold investor who built his fortune by acquiring undervalued companies. More recently, Berkshire Hathaway has invested in large, well-known companies. Its portfolio of wholly owned subsidiaries includes interests in insurance, energy distribution, and railroads as well as consumer products.

• The list ranks the richest people in the world based on their net worth.
• While attending Harvard University in 1975, Bill Gates went to work alongside his childhood friend Paul Allen to develop new software for the original microcomputers.
• “The billionaire ranks prove that even the world’s richest are not immune to economic forces and the volatility of world markets,” Luisa Kroll, assistant managing editor of wealth at Forbes, said in a statement.

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.