Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is no longer the world’s richest person. He lost that title today, after having held onto it for an astounding 13 years. Taking over as the world’s richest person is the American investor Warren Buffett, who increased his fortune by $10 billion in the past year. Comparatively, Bill Gates lost $1 billion in net worth over the past year, and can attribute losing the top spot to his Yahoo bid and the fall of Microsoft stock.
Gates was still the world’s richest man until February, but his luck began to fail when the Yahoo bid was announced and the stock nosedived. This not only knocked him out of the top spot, but put him all the way down to number three on the list. Forbes indicated that if it wasn’t for the Yahoo bid, Gates would have likely retained his #1 ranking.
Coming in at second on the list is Mexican telecommunications mogul Carlos Slim Helu, who’s now worth $60 billion.
Another interesting development with this year’s Forbes richest people in the world list is the appearance of Mark Zuckerburg, 23, founder of Facebook, who has become the youngest self-made billionaire to make the exclusive list. Although he ranks just #785 out of the record 1,125 billionaires internationally, his $1.5 billion fortune doesn’t even rank him in the top 20 in Silicon Valley.
And speaking of Silicon Valley, according to the list, SV is home to 27 billionaires – more than a quarter of the 101 billionaires living in the state of California. 1/5 of the entire $317 billion net worth of California billionaires is controlled by three Silicon Valley tycoons: Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page at $19 billion each, and Oracle founder Larry Ellison at $25 billion.
Although the US has the most billionaires of any country, foreign billionaires outnumbered American billionaires 656 to 469. Foreign billionaires together were worth more as well: $2.8 trillion to $1.6 trillion.
