1. Elon Musk
Elon Reeve Musk is an American business executive. He is SpaceX’s founder, CEO, and Chief Engineer; Tesla, Inc.’s angel investor, CEO, and Product Architect; The Boring Company’s founder; and co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI. Musk has an estimated net worth of around US$203 billion as of June 2022, pertaining to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and the Forbes real-time billionaires list. Elon Reeve Musk now has a $224 billion net worth. (1)
Musk founded the company SpaceX, and engineering and construction manufacturer and space transport services company, in 2002, and he currently serves as CEO and Chief Engineer. He was an early investor in electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla Motors, Inc. 2004, now called Tesla. He rose through the ranks to become its chairman and product architect, eventually becoming CEO in 2008. He was a founding member of SolarCity, a solar energy company later acquired by Tesla and renamed Tesla Energy. He co-founded OpenAI, a non-profit research organization that promotes friendly artificial intelligence, in 2015.
He is a co-founder of Neuralink, a neurotechnology company concentrated on creating brain–computer interfaces, and The Boring Company, a tunnel construction company, 2016. He also agreed to pay $44 billion for the primary American social networking service Twitter in 2022. Musk has created a hierarchical vactrain transportation system called the Hyperloop. He is the chairman of the Musk Foundation, which supports scientific research and education. Musk has been chastised for making unscientific and contentious claims, such as spreading false information about the COVID-19 pandemic. He was sued by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2018 for wrongfully tweeting that he had sufficient funding for a private takeover of Tesla; he resolved with the SEC but did not admit guilt, and he stepped down from his Tesla chairmanship temporarily. In 2019, he won a defamatory suit brought against him by a British cave rescuer who assisted in the Tham Luang cave rescue.
2. Jeff Bezos
Jeffrey Preston Bezos is a businessman, media owner, investor, computer engineer, and advertising astronaut from the United States. He is Amazon’s founder, executive chairman, and former president and Chief executive officer. Bezos is the world’s second-wealthiest person, with a net worth of around $131.9 billion (2) as of June 2022, and was the wealthiest from 2017 to 2021, according to both Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index and Forbes.
Blue Origin, an aerospace manufacturing company, and suborbital spaceflight services provider, was founded by Bezos in 2000. Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft launched into space in 2015 and successfully returned to Earth. In 2013, he paid $250 million for the major American newspaper, The Washington Post, and he handles several other investment opportunities through his venture capital firm, Bezos Expeditions. Bezos and Mail.ru founder Yuri Milner co-founded biotechnology company Altos Labs in September 2021.
Bezos, the first billionaire on the Forbes wealth index, was named the “richest man in modern history” in July 2018 after his net worth increased. As stated by Forbes, he had a net worth of more than $200 billion in August 2020. During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, his fortune increased by approximately $24 billion. On July 5, 2021, Bezos stepped down as CEO of Amazon and became executive chairman; Andy Jassy, the head of Amazon’s cloud computing division, took over as CEO of Amazon. He launched into space with his brother Mark on July 20, 2021.
3. Bernard Arnault & family
Bernard Arnault is a French billionaire who made millions as chairman and CEO of LVMH, the world’s largest luxury goods conglomerate. Bernard Arnault has a net worth of $125 billion. (3) His net worth places him among the world’s wealthiest people, alongside Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.
Arnault began his professional career at Ferret-Savinel in 1971 and served as its president from 1978 to 1984. Arnault, a young real estate investor at the time, learned in 1984 that the French government was about to select somebody to take over the Boussac Saint-Frères empire, a textile and retail multinational corporation that owned Christian Dior. Arnault acquired the Financière Agache, a luxury goods company, with the assistance of Antoine Bernheim, a senior partner at Lazard Frères. He became CEO of Financière Agache and later won the bidding war for Boussac Saint-Frères, purchasing the group for a symbolic one franc and effectively taking control of Boussac Saint-Frères. Boussac’s assets have included department store Le Bon Marché, the retail shop Conforama, and the diaper manufacturer Peaudouce, in addition to Christian Dior.
LVMH has grown to become a significant company in the Eurozone by market capitalization under Arnault’s leadership, with a record of $382 billion as of May 2021. Arnault has advocated for globalizing the group’s brands as a corporate strategy. As a result of these challenges, brands under the LVMH umbrella, such as Tiffany, are still viewed as independent firms with their own histories. For a brief moment, on May 24, 2021, Arnault temporarily surpassed Jeff Bezos as the wealthiest man in the world. However, Amazon stock rose a few hours later, and Jeff Bezos reclaimed the top spot.
4. Bill Gates
William Henry Gates III is a billionaire businessman, software developer, investor, author, and philanthropist from the United States. He and his late childhood friend Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft. During his tenure at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, CEO, president, and chief software architect and was the company’s largest individual shareholder until May 2014. He was a crucial figure in the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s.
Microsoft Company was established in Albuquerque, New Mexico, by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. It grew to become the world’s largest personal computer software corporation. Gates served as chairman and CEO of Microsoft until January 2000, when he was succeeded as CEO by Steve Ballmer. Still, he remained chair of the company of directors and became chief software architect. During the late 1990s, he was chastised for his business practices, which were deemed anti-competitive. Numerous court rulings have supported this viewpoint. Gates left Microsoft in June 2008 to work part-time at the private charitable foundation he and his then-wife, Melinda Gates, founded in 2000. In February 2014, he decided to step down as Microsoft’s chairman of the board and took on a new role as technology adviser to support newly appointed CEO Satya Nadella. Gates resigned from his positions on Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway boards in March 2020 to focus on his philanthropic efforts in climate change, global health and development, and education.
Gates has been on Forbes’ list of the world’s wealthiest individuals since 1987. Except for 2010 and 2013, he was the richest person in the world every year from 1995 to 2017. In October 2017, he was outperformed by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who had an estimated $90.6 billion at the time, compared to Gates’ net worth of $89.9 billion. Gates had an estimated net worth of $114 billion as of June 2022, (4) making him the world’s fourth richest person.
5. Warren Buffett
Warren Buffett is one of the world’s most famous and wealthiest people and arguably the most significant investor. Warren Buffett’s net worth is $113 billion as of this writing. (5) Many consider Warren Buffett the most prominent and popular investor in history. If you had put $10,000 with Warren Buffett in 1966, you would now have more than $160 million. Since 1970, Buffett has served as chairman and majority shareholder of Berkshire Hathaway. Global media have dubbed him the “Oracle” or “Sage” of Omaha. Despite his enormous wealth, he is known for his commitment to value investing and personal frugality. Buffett is a philanthropist who has pledged to donate 99 percent of his fortune to charitable organizations, primarily through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In 2010, he and Bill Gates co-founded The Giving Pledge, in which billionaires pledge to consider giving away at least half of their fortunes.
In his youth, he developed a strong interest in business and investing, eventually enrolling at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in 1947 before transferring to and graduating from the University of Nebraska at 19. He graduated from Columbia Business School, where he based his investment philosophy on Benjamin Graham’s concept of value investing. He attended the New York Institute of Finance to hone his economics skills and soon began various business ventures, including one with Graham. In 1956, he founded Buffett Partnership, Ltd., and his firm eventually acquired Berkshire Hathaway, a textile manufacturing firm, assuming its name to form a diversified holding company. In 1978, Charlie Munger joined Buffett as vice-chairman.
References
- Top 10 Richest people in the world, retrieved from https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/012715/5-richest-people-world.asp
- Jeff Bezos, retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos
- Bernard Arnault Net Worth, retrieved from https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/richest-billionaires/bernard-arnault-net-worth/
Bill Gates, retrieved from https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/william-h-gates/
- Warren Buffett, retrieved from https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/richest-billionaires/warren-buffett-net-worth/