The richest
man in the whole world has been revealed by Forbes Magazine in its latest
edition of the ranking.
Jeff Bezos
Amazon founder and chief executive, Jeff
Bezos, has been named by Forbes Magazine in its latest edition as the
world’s richest man with 112bn dollar fortune. He replaces Microsoft
co-founder, Bill Gates, who fell back into second place with 90bn dollars.
Forbes calculated that Bezos’s fortune,
which is mostly held in Amazon shares, increased by 39.2bn dollars over the
past year.
The biggest ever one-year gain. Amazon’s
shares have nearly doubled from 846 dollars a share last March to 1,523 dollars
per share last night.
Gates, who had topped the Forbes
billionaires list for 18 of the last 24 years, saw his fortune rose modestly
from 86bn to 90bn dollars.
Collectively, the world’s 2,208
billionaires hold 9.1tn dollars more than three times the gross domestic
product (GDP) of the UK.
The billionaires increased their
combined wealth by 1.4bn dollars over the past year.
The list is published in Forbes’s latest
edition under the headline “The super-rich continue to get richer, widening the
gap between them and everyone else”.
Twelve out of the top 15 richest people
are from the US, with investor Warren Buffett in third place (with $84bn) and
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg in fifth ($71bn).
France’s Bernard Arnault of luxury goods
group LVMH is the richest person from outside of the US with a $72bn fortune.
The number of women on the list
increased from 227 to 256. A record 72 of the women made their own fortunes.
The world’s richest self-made woman is Hong Kong’s Zhou Qunfei, founder of
smartphone screen maker Lens Technology.
The Forbes’ billionaires list is based
on share prices and other financial data on 9 February 2018. The magazine also
noted that the U.S president Donald Trump’s fortune had fallen for the second
year running in annual ranking of the world’s wealthiest people.
It said that Trump’s net worth had
fallen by $400m (£287m) to $3.1bn over the past year.
“It means the president has
slipped more than 200 places in the billionaire rankings from 544th richest
last year to 766th this year,’’ it said.
The magazine attributed Trump’s decline
in wealth to “a tough New York real estate market, particularly for retail
locations; a costly lawsuit and an expensive presidential campaign”.
Forbes said a record 35 people have
joined the list of the world’s billionaires, with the magazine calculating there
are now 2,208 people with a net worth of more than 1bn dollars.
When News Breaks Out, We Break In. (The 2014 Bloggies Finalist)
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