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The 10 Richest People In the World.

Jeff Bezos retains his top position.

By Rachel MukherjeePublished 3 years ago 4 min read
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Jeff Bezos tops the table once again.

In 2020, there were reportedly 2,095 billionaires on Earth, with an estimated total net worth of $8 trillion. Of this amount, the top 10 wealthiest people in the world account for $1,153 billion, or roughly 14.41%, which is impressive when you consider that they represent around 0.48% of billionaires.12 Below are the 10 individuals currently considered the wealthiest at the time of updating this article—May 2021—according to the Forbes World's Billionaires List.

Jeff Bezos is the CEO and founder of Amazon, the world's largest retailer, and founder of Blue Origin. His estimated net worth is $177 billion. With an estimated net worth of $197 billion, he is the richest man in the world

Elon Musk is the CEO and co-founder of Tesla; CEO, leader designer, and founder of SpaceX; CEO and founder of Neuralink; and founder of The Boring Company. His estimated net worth is $152 billion.

Bernard Arnault is the chairman and CEO of LVMH, the world's largest luxury goods business, and chairman of its holding company, Christian Dior SE. His estimated net worth is $150 billion.

Bill Gates is the co-founder of Microsoft, the largest software company in the world, and the co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. His estimated net worth is $124 billion.

Mark Zuckerberg is the CEO, chairman, and co-founder of Facebook, the world's largest social networking service, as well as co-CEO and co-founder of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. His estimated net worth is $97 billion.

The most famous living value investor, Warren Buffett filed his first tax return in 1944 at age 14, declaring his earnings from his boyhood paper route. He first bought shares in a textile company called Berkshire Hathaway in 1962, becoming the majority shareholder by 1965. He expanded the company to insurance and other investments in 1967. Now, Berkshire Hathaway is a half-trillion-dollar company, with a single share of stock trading at more than $390,000 per share in early 2021.

After dropping out of the University of Chicago in 1966, Larry Ellison moved to California and worked as a computer programmer for several companies over the years. First, in 1973, he was an employee of the electronics company Ampex, where he met his future partners Ed Oates and Bob Miner. Three years later, Ellison joined Precision Instruments, serving as the company's vice president of research and development. By 1977, Ellison had founded Software Development Laboratories (SDL) alongside Oates and Miner, which, two years later, released Oracle, the first commercial relational database program to utilize Structured Query Language. The database program proved so popular that SDL would change its name to Oracle Systems Corporation in 1982. Additionally, Ellison joined Tesla's board in Dec. 2018.

Like several tech billionaires on this list, Larry Page's claim to fame got its start in a college dorm room. While attending Stanford University in 1995, Page and his friend Sergey Brin came up with the idea of improving data extraction capabilities while accessing the Internet. The duo devised a new type of search engine technology they dubbed "BackRub," named after its ability to analyze "backing links." From there, Page and Brin went on to found Google in 1998, with the former serving as CEO of the company until he stepped down in 2001.

What makes Google unique, compared to the other companies featured on this list, is that its co-founders are relatively close in terms of total wealth. Sergey Brin's involvement in Google follows a similar path to Page's. After the duo founded in the company in 1998, Brin served as co-president alongside Page until Eric Schmidt took over as CEO in 2001. Similarly, after founding Alphabet in 2015, Brin acted as the holding company's president before stepping down in 2019 when Sundar Pichai took over as CEO.

In 1979, Dhirubhai's son Mukesh moved to Palo Alto, Calif., to attend Stanford Business School. A year later, Mukesh Ambani returned home at the behest of his father to oversee the construction of a new polyester mill, during which time he also joined Reliance Industries' board. Rather than moving back to the U.S. to finish his university program, Mukesh remained in India to lead Reliance's backward integration initiative. During the nineties, he spearheaded the company's efforts to create—as well as acquire—multiple petrochemical plants and petroleum refineries. In 2002, Dhirubhai suffered a stroke and passed away. The lack of a will resulted in a feud between Mukesh and his brother Anil over how their father's empire would be distributed. Three years later, as the result of a settlement brokered by their mother, the siblings agreed to split the business, with Mukesh retained control over refining, petrochemicals, oil and gas, and textile operations. This didn't completely ease the tension between the two brothers, as they wouldn't settle a legal dispute over sharing natural gas nor dissolve their noncompete pacts until 2010. In 2014, Mukesh and Anil seemingly buried the hatchet with the announcement of a $220 million pact to share a fiber-optic network between their two companies.

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About the Creator

Rachel Mukherjee

Cinema, Art and Lifestyle correspondent.

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