W B There are people with such large fortunes living in this world they’re not able to spend them throughout their lives.
#10 WARREN BUFFETT
Buffett is the owner of Berkshire Hathaway – the great investment enterprise with stocks in Apple, Duracell, American Express, Coca-Cola, and many more. For that reason, his net worth is 101 billion dollars. Since he was young, he’s been a business enthusiast. At 11, he bought his first shares in the stock market. As an adult, in 1962, he began to buy Berkshire Hathaway’s stocks – it was a textile company at the time – and he would shortly control so many of them that he managed to change the course of the enterprise and change it an insurance and investment company. Buffett donates large amounts of money through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and organized The Giving Pledge campaign which is led by billionaires who pledge to donate at least half of their fortunes. Still, half is little for Warren Buffet so he’s willing to give away 99% of his net worth to philanthropic deeds.
#9 STEVE BALLMER
Ballmer owes his fortune to Microsoft. He was friends with Bill Gates who hired him as a business manager. His salary was 50 thousand dollars plus 10% of all the earnings from the enterprise. The problem was that Microsoft grew so fast that paying him 10% of the earnings became quite tedious so he signed a new contract to get 8% of the enterprise’s stocks in exchange for forgetting about the earnings. Ballmer agreed and when the enterprise went to the stock market in 1986, he earned 56 million dollars all at once. In 2008, he became CEO of Microsoft after Bill Gates stepped down. During his time there, they created the operating system Windows Phone and the first Xbox devices. However, Forbes named him one of the worst executives in the world for not letting Microsoft plunge into the world of touch screens. Perhaps that was the reason he left the position in 2014 and isn’t close to Bill Gates anymore. Anyway, he now amasses a 107-billion-dollar fortune and bought his own NBA team – Los Angeles Clippers – for 2 billion dollars.
#8 LARRY ELLISON
Larry Ellison is the owner of Oracle – the enterprise that the Chinese sold Tik Tok to after Trump made them sell. As a young man, Ellison dropped out of college and set up Software Development Laboratories – a custom software creation enterprise. Some years later, the CIA hired him to develop a database called Oracle and it was so successful it became his star product, so he named his company like this and started to sell this database as standardized software. Every big enterprise needs databases so Oracle is everywhere. Currently, Larry Ellison’s net worth is 117 billion dollars. He’s famous for his eccentricities such as having a series of millionaire mansions and villages all over the world, purchasing a 300-million-dollar yacht and an island in Hawaii for 300 million dollars as well, and even having two military planes.
#7 SERGEY BRIN
Both Sergey Brin and Larry Page are the founders of Google and Brin owns 16% of Alphabet’s stocks – this is the parent company. As a young man, he was really into maths and while he was doing his master’s degree he met Larry Page, so the two of them developed a search engine that was initially called Backrub before becoming a resounding success called Google. The source of earnings of this search engine is the advertising platform Google AdWords that was created in 2000. Over time, other products popped up such as Google Chrome, the operating system Android, and in 2006, they bought YouTube for 1.6 billion dollars. In 2015, they created Alphabet as the parent enterprise and Brin became the first president until 2019. At that time, he was rarely seen at Google events because he said he was working on a new project: a high-speed blimp. Currently, Sergey Brin is worth 124 billion dollars.
#6 LARRY PAGE
Larry Page is Sergei Brin’s partner and together created Google based on PageRank, the algorithm that ordered web pages based on the number of links they have. Page was in charge of running the enterprise whereas Brin managed the special projects. He has a similar percentage of Google’s stocks to his partner so he’s accumulated a 129-billion-dollar fortune.
#5 MARCK ZUCKERBERG
Ever since he was little, Zuckerberg was always a computer enthusiast. At Harvard, he created Facemash.com, an app where you could see students’ photos and rate them. The experiment had to end because he was accused of having hacked the university website to get those photos. In the next year, 2004, he created Facebook, a social network that began as only for students from certain countries, but two years later it was opened for anyone who had an e-mail address. The page became profitable thanks to advertising and in 2011, he bought Instagram for one billion dollars and, in 2014, he bought WhatsApp for 21.8 billion dollars. Thanks to all this, he has built up a 142-billion-dollar fortune. Zuckerberg hasn´t been free of scandal, he had to go to the US Congress to defend himself against accusations that Cambridge Analytica had politically used Facebook data to favor the Trump campaign. Due to the several gestures he made in the interrogation, the conspiratards said Zuckerberg wasn’t a human – this theory stems from a joke made at a conference. What do you think, is he a human, reptilian, android, or Pokémon?
#4 BILL GATES
William Henry Gates III began to program computers at 13. In 1975, while he was still studying at Harvard, he founded Microsoft. This company developed operating systems to sell to computer manufacturers. Back then IBM copied the Apple II computer using an Intel microprocessor. So Gates bought an operating system from programmer Tim Paterson for 50 thousand dollars and sold it to IBM under the name MS-DOS so IBM can put the system in its new PCs. IBM would pay Microsoft a tiny amount for each computer it sold with the MS-DOS installed – however, it didn’t acquire the property rights. When other manufacturers copied IBM’s PC, they saw no problem installing Microsoft’s program on it, thus Gates became rich. Some years later, Apple invented the desktop interface, icons, and mouse, and Gates struck back with the program we all know: Windows. Apple took him to trial for plagiarism but Gates was found innocent. Now he’s worth 152 billion dollars and is dedicated to charity through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Plus, he was the founder of The Giving Pledge campaign so he’ll donate at least half of his fortune.
#3 BERNARD ARNAULT
Bernard Arnault is the owner of the Christian Dior stores. He started to work at Ferret Savinel – his father’s construction enterprise – in 1971. Seven years later, he took over ownership of the company, and with the earnings, he bought the finance company Financière Agache and the textile enterprise Boussac, which owned Christian Dior. At the end of the eighties, he invested part of his earnings in buying the Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy corporation that he became a huge conglomerate that, apart from the Louis Vuitton brand, also includes very famous companies such as Sephora, for cosmetics; Givenchy, for fashion and fragrance; or Bvlgari , for jewelry. Also, he bought the design house Tiffany & Co for 15.8 billion dollars – this was the most expensive purchase of a luxury enterprise ever. All these enterprises have led him to have a net worth of 198.4 billion dollars. Oh, la la!
#2 JEFF BEZOS
Jeffrey Preston Bezos, the CEO of Amazon started to build up his fortune in 1995 when he founded Cadabra.com. This website offered an online book catalog so that the public could buy and receive them by mail. Soon after, he changed its name to Amazon. It didn’t take long for the webpage to become a real success and the business was soon expanded to CDs, DVDs, toys, and just about anything, for which Bezos currently has a 202-billion-dollar fortune. In 2000, Bezos founded Blue Origin – an enterprise that aims to provide low-cost space travels – thanks to it he was able to spend 11 minutes in space in July 2021. He also owns the Washington Post. In 2019, he reported his intimate photos had been used to blackmail him and details of his extramarital relationship came to light at the same time that he announced his divorce process. According to some investigations, the Saudi government obtained the messages and photos by hacking Bezos’s phone in revenge for the criticisms of the Washington Post. His divorce was the most expensive ever: his ex-wife was compensated with 35 billion dollars.
#1 ELON MUSK
Elon Musk – the most futuristic millionaire of all – founded X.com in 1999 – this is a financial startup that ended up merging with Confinity – the company that owns PayPal. Musk was the majority partner with 11.8% of the stocks. In 2002, the company was sold to eBay and Musk got 180 million dollars. With 100 of them, he founded SpaceX, a company that is involved in producing space shuttles – Musk has in mind to reach Mars and create tour packages for the moon. SpaceX has a project called Starlink which plans to deliver low-cost, global internet through 11,943 satellites in space. He invested another 70 million from the sale of PayPal in Tesla – an electric car manufacturer. The remaining 10 million were invested in SolarCity – an enterprise that makes solar energy affordable. Musk is also the founder of the Boring Company which plans to create high-speed trains that would operate in vacuum tunnels. Currently, he has a net worth of none other than 204 billion dollars. With so many dollar bills, he can surely build a path from Earth to Mars.
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