What do the world’s biggest tech billionaires have in common? Not an awful lot, it seems… other than the fact that they’re all men.
This year Amazon’s Jeff Bezos overtook Microsoft legend Bill Gates as the world’s richest person before opening up the biggest gap between first and second place on Forbes’ rich list since 2001.
The world’s first centi-billionaire with an eye-popping fortune of $150bn at the time of writing, Bezos has added an incredible $77bn in just 16 months – $38bn of that in the last four months alone. Gates is worth $95bn today.
Tech provided nine of the top 20 on Forbes’ list, which contained an incredible 2,208 billionaires from 72 countries in all.
The companies they have built include two eCommerce giants, a software specialist, one social media platform, a telecoms company, a CRM developer and two co-founders of a certain search giant.
There are six Americans, two Chinese and one Mexican among them. With an average age of 54, they are below:
Tech billionaires in top 20
- Jeff Bezos, Amazon, US, 54yo – $150.3 billion
- Bill Gates, Microsoft, US, 62 – $95.2bn
- Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, US, 34 – $67.2bn
- Carlos Slim and family, America Movil, Mexico, 78 – $65.8bn
- Larry Ellison, Oracle, US, 73 – $59.9bn
- Larry Page, Alphabet, US, 45 – $57.4bn
- Sergey Brin, Alphabet, US (Russian-born), 44 – $56bn
- Ma Huateng, Tencent, China, 46 – $41.8bn
- Jack Ma, Alibaba, China, 53 – $41.1bn
There were only two women in the top 20: Alice Walton, the only daughter of Walmart founder Sam Walton – whose two brothers also made the list – and L’Oreal chairman and heiress Françoise Bettencourt Meyers.
There were a record 206 tech billionaires on the Forbes list this year, 23 more than 12 months before. Just 15 of the 206 were women.
The richest female tech billionaire is Hong Kong-based Zhou Qunfei, chairman of smartphone screen maker Lens Technology.
Among 259 newcomers on the overall list are the first ever cryptocurrency billionaires, including Chris Larsen, who co-founded Ripple in 2012 to facilitate international payments for banks using blockchain technology. He is worth around $5bn while Changpeng Zhao, founder of crypto exchange Binance, is worth around $1.4bn.
Silverdoor Apartments analysed the world’s top 50 billionaires and found that the majority of them – 22 – live in the USA, with Germany and China next on the list with six apiece. Their average age is 68,
Just five of the top 50 billionaires are women with another five in the next 50, meaning men make up 90 per cent of the top 100.
The most common highest level of education is a Bachelor’s degree but three dropped out of high school and seven out of university.
An infographic by SilverDoor Apartments