On a blazingly bright morning at the end of the South By Southwest music and technology conference, Rico Nasty takes the stage at the Fader Fort in Austin as part of a panel discussion—and finds another way to increase her earnings. Clad in a swirly black-and-lime-green jumpsuit, she shows off her threads as cameras flash; after the event, she spends a few moments talking up her outfit.



“I bought it a few days ago, and I’m probably going to wear it once, and there’s going to be a lot of pictures in it,” the 21-year-old rapper says before outlining her plan to sell the jumpsuit on the peer-to-peer shopping app Depop, as she does with most of the clothing she wears in public. “We’ve made like, probably $20 thousand in the past two months.”



Born Maria-Cecilia Simone Kelly in Brooklyn, Rico started rapping in high school before releasing a string of mixtapes. She signed to Atlantic Records and has yet to release her formal debut studio album, but she’s already among music’s most promising up-and-comers, earning her a spot on our list. And with more women like Rico rising up the rap charts, we’re formally changing the name of our ranking to Hip-Hop Cash Princes and Princesses.



The list, presented in full below, comprises the genre’s top ten recording artists and producers under the age of 30 in terms of future earning potential, as judged by an expert panel; no repeats are allowed. This year’s list of judges includes the late Nipsey Hussle,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/natalierobehmed/2015/03/31/nipsey-hussle-independent-musics-next-mogul/#4da2eb107219" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">a 2015 Cash Prince</a>&nbsp;who sent his picks just days before his tragic passing; songwriter and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/30-under-30/2019/music/#7f9b76294c40" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">30 Under 30</a>&nbsp;honoree Mickey Shiloh; and NBA Hall of Famer Shaquille O’Neal, who found a lot to like about Rico.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5cc0b7e44bbe6f4b9c1c8820/960x0.jpg?cropX1=2&amp;cropX2=1198&amp;cropY1=0&amp;cropY2=1196" alt="Rico Nasty"/><figcaption>Rico NastyGETTY IMAGES</figcaption></figure>



“Rico Nasty is one of the best shooting guards in hip-hop right now,” says O’Neal, whose résumé includes careers as a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomalleygreenburg/2018/07/31/how-shaq-became-the-biggest-dj-on-the-planet/#2ffbe2652252" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">DJ</a>&nbsp;and rapper. “Like a shooting guard, she is able to score in many ways and adapt to the style of play.&nbsp;She is dynamic and always working on her craft, improving&nbsp;her game, updating her sound.”



First, Rico had to work her way off the bench. After moving from New York to Maryland as a child, she started rapping during her teenage years and her mother started working as her manager. For Rico’s first gig, they paid $200 to rent out a performance space, figuring they could more than double that sum by charging $20 per head for tickets. Only six people showed up.



Rico remembers reorganizing her life after that: She moved out of her mother’s house and started working to build her career from the ground up. That meant churning out mixtapes and interacting with her fans on a one-on-one basis—both on social media and in person as she tried her hand at live performances once again around Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia.



“I’m bringing them out to the shows, and we’re getting our nails done and shit,” she says, recalling her first efforts to bring fans into her corner. “This is my opportunity to make these people lifelong friends, in a sense.”



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5cc0b81c4bbe6f4b9c1c8851/960x0.jpg?cropX1=0&amp;cropX2=1199&amp;cropY1=0&amp;cropY2=1198" alt="Blueface"/><figcaption>BluefaceGETTY IMAGES</figcaption></figure>



In 2017, Rico’s single “Poppin” took off on YouTube and was featured on HBO’s&nbsp;Insecure; the following year, she signed to Atlantic and released another mixtape,&nbsp;Nasty. Her pay for live shows started to climb in tandem. From her days struggling to top $100 per concert, she zoomed to an average of $7,000 per gig before snagging an estimated $35,000 guarantee for her performance at Coachella last weekend (she wouldn’t confirm the precise amount).



“Five figures,” she says coyly. “That shit feels amazing to say out loud.”



Rico still has ways to go before she gets to the level of the festival’s headliners, whose gigs fetch seven-figure guarantees. In the meantime, she’s working on other ways to extend her brand. In addition to her work with Depop, she recently launched a line of headphones with Skullcandy. And, with the marijuana accessory provider Hemper, she gets a per-unit cut on sales of Rico Nasty-branded bongs, rolling papers and air fresheners.



Says judge Mickey Shiloh of Rico: “Somebody that creates their own lane like this is bound to make waves for the long run.”



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<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">Hip Hop Cash Princes: Introducing The Class Of 2019</blockquote>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">6LACK</h2>



“6LACK’s tone is completely his own,” says Shiloh. “His songwriting is also what takes his artistry to an entirely new level … it’s like everything you can’t find the words to say, he says effortlessly.”



—



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie</h2>



The Bronx-born rapper is no stranger to the Cash Princes universe, having collaborated with list of alumni including 21 Savage and Offset of Migos. He’s becoming a star in his own right: A Boogie’s second album,&nbsp;Hoodie SZN, topped the chart shortly after its December 2018 release.



—



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<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Bad Bunny</h2>



The trap rapper blends hip-hop with Reggaeton as seamlessly as he weaves English and Spanish lyrics into wildly popular songs like Cardi B’s “I Like It,” his first U.S. chart-topper. He now grosses more than $500,000 per tour stop.



—



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<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Blueface</h2>



The&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomalleygreenburg/2019/02/28/can-cash-money-the-label-that-launched-drake-and-nicki-minaj-strike-platinum-again/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cash Money Records</a>&nbsp;signee rose to prominence with his smash song “Thotiana”—from his 2018 mixtape&nbsp;Famous Cryp­—which has climbed to No. 8 on the U.S. singles charts. He was a top pick from Nipsey Hussle; both stars have crossed gang lines to record with Cash Princes alum YG.



—



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Juice Wrld</h2>



Five questions with the Chicago-born “Lucid Dreams” hip-hop star:



Forbes: What was your first job?&nbsp;“Factory job creating car parts.”



What’s the app you can’t live without?&nbsp;“Soundcloud.”



How many hours per week do you work now?&nbsp;“168.”



Worst advice you’ve received?&nbsp;“To change my style of music in order to try and be more popular.”



What is your greatest achievement?&nbsp;“I haven’t reached it yet.”



<figure><iframe src="https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fe.infogram.com%2F_%2FVJlSEumS6SG8BTJwF1f6%3Fsrc%3Dembed&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Finfogram.com%2F1px212d9np7620hqn6mkvmplymcn555z5ml&amp;image=https%3A%2F%2Finfogram-thumbs-1024.s3.amazonaws.com%2F6d7c7145-09ec-48cb-8ef6-91a0f292ec22.jpg&amp;key=3ce26dc7e3454db5820ba084d28b4935&amp;type=text%2Fhtml&amp;schema=infogram"></iframe></figure>



—



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Lil Baby</h2>



The Atlanta-born emcee is already accumulating princely numbers: His 2018 debut,&nbsp;Harder Than Ever, earned gold certification for sales of more than 500,000 units. He now grosses over $70,000 per tour stop.



—



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Gunna</h2>



The Georgia native got started with the help of Cash Princes alum Young Thug, whose YSL label co-released Gunna’s studio debut&nbsp;Drip Or Drown—which soared to No. 3 on the&nbsp;Billboard&nbsp;charts—in February. His single “Drip Too Hard,” with listmate Lil Baby, earned triple-platinum certification.



—



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Russ</h2>



Five questions with the hip-hop star who&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomalleygreenburg/2018/12/07/at-26-hip-hop-star-russ-is-earning-15m-a-yearand-showing-how-to-succeed-in-music-now/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">earned</a>&nbsp;$15 million last year:



Forbes: What was your first job?&nbsp;“Busboy.”



What’s the app you can’t live without?&nbsp;“Uber Eats.”



How many hours per week do you work?&nbsp;“168.”



Worst advice you’ve ever received?&nbsp;“Be realistic.”



What’s your greatest achievement?&nbsp;“Being in a place where I can take care of my family.”Play Video



Russ: How I Maintained Control Over My Music | 30 Under 30 2019| 3:05



—



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Rico Nasty</h2>



“I’ve never heard anything like what comes out of Rico Nasty’s mouth,” says Shiloh. “She’s trap, she’s urban, but she’s also rock with hints of screamo … somebody that creates their own lane like this is bound to make waves for the long run.”



—



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<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Tierra Whack</h2>



With a quirky tone and thoughtful visuals, the Philadelphia upstart made her major-label debut last year at Interscope with the critically acclaimed&nbsp;Whack World. The social-media-friendly album featured 15 one-minute songs. She earned a Grammy nomination in the Best Music Video category this year for her 2017 single “Mumbo Jumbo.”



—



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—



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Methodology</h3>



Our list of Hip-Hop’s Cash Princes and Princesses ranks the genre’s top ten recording artists and producers under age 30 in terms of future earning potential. No repeats are allowed. This year, the honorees were selected by a panel of five judges: Nipsey Hussle, the late&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/natalierobehmed/2015/03/31/nipsey-hussle-independent-musics-next-mogul/#4da2eb107219" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">2015 Cash Prince</a>&nbsp;who sent in his picks just days ahead of his untimely passing; 30 Under 30 honoree and songwriter Mickey Shiloh; basketball legend and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomalleygreenburg/2018/07/31/how-shaq-became-the-biggest-dj-on-the-planet/#2638d60c2252" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">professional DJ</a>&nbsp;Shaquille O’Neal; and&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;editors Zack O’Malley Greenburg and Natalie Robehmed.



-Zack O&#8217;Malley Greenburg; Forbes Staff

1920×0-hh

Hip-Hop Cash Princes And Princesses: The Class Of 2019

Ask nearly any leading banker or financial executive to go on the record about blockchain, and you are liable to hear crickets. After all, it’s an industry built on trust and stability and crypto’s recent legacy of volatility and even fraud has tainted the topic.



It’s ironic because, behind the scenes, few industries are eagerly working on blockchain projects as feverishly as financial services firms are. Bank of America, for example, has filed nearly 60 blockchain patents. Yet it refused to speak to Forbes about its dive into distributed ledger tech. JPMorgan’s CEO Dimon famously threatened to fire any employee caught trading bitcoin. Today it is developing its own digital token.



The world&#8217;s largest, most centralized and most powerful institutions are now embracing the technology designed to unseat them because they realize that at its, core blockchain is just lines of code that simplify accounting and record keeping. For hundreds of years, bankers have exhibited mastery in ledger keeping and they have no intention of giving that up.



Our inaugural Blockchain 50 list is dominated by financial firms. From BNP Paribas and Citigroup to Nasdaq to Mastercard and Visa, the biggest names in global money are making strides in blockchain testing and adoption. 



They&#8217;re using the technology to speed up settlement times and interbank payments, simplify processes that still rely on paper and fax machines, and improve security measures with the goal of both saving time and money now and creating new ways to make a profit in the future.



Fidelity, which now has 100 employees devoted to digital assets, has launched a digital asset custody service for institutional investors and is already building a trading platform for purchasing crypto. PNC bank is using Ripple’s blockchain software to process international payments. 



Santander is already collecting revenue from One Pay FX, a blockchain-based foreign exchange service that is also built on Ripple technology. Dutch banking giant ING’s dedicated blockchain team that has launched 8 pilots since 2016, and alongside Credit Suisse completed the first legally enforceable securities swap on a blockchain last year.



Even banks that didn&#8217;t make our list, like the Royal Bank of Canada and Bank of America, are testing the waters. RBC has conducted 8 live pilots, and Bank of America has filed the most blockchain patents of any company in the industry.



Notably, these early first forays into the blockchain space have fostered something unexpected among these major competitors: collaboration, especially through industry efforts like Hyperledger and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. “I remember how different people from different institutions tried to start talking about the common work in this moment,” says BBVA’s Carlos Kuchkovsky, CTO of new digital business, of the early days of those groups. “That’s how we want to collaborate now, to create common new rails.”



Citibank has partnered with Barclays to launch a blockchain app store. ING and BNP Paribas are just two of several big banks that partnered to create komgo, a blockchain trade commodity network, and UBS has partnered with BNY Mellon, Deutsche Bank, and Santander to create a way to exchange digital cash.



Of course, these banks know that there is a long road ahead when it comes to integrating blockchain into their daily processes. Blockchain is not a catch-all solution, and there are sure to be new hurdles ahead, but some banks say they are already reaping the rewards. “You already have tangible benefits but this still is not the end state,” says ING’s program director of distributed ledger technology Mariana Gomez de la Villa of a recent ING pilot. “The ecosystem is growing.”



-Sarah Hansen; Forbes Staff

Aerial View of the Network of the Office Building

Controlling The Ledger: The World’s Largest Financial Firms Embrace Blockchain

Turns out there is literally no difference between lab-grown diamonds and natural diamonds, well, apart from the price.



<hr class="wp-block-separator"/>



Ever wondered what the difference between lab-produced
diamonds and natural diamonds was? Well, nothing. They are exactly the same. 



As with most things of value, a great deal of information
has been produced over the years about the price of diamonds. In short, many
believe the real price of diamonds is far lower than what ‘big business’ would
have us believe and that it is driven up by our insatiable hunger and the
social importance we place on the stones. 



In line with this, there is a widely-held belief that they
are not rare and the market is being deliberately controlled to create the
façade that they are difficult to produce. Therefore, their price is dictated
by the fact that they symbolize the most enduring of all human emotions – love.



&nbsp;With that out of the
way, in recent times, society has developed a pragmatic relationship with
diamonds, rather than a romantic one that has long sustained the industry. 



It might be that we live in the era of instant gratification
or that we have stopped romanticising the idea of waiting millions of years for
the precious stone, but more people have embraced the idea of purchasing
lab-grown diamonds.



READ MORE | <a href="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wealth/2019/04/08/from-medicine-to-nanotechnology-how-gold-quietly-shapes-our-world/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="From Medicine To Nanotechnology: How Gold Quietly Shapes Our World (opens in a new tab)">From Medicine To Nanotechnology: How Gold Quietly Shapes Our World</a>



Unlike an imitation gem like cubic zirconia, it has the same physical characteristics and chemical components as a natural diamond but production time is much shorter, enabling producers to create it in a matter of weeks. 



Lab-grown diamonds producer Ross Reid offers FORBES AFRICA a very sobering perspective with the following analogy to describe man-made diamonds. 



“If a couple can’t fall pregnant using conventional methods,
they do IVF where the baby’s origin of life is manmade. Is that not a real baby
when it’s born?”



The room falls silent as all contemplate this question.



“So by that logic, it is a real diamond,” Reid states
emphatically.



Reid is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of Inception
Diamonds, One of South Africa’s first Diamond companies to offer lab-grown
diamonds and fine jewelry.



The world’s leading diamond producer, De Beers, however, has
a different perspective.



“We view natural diamonds and lab-grown diamonds as very
different products as they have completely different production processes.
Natural diamonds are created in the earth, under intense heat and pressure over
billions of years. Each diamond is rare, finite and unique,” says Bianca
Ruakere, a De Beers Group spokesperson.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="585" height="611" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Diamond2.png" alt="" class="wp-image-40193" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Diamond2.png 585w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Diamond2-300x313.png 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Diamond2-287x300.png 287w" sizes="(max-width: 585px) 100vw, 585px" /><figcaption> De Beers Lightbox range. Picture: De Beers</figcaption></figure>



Reid says he recognizes the market potential for global
growth in being able to offer conflict-free, environmentally-friendly lab-grown
diamonds, especially to the millennial market.



“With the creation of laboratory-grown diamonds, it allows
you to offer the consumer the same thing optically, physically, and chemically
at a big discount. So you can have the same beauty, the same hardness, the same
look and the same feel for less money,” Reid says.



Large diamond producers have also recognized the same
potential.



De Beers Group has been producing synthetic diamonds for
industrial purposes for more than 50 years. “Last year, we launched Lightbox in
the United States to market a range of fun, fashion jewelry using lab-grown
diamonds. They are accessibly priced, and a distinct product offering compared
with natural diamonds,” Ruakere says.



&nbsp;Price is not the only
reason that encourages the market to opt for lab-grown diamonds. They are also
other ethical factors such as having a guarantee that the rock on your finger
is conflict-free.



&nbsp;Shogan Naidoo, who
proposed to his fiancé, Preba Iyavoo, on Valentine’s Day at the popular
independent cinema house, The Bioscope, did so with a healthy bank balance and
clean conscience. 



They were traditionally engaged in July last year, so by the time the ring engagement happened, Iyavoo was caught completely off-guard and was pleasantly surprised. 



“Shogan is the most endearing person, but he’s not romantic
in the slightest,” says a giddy Iyavoo, who recalls the proposal that happened
in a filled theater, with a movie Naidoo had created just for her. 



The couple are besotted with their lab-grown diamond. Naidoo
says after doing exhaustive research to find the perfect ring to propose with,
all conventional options had failed him.



READ MORE | <a href="https://www.forbesafrica.com/technology/2018/09/03/blood-diamonds-to-blockchain-diamonds/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Blood Diamonds To Blockchain Diamonds? (opens in a new tab)">Blood Diamonds To Blockchain Diamonds?</a>



&nbsp;He says his final
ring choice far exceeded his expectations in price and design. Naidoo explains
that Iyavoo has a very specific preference and that he was not willing to
compromise in getting her the perfect ring but the one he initially wanted was
in the range of R80,000 ($5,500).



&nbsp; “We were planning a
wedding and we’d just bought a house,” he says. The exorbitant cost of retail
rings led him to search out of the box, and eventually the box returned with
the perfect gem.



&nbsp;The couple who lead a
very environmentally-conscious lifestyle, say they are especially proud to be
the custodians of this ring because they are guaranteed it’s conflict-free and
no miners were exploited.



&nbsp;Reid says he has to
grapple with a great deal of scepticism because many are not ready to fully
embrace the idea of lab-grown diamonds despite their advantages. 



“The Federal Trade Commission has changed the definition of
a diamond. It does not need to come from the ground.



“We have opened up the market for people to be able to
afford beautiful pieces without compromising on quality,” Reid says.



Change is inevitable and with that, there will always be
those resistant to it. But one thing is for sure, society’s relationship with
diamonds are changing.

diamond

Lab-grown Diamonds: Never Mined, It’s Man-Made

The periodic table of chemical elements&nbsp;<a href="https://www.iypt2019.org/">turns 150</a>&nbsp;this year. The anniversary is a chance to shine a light on particular elements – some of which seem ubiquitous but which ordinary people beyond the world of chemistry probably don’t know much about.



One of these is gold, which was the subject of my postgraduate degrees in chemistry, and which I have&nbsp;<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Werner_Van_Zyl">been studying</a>&nbsp;for almost 30 years. In chemistry, gold can be considered a late starter when compared to most other metals. It was always considered to be chemically “inert” – but in recent decades it has flourished and a variety of interesting applications have emerged.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">A long, curious history</h4>



Gold takes its name from the Latin word aurum (“yellow”). It’s an element with a long but rather mysterious history. For instance, it’s one of 12 confirmed elements on the periodic table whose discoverer&nbsp;<a href="http://www.rsc.org/periodic-table/element/79/gold">is unknown</a>. The others are carbon, sulfur, copper, silver, iron, tin, antimony, mercury, lead, zinc and bismuth.



Though we’re not sure who discovered it, there’s evidence to suggest it was known to the ancient Egyptians as far back as <a rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label=" (opens in a new tab)" href="http://raregoldnuggets.com/?p=6724" target="_blank">3000 BC</a>. Historically, its primary use was for jewellery; this is still the case <a href="https://www.sbcgold.com/blog/top-6-common-uses-for-gold/">tod</a><a rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="a (opens in a new tab)" href="https://www.sbcgold.com/blog/top-6-common-uses-for-gold/" target="_blank">a</a><a href="https://www.sbcgold.com/blog/top-6-common-uses-for-gold/">y</a>, it’s also used in mint coins. Gold is also found in ancient and modern art: it’s used to prepare ruby or purple pigment, or as gold leaf.



READ MORE | <a href="https://www.forbesafrica.com/economy/2019/01/30/gold-back-on-upward-path-as-global-growth-slows/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Gold Back on Upward Path As Global Growth Slows (opens in a new tab)">Gold Back on Upward Path As Global Growth Slows</a>



South Africa was once the top&nbsp;<a rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label=" (opens in a new tab)" href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2018/06/13/top-10-gold-producing-countries/#7580dae84a87" target="_blank">gold-producing country</a>&nbsp;by far: it mined over 1,000 tonnes in 1970 alone. Its annual output has steadily fallen since then – the top three gold producing countries&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2018/06/13/top-10-gold-producing-countries/#7580dae84a87" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label=" (opens in a new tab)">in 2017</a>&nbsp;were China, Australia and Russia, with a&nbsp;combined&nbsp;output of almost 1000 tonnes. South Africa has dropped to 8th position, even surpassed by Peru and Indonesia.



But gold’s uses and its chemical properties extend into many other areas beyond jewels and minted coins. From pharmaceutical research to nanotechnology, this ancient element is being used to drive new technologies that are pushing the world into the future.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Why and how it’s useful</h2>



Of the 118 confirmed elements in the periodic table, nine are naturally occurring elements with radioactive&nbsp;<a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-nuclear-applications/radioisotopes-research/radioisotopes-in-medicine.aspx" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label=" (opens in a new tab)">isotopes</a>&nbsp;that are used in so-called nuclear medicine. Gold is not radioactive, but is nevertheless very useful in medicine in the form of gold-containing drugs.



There are two classes of gold drugs used to treat rheumatoid arthritis. One is injectable gold thiolates – molecules with a sulfur atom at one end, and a chemical chain of virtually any description attached to them – found in drugs such as Myocrisin, Solganol and Allocrysin. The other is an oral complex called Auranofin.



READ MORE | <a href="https://www.forbesafrica.com/economy/2019/03/10/south-africas-precious-metal-mining-industry-is-on-shaky-ground/">South Africa’s Precious </a><a href="https://www.forbesafrica.com/economy/2019/03/10/south-africas-precious-metal-mining-industry-is-on-shaky-ground/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Metal (opens in a new tab)">Metal </a><a href="https://www.forbesafrica.com/economy/2019/03/10/south-africas-precious-metal-mining-industry-is-on-shaky-ground/">Mining Industry Is On Shaky Ground</a>



Gold is also increasingly being used in&nbsp;nanotechnology. A nanomaterial is generally considered a material where any of its three dimensions is 100 nanometres (nm) or less. Nanotechnology is useful because it is not restricted to a particular material – any material could in principle be made into a nanomaterial – but rather a particular property: the property of size.



For example, gold in its bulk form has a distinct yellow colour. But as it is broken up into very small pieces it starts to change colour, through a range of red and purple, depending on the relative size of the gold nanoparticles. Such nanoparticles could be used in a variety of applications, for example in the&nbsp;biomedical&nbsp;or&nbsp;optical-electronic&nbsp;fields.



Another exciting advancement for gold in nanotechnology was the discovery in 1983 that a clean gold surface dipped into a solution containing a thiolate could form&nbsp;self-assembled monolayers. These monolayers modify the surface of gold in very innovative ways. Research into surface modification is important because the surface of anything can show very different properties than the bulk (that is, the inside) of the same material.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">More to come</h4>



Gold nanoparticles have also proven to be an effective catalyst. A catalyst is a material that increases the rate of a chemical reaction and so reduces the amount of energy required without itself undergoing any permanent chemical change. This is important because catalysis lies at the heart of many&nbsp;manufactured goods&nbsp;we use today. For example, a catalyst turns propylene into propylene oxide, which is the first step in making antifreeze.



Two discoveries in the 1980s made scientists look at gold catalysis differently. Masatake Haruta, in Osaka, Japan, made mixed oxides containing gold – and discovered the material was remarkably active to catalyse the oxidation of toxic carbon monoxide into carbon dioxide. Today, this catalyst is found in vehicle exhausts.



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At the same time&nbsp;Graham Hutchings, who was working in industry in Johannesburg, South Africa,&nbsp;discovered a gold catalyst&nbsp;that would work best for acetylene hydrochlorination. This process is central to PVC plastic, which is used in virtually all plumbing production. Until then, the industrial catalyst for this process was using environmentally unfriendly mercuric chloride material.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">Many applications</h4>



In my opinion, gold has many more uses that haven’t yet been discovered. There is much more to come in the world of&nbsp;<a href="https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ed400782p">gold research</a>.



There will, in the next few years, be new developments in how the element is used in, amongst others, medicine, nanotechnology and catalysis. It will also find new applications in relativistic quantum chemistry (combining relativistic mechanics with quantum chemistry), surface science (the physics and chemistry of surfaces and how they interact), luminescence and&nbsp;photophysics&nbsp;– and more.



&#8211;Werner van Zyl; Associate Professor of Chemistry, Lecturer in sustainable biomass, energy and water systems, University of KwaZulu-Natal



&#8211;The Conversation

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From Medicine To Nanotechnology: How Gold Quietly Shapes Our World

Jeff Bezos announced on Thursday that he will give a 4% stake in Amazon—currently worth more than $35 billion—to his wife, MacKenzie, as part of their pending divorce, making it by far the largest divorce settlement in history. In January, soon after the couple announced their separation, Forbes assembled a list of the largest, strangest and most notable billionaire disunions on record—at least where we could follow the money. In some cases, like the split between Google’s Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki, we don’t know the size of the settlement because divorce filings were sealed. 



Below are five of the largest settlements, in descending order.



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1) Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos &#8211; At least $35 billion.



The couple met while both were working at hedge fund D.E. Shaw in New York. After they moved to Seattle, MacKenzie helped Jeff get Amazon off the ground. On April 4, they announced the terms of their divorce, which will likely become official over the summer: she will receive about 4% of Amazon’s outstanding shares—now worth over $35 billion. Jeff will hold on to all of rocket company Blue Origin and The Washington Post. Once the divorce is finalized, MacKenzie will likely be the world’s third-richest woman.



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2) Bill and Sue Gross &#8211; $1.3 billion



The Grosses’ messy split minted a new billionaire and dragged down another. Sue filed for divorce in 2016 from her husband, the founder of asset-manager Pimco, and she walked away a year later with a $1.3 billion fortune. That haul included a $36 million Laguna Beach house and “Le Repos,” a contested 1932 Picasso painting that she later sold for $35 million. While Bill originally tried to hang on to one of their three pet cats, Sue eventually got custody of all of them. Bill lost his spot on The Forbes 400 in 2018 following 14 consecutive years on the list. Both now run their own charitable vehicles.



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3) Steve and Elaine Wynn &#8211; $850 million



The cofounders of casino giant Wynn Resorts divorced (for the second time) in 2010. That settlement dictated that Elaine, a Wynn Resorts board member since 2002, receive 11 million shares, then worth an estimated $795 million. Steve also sold around $114 million in stock that year—some, if not all, went to Elaine as part of the deal. She then sued Wynn Resorts in 2012 to sell part of her 9% stake and was kicked off the board three years later amid an ugly proxy battle. 



 After Steve stepped down as CEO and chairman in February 2018 amid sexual harassment allegations that he has denied, he sold all his shares. Elaine, now worth $2 billion, is Wynn Resorts’ largest shareholder.



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4) Harold Hamm and Sue Ann Arnall &#8211; $975 million



After three years of bitter court proceedings, oil tycoon Harold in 2015 tried to finally end his 26-year marriage with Sue Ann (no prenup) by writing her a check in the amount of $974,790,317.77 from his Morgan Stanley account. She deposited it, but then changed her mind, decided she wanted more and filed an appeal seeking a bigger share of the $13.7 billion fortune tied to Hamm’s 75% ownership in publicly traded Continental Resources. In April 2015 the Oklahoma Supreme Court ended the saga, granting Harold’s motion to dismiss her appeal, reasoning from precedent that Sue Ann had agreed to the settlement by signing and depositing the check. Sue Ann subsequently funded a political action committee that succeeded in its effort to unseat the judge who presided over the divorce.



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5) Roy E. and Patricia Disney &#8211; $600 million



Roy and his wife filed for divorce in 2007 at the ages of 77 and 72, respectively, after 52 years of marriage. Roy, a nephew of Walt Disney, was worth approximately $1.3 billion at the time. Previously a Forbes 400 mainstay, he lost nearly half of his fortune in the split and was dropped from the list. In 2008, he married writer and producer Leslie DeMeuse. He died a year later; Patricia followed in 2012. A family foundation with assets of $122 million (as of 2016) bearing both of their names supports environmental and economic causes.



&#8211;Compiled by Madeline Berg, Deniz Cam, Kathleen Chaykowski, Lauren Debter, Kerry A. Dolan, Alex Fang, Luisa Kroll, Chloe Sorvino and Jennifer Wang.



&#8211; Noah Kirsch; Forbes Staff

Axel Springer award ceremony

Bezos By Far: The 5 Largest Billionaire Divorces In History

He was a Los Angeles billionaire known worldwide for pushing the limits of engineering, safety and his bank account to achieve transportation breakthroughs, as well as for gossipy celebrity romances. 



He churned through executives like a buzz saw, made puzzlingly costly business decisions and invited conflict by thumbing his nose at politicians and the law. Yet he was one of the great entrepreneurs of his time.



No, it isn&#8217;t Tesla’s mercurial billionaire CEO Elon Musk, who’s locked in a legal fight with the Securities &amp; Exchange Commission that could lead to his ouster and must put the company on sound footing after burning through $5 billion since 2010 to popularize its electric cars and solar power. 



We’re talking about billionaire Howard Hughes, who at his death was among the world’s richest people. Hughes’ machinery ushered in the oil age, his investments helped popularize commercial air travel, he ran Hollywood’s biggest studios, built an enormous gaming and real estate empire, and has an imprint that stretches from satellite television to the Las Vegas strip and biomedical research.



We’re talking about billionaire Howard Hughes, who at his death was among the world’s richest people. Hughes’ machinery ushered in the oil age, his investments helped popularize commercial air travel, he ran Hollywood’s biggest studios, built an enormous gaming and real estate empire, and has an imprint that stretches from satellite television to the Las Vegas strip and biomedical research.



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As federal judge&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2019/03/19/sec-slams-elon-musk-for-failing-to-have-a-single-tesla-tweet-checked/#283d8f383a46" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Alison Nathan weighs the SEC’s charge</a>&nbsp;that Musk violated a 2018 settlement arising from alleged share price manipulation with tweets about taking Tesla private, it’s instructive to look back at another mercurial entrepreneur’s career and fights with regulators, because even surprise victories didn’t guarantee long-term stability for Hughes.



Born in 1905, Hughes in the 1920s inherited Hughes Tool, which made drill bits used to burrow oil wells. Uninterested in oil, he let others run the company and moved to Los Angeles to spend Toolco cash on passion projects in two emerging technologies: aviation and moviemaking. Hughes’ silent filmTwo Arabian Knights won Academy awards. During the filming of his 1930 epic Hell’s Angels, pilots died and planes crashed. 



The silver screen adventures made Hughes a celebrity. He dated Jane Russell and Katherine Hepburn and married actress Jean Peters. Likewise, Musk married British actress Talulah Riley following his divorce from author Justine (Wilson) Musk. He’s also dated actress Amber Heard and had a brief but sensational, relationship with indie singer Grimes.



Hughes’ aviation obsession led him in 1932 to create Hughes Aircraft as a division of Toolco, to siphon more profits and manufacture planes in the pursuit of flight records. By 1938 he flew around the world in record time, gaining global fame. In 1939, he paid $9 million to take control of Trans World Airlines. 



Hughes’ aircraft unit was a big military contractor during World War II, and TWA, under his ownership, brought flying into the mainstream through expansion and enormous aircraft investments. The spending even supported burgeoning aerospace conglomerates like Boeing and McDonnell Douglas.



At the time of his death in 1976, Hughes had controlled TWA, RKO, Air West and owned multiple billion-dollar businesses, six casinos and most of the undeveloped land in Las Vegas. Though he spent his last days as a recluse at Xanadu, his Bahamian estate, Hughes’ fame was worldwide, and it carries on with his Howard Hughes Medical Institute, one of America&#8217;s biggest philanthropies. For all the success, Hughes also spent much of his public life fighting with politicians and regulators.



Like Musk, the SEC targeted Hughes for manipulative financial maneuvers in his publicly traded companies, and both faced shareholder lawsuits. Unlike Musk so far, Hughes’ reckless maneuvering also meant he was often forced to put his businesses into blind trust structures, shielded from his capricious management.



Born in South Africa, Musk came to the U.S. to study physics and economics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, arriving at the dawn of the internet era in search of big opportunities. Musk later dropped out of Stanford to create a software company he eventually sold to Compaq. 



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Next he built X.Com, a Web payments company that became part of PayPal, and Musk was treated as a cofounder alongside Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman and others. When eBay bought PayPal in 2002, Musk earned a $165 million payday that bootstrapped his push into new industries. 



He began by founding the rocket company SpaceX in 2002, then in 2004 invested $6.35 million to transform Tesla from a concept on paper into the world’s leading electric car brand. He funded the residential solar energy startup SolarCity in 2006, which has since been integrated into Tesla, and in 2017 created the Boring Company as a way to advance his high-speed Hyperloop concept.



Like Hughes, Musk made daring, contrarian bets aimed at reshaping enormous industries. He, too, wanted to test the limits of corporate leadership to gain ground on incumbents like General Motors, electric utilities, oil companies and government-backed space endeavors. 



Tesla competes with an oligopoly of carmakers specializing in petroleum-powered internal combustion engines. With SpaceX he saw an opportunity to ferry satellites, cargo and astronauts into space as NASA slimmed down. SolarCity’s goal is to accelerate clean energy use and curb dependence on fossil fuels.



All three have become high-profile, multibillion-dollar businesses, but none has produced meaningful profits. They’ve also been hamstrung by Musk’s driven, but often reckless, management style.



SpaceX, a wild success now worth $30 billion, has completed numerous launches for NASA and is the leader in private space travel. Musk also set a goal of not just getting to Mars but colonizing it. At the moment, SpaceX is also reportedly under review as a federal contractor, after Musk smoked pot on comedian Joe Rogan’s podcast. 



Tesla acquired SolarCity in a 2016 merger that puzzled investors and led to accusations of self-dealing since most board members rubber-stamping the purchase were affiliated with Musk. It also triggered a class-action shareholder suit. SolarCity has disappointed so far, losing market share and moving slowly on ambitious plans to sell solar roofs and Powerwall battery storage systems. But none of Musk’s companies has become more valuable or problematic than Tesla.



Two years after its 2010 Nasdaq debut, Tesla and Musk dazzled with the electric Model S, a sleek sedan that won critical raves and blew away sales expectations. Tesla shares soared, and Musk began planning new vehicles including the Model X SUV and mass-market Model 3 sedan. But X was two years late to market, mainly because of the problematic “falcon wing” doors Musk insisted on, and the 3’s rollout was hamstrung by bottlenecks with the automated assembly line Musk envisioned. 



Tesla mostly abandoned his robotic production dream, even building Model 3’s almost by hand in a tentlike assembly line in a lot at its plant in Fremont, California. Since 2016 dozens of top Tesla executives have left, and Wall Street has grown uncomfortable with its billions of dollars in spending but weak financial position.



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Over time, Hughes became known for increasingly erratic behavior. His fame transitioned from Hollywood showmanship to mystery as he spent his later years as a recluse in a suite in Las Vegas’s Desert Inn and then at his Bahamian Xanadu. “Hughes survived three major airplane crashes and an automobile crash that put him out for two days. His head was badly banged around in all of these, and I think his mental condition can be directly attributed to those crashes,” Noah Dietrich, Hughes’ longtime accountant and confidant, told&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;in 1972. Dietrich recalled a 1944 episode when he told Hughes, “You better see some doctors and do it quick.” When Hughes returned, Dietrich recalled, he said, “Noah, thanks a lot. I had a consultation with three doctors this morning and they tell me I’m right on the verge of a complete mental collapse. They tell me if I don&#8217;t get away for a while and relax&#8230;”



In 2017, Musk <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2017/07/31/amid-his-most-important-tesla-milestone-elon-musk-says-he-may-be-bipolar/#454f42f971f4" target="_blank">tweeted that he might be bipolar</a>, a surprisingly candid admission for such a public figure. But in the summer of 2018, he created unnecessary headaches with several head-scratching moves. He triggered a defamation lawsuit for recklessly calling a British man who aided the rescue of a Thai soccer team trapped in a cave a “pedo” on Twitter. In August, after receiving an investment from Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, he dropped an even bigger Twitter bombshell. “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured,” he blared to 25 million followers. After a probe, the SEC found Musk had little basis to proclaim the buyout and charged him with stock manipulation. In September, after seeking his removal as CEO, the regulator fined Musk and Tesla $40 million, had him step down as chairman and agree to have tweets containing material information reviewed by Tesla officials. Musk agreed to the terms but neglected them and expressed contempt for the SEC. “I want to be clear. I do not respect the SEC. I do not respect them,” he told 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl in December 2018. That interview, combined with an inaccurate tweet about Tesla production, led the SEC to claim he had breached the settlement.



Now it’s up to Judge Nathan, who’s presiding over the case in the federal court for the Southern District of New York, to decide Musk’s fate. On Thursday, she asked that&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2019/04/04/elon-musk-lives-to-fight-another-day-as-judge-orders-him-to-work-out-twitter-dispute-with-sec/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Musk and the SEC try to mediate a solution,</a>&nbsp;which was an idea the entrepreneur seemed amenable to. But what if he again opts for a standoff? The most extreme outcome could force Musk out of Tesla management. Could his role at SpaceX also be curbed? Will banks who’ve lent billions to Musk pull their support? These are all scenarios that played out in Hughes’ half-century business career in aviation, film, gambling, real estate and energy.



Consider his deal to take control of Trans World Airlines, an investment that returned Hughes a fiftyfold profit. TWA also spent over a decade battling the billionaire. In 1961, it sued Hughes on antitrust grounds, accusing the mercurial businessman of using a crony as CEO to rubber-stamp $320 million in jet orders, which the airline leased from Hughes Tool and nearly caused the airline to go under. The buying binge propelled TWA into one of the world’s fastest growing airlines, but its cash needs proved to be a double-edged sword. When Hughes’ hand-picked CEO retired midway through a $265 million rescue financing, he was blindsided by a piece of fine print that allowed lenders to put his shares in trust if there were any executive departures. When the financing was completed, TWA was saved, but Hughes lost control. In came the professional management, which turned the tables by suing Hughes on antitrust grounds for the reckless aircraft orders. Hughes sold his TWA stock for $546.5 million in 1966.



Of Hughes’ management,&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;said in a 1961 cover story, “On the whole, it is to be hoped that Howard Hughes will never again be able to exercise the absolute power he once held over TWA. The hope is not expressed from any high-flown considerations of economic morality or national interest. Rather, it is because Hughes is basically a distraction: No rational analysis of TWA and its prospects seems possible without soon being perverted into a discussion of this mysterious, magnetic, remarkable man.”



Even after Hughes’ sold his stake in TWA, the battle raged on, with the airline winning a $135 million judgment against the entrepreneur in 1963. For the better part of a decade, the nine-figure legal loss hung over Hughes’ empire. In 1972, an appeal by the billionaire made it to the Supreme Court, where Hughes prevailed.



That wasn’t the only airline conquest that resulted in legal trouble for Hughes. After exiting TWA, he set his sights on Air West, offering to buy the struggling airline for $81 million, or $22 a share, in a 1968 hostile takeover. Hughes won a lengthy battle and changed the airline’s name to Hughes Air West. However, in 1970 when shareholders were paid, they received just $8 a share. In 1973, Hughes and four associates were charged criminally for stock manipulation, conspiracy and wire fraud. In 1975 the SEC joined the legal battle. The suit raged on through Hughes’ death in 1976. His estate paid $30 million to the SEC in 1979 to settle the charges.



As a government contractor, Hughes invited particular scrutiny. Hughes Aircraft was notorious for missing deadlines and frustrating federal bureaucracies. During World War II, it was tasked with building a spy plane that was never delivered, though Hughes narrowly escaped death crashing a prototype in Beverly Hills. Then came notoriety. Hughes was contracted to build a plane to shuttle supplies and troops by air, instead of warships susceptible to German U-boats. His eight-engine, 750-person plywood H-4 Hercules, known nationwide as the Spruce Goose, was a marvel of ambition. But the war came and went, tens of millions were spent, and it wouldn’t fly.



In 1947, Owen Brewster, a U.S. senator from Maine who was an ally of infamous Senator Joseph McCarthy, brought Hughes to the Senate to testify on why the government spent $40 million on a plane that wasn’t delivered. To deflect accusations the was selling vaporware, Hughes organized a media event in Long Beach, California, in which he flew the Spruce Goose 33 feet in the air for about a minute, winning the public’s support and eventually ending Brewster’s political career. But to remain a government contractor, he was forced in 1953 to spin off Hughes Aircraft and put it in a trust, which was called the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. When Hughes died in 1976, he was among the world’s richest people, and nearly everything he owned was under a legal cloud.



Hughes’ divestiture of Hughes Aircraft in 1953, Forbes reported in a 1984 feature, wasn’t without upside. “The suspicion has been that the whole affair was a tax move designed to keep Howard Hughes in sole control while paying no taxes,” wrote reporter Allan Dodds Frank. The Hughes estate sold Hughes Aircraft–which evolved into a coveted giant in satellite TV that birthed DirecTV–to General Motors in 1985 for $5 billion. 



The sale turned the institute into a top philanthropy and a leader in genetics and biomedical research: It has distributed $22 billion and 28 of its current and former scientists have been awarded Nobel prizes. In a 1972 exclusive interview with Forbes, Dietrich, Hughes’ accountant, revealed that the billionaire had probably paid just $20,000 a year in taxes. 



Dietrich himself spent years in a legal battle over undelivered bonus pay Hughes promised him if he stayed amid constant turnover. And though Dietrich’s tell-all to Forbes was mostly critical, the loyal adviser conceded, “Hughes did have a certain amount of mechanical genius.”



While Musk received most of the credit for Tesla’s early breakthrough with Model S, he benefited from an able team that included veteran auto engineers Peter Rawlinson and Nick Sampson; battery expert Kurt Kelty; George Blankenship, who designed Tesla’s stores; and government affairs pro Diarmuid O’Connell. None of them are still with Tesla. And while Musk gained billions from SpaceX, it’s been ably run (with minimal turnover) by president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell. It’s a contrast to Musk’s Model 3 “production hell” in 2018, when he spent many nights sleeping on a sofa in Tesla’s Fremont factory or jetting off to promote subterranean transit tunneling services by his Boring Co.



For all the similarities between the two men, there are also major differences. Hughes hardly ever relied on outside money to finance his whims. In his 20s, he smartly took 100% ownership of Hughes Tool and thus could plunder its cash without having to answer to anyone. Musk, on the other hand, magnified his PayPal windfall with enormous sums of other people’s money, on public stock markets and in private markets. He answers not only to public shareholders and venture capitalists in all of his endeavors but also to bankers, who’ve provided billions in margin debt to maintain large Tesla and SpaceX holdings as they’ve raised capital.



As much as Tesla and SpaceX’s combined $80 billion market cap is a marvel–and Musk’s newer ventures like Hyperloop and Boring Co. set impressive goals–they have yet to profit on their industry-changing intentions. Much of Musk’s empire is still based on undelivered promises anchored to time-bound investor expectations.



-Antoine Gara; Forbes Staff



-Alan Ohnsman; Forbes Staff



-With assistance from Susan Radlauer

960×0

Crazy Aviators: The Eerie Similarities Between Billionaire Howard Hughes And Elon Musk

They come from every corner of the world—Austria and Slovakia to Australia and Vietnam—having made their fortunes in every venture imaginable: music and makeup, software and sweaters. In all, 195 fresh faces joined the world’s billionaire ranks this year. Here are 10 of the most exceptional.



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one of eight children, Steward milked cows and slopped hogs on the family farm before school every day while his dad worked as a mechanic, trash collector and janitor to make ends meet. After graduating from Central Missouri State University, he sent out 400 resumes over three years before landing his “dream” job as a salesman at Missouri Pacific Railroad Company. 



He cofounded IT provider World Wide Technology in 1990, which counts companies like Citi, Verizon and the federal government among its customers. His 59% stake in the $11.2 billion (sales) company, making him one of the richest African-Americans in the country. “I hope what this represents is that all things are possible,” Steward says, a lifelong jazz lover who donated $1.3 million to the University of Missouri-St. Louis in 2018 to create a jazz studies program. “We still live in the greatest country in the world, and God blesses persons of color too.”



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After making his fortune in retail, Hang is now focusing on politics, too. In the run-up to Brazil’s October 2018 presidential election, he urged his 2 million Facebook followers to back far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro, who ultimately won by a ten-point margin. (Hang went as far as threatening to leave the country if Bolsonaro’s leftist opponent, Fernando Haddad, won the race.)



Even after the election, he has continued to post live videos of himself on social media almost daily. One recent posting showed him celebrating former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s corruption conviction by dancing poolside to fireworks.



Outside of politics, Hang’s stores are thriving. Havan, the department store chain he cofounded at 24, generated a record $1.2 billion in 2017 sales, up 40% over the prior year. One ingredient in that success: “Always hire happy people; leave the unhappy ones to the competition,&#8221; Hang says.



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The dermatologists have tapped into the lucrative skin care market with their multilevel marketing firm Rodan + Fields, which boasts $1.5 billion in sales and 300,000 independent “consultants” selling anti-aging creams and more. In February, they launched a new teen acne line, a throwback to their first claim to fame, acne product Proactiv. 



The brand took off when the doctors created a licensing deal with infomercial company Guthy-Renker in 1995 to sell their regimen through television advertisements featuring celebrities like Jessica Simpson. The doctors sold their royalty rights in 2016, and now their full attention is on Rodan + Fields. Their goal, Rodan says, is help as many people as possible have “life-changing skin.”



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An English major who reluctantly took over his grandfather’s small outerwear company in 2001, Reiss has created the “it” coat of the decade. The Canada Goose CEO marketed his down-filled jackets by giving freebies to people who spent a lot of time in the cold: Bouncers outside of nightclubs, polar explorers and attendees of cold-weather film festivals like the ones in Sundance and Toronto.



His $1,000-plus parkas are now fashion statements, staples on the streets of London, New York and Tokyo and have a strong celebrity following, including Jennifer Lopez, Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig. The stock has climbed threefold since its public debut two years ago; sales rose 46% to $450 million in 2018. Reiss, 45, has kept manufacturing at home as other companies moved offshore: “Making a Canada Goose parka in Canada is like making a Swiss watch in Switzerland.”



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She’s just the second woman in Russian to become a billionaire and joins the ranks of the world&#8217;s wealthiest thanks to the success of her e-commerce company, Wildberries, which had $1.9 billion in revenue last year. She started the business in 2004 at age 28 in her Moscow apartment while on maternity leave from teaching. She realized how difficult it was for her and other young mothers to shop for clothes for themselves with a newborn at home. Her husband, Vladislav, an IT technician, soon joined her to help grow the business. Today Wildberries sells 15,000 brands of clothing, household products and other items and processes roughly 400,000 orders a day from 2 million daily visitors in Russia, Kazakhstan, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan.



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In twenty years at Oracle, Catz, a former investment banker and now the company’s co-CEO, is often credited with leading Oracle’s aggressive acquisition strategy, including two hostile takeovers. In January 2005, Oracle acquired competitor PeopleSoft after an 18-month pursuit for $11 billion, more than double its original unsolicited bid.Three years later in April 2008, it acquired BEA Systems for $8.5 billion, a deal that also involved Carl Icahn, the billionaire corporate raider who was a BEA shareholder and pushed BEA to do the deal with Oracle. “I can’t really speak about [working with Icahn] in open session,” Catz said at a May 2019 commencement speech at the Wharton School. “It would be unladylike.”



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Born to two Iraqi parents who came to Israel as refugees, Fattal began working in hotels at age 23 as a receptionist. He toiled in other jobs—bellhop, security guard, salesman—before founding his own hotel company in 1999. “From the day I went into the hotel industry, I fell in love with it,” he says. “There is a glamour to it.” 



Starting a business just then in Israel would prove exceptionally tough, especially for a tourism-based one like Fattal&#8217;s. The Second Intifada conflict with the Palenstinains began in 2000 and lasted for several years. Fattal, however, thrived by targeting local, rather than international, tourists and by persuading hotel owners to switch from global brands to his more affordable one.



Today, Fattal Hotels, which went public in February 2019, owns and operates 40 locations in Israel and the Leonardo Hotels in Europe. “When you’re approaching the guests, it’s like you are on a stage. You have to be courteous, and I just always felt it was my job to maintain the atmosphere for happy people.”



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At 21, Jenner is the youngest-ever self-made billionaire, earning a ten-figure fortune even earlier than Mark Zuckerberg (who joined the billionaires list at 23 in 2008). “I didn’t expect anything—I did not foresee the future,” Jenner says. “But [the recognition] feels really good. That’s a nice pat on the back.” She owns 100% of Kylie Cosmetics, the three-year-old beauty business that did an estimated $360 million in sales last year. Most of the company’s revenue comes from e-commerce. But Kylie Cosmetics also has a new deal with Ulta that put its goods in all the makeup retailer’s 1,163 U.S. stores, “so people that would never buy my products—or that aren’t my fans—can see them in person.”



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A successful IPO last year was music to Ek’s ears. Spotify, the music-streaming service he founded 13 years ago, now has a $24 billion market cap. It still hasn’t had a profitable year, though; its focus is squarely on funneling cash into acquisitions. In February it announced a $340 million purchase of podcast companies Gimlet Media and Anchor FM. Ek founded Spotify in 2006 but before that, he found himself adrift as a self-made millionaire in his 20s—clubbing, driving a cherry-red Ferrari Modena—after an early stint at another Swedish tech company. “I was deeply uncertain of who I was and who I wanted to be,” Ek said in 2012. “I really thought I wanted to be a much cooler guy than what I was.” 



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I never intended to get this far,” said Kenny Park, whose father owned a fishing company. But he has stitched together a fortune making handbags and accessories for U.S. brands such as Michael Kors, Coach, Mark Jacobs and Alexander Wang. His Simone Accessories, named after his wife and 62% owned by Park and his family, makes some 30 million handbags, purses and wallets a year in its factories in Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia and China. 



His big break came in 1987 after he flew from Seoul to New York City with a sample bag. He pitched Donna Karan executives an offer to supply bags for almost 30% less than what they were paying their European suppliers, but with one caveat: a “Made in Korea” label. Reluctant at first, Donna Karan agreed to a trial order and by the next year was a key customer, one he still supplies today.



-Luisa Kroll; Forbes Staff



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The 10 Most Notable New Billionaires Of 2019

Women are still a minority among the most successful venture capital investors, but their presence is growing. Twelve female investors made it onto this year’s Midas List, a record for the annual ranking and an increase from nine women a year ago. The cohort includes three female newcomers, one of whom,&nbsp;Kathy Xu, is the highest-ranked woman on the list. &nbsp;



The Midas List ranks venture capital investors based on the number and dollar size of exits and highly-valued private companies over the past five years, with a premium on bolder early-stage deals. Produced in partnership with TrueBridge Capital Partners, the ranking counts only exits (public offerings or acquisitions) that are over $200 million or private investment rounds valuing companies at $400 million or more.&nbsp;



Newcomer Kathy Xu, founder and partner at Shanghai-based firm Capital Today, joins the list at the very lofty No. 6 spot, thanks largely to her prescient bet on JD.com, China’s No. 2 online retailer, plus investments in Chinese gaming company NetEase and discount e-commerce site Meituan-Dianping. Capital Today was just a year old when Xu bet on JD.com as its only Series A investor. 



After the e-commerce site went public in 2015, she had a career-making win. Her $18 million check returned $2.9 billion to Capital Today and its investors. Xu began her career as a bank clerk in China, then worked at Hong Kong investment firm Peregrine and Baring Private Equity Asia before founding Capital Today in 2005.



READ MORE | <a rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label=" (opens in a new tab)" href="https://www.forbes.com/pictures/5c9c18d5a7ea43206f13833a/women-investors-of-the-20/" target="_blank">Gallery: Women Investors Of The 2019 Midas List12 imagesView gallery</a>



Xu dethroned Mary Meeker, who was the highest-ranked female on the Midas List for the past three years. Meeker lands at No. 8 this year. After eight years at Kleiner Perkins Caufield &amp; Byers, Meeker left the firm in late 2018 to start a new fund with former members of Kleiner Perkins’ digital growth team. Her new fund, Bond Capital, launched in January 2019 and focuses on high-growth Internet companies. 



Her Kleiner Perkins portfolio had five exits since our last Midas List: Turkish commerce site Trendyol (acquired by Alibaba in June 2018), DocuSign (IPO in April 2018), Spotify (direct listing in April 2018) and Ring (acquired by Amazon in March 2018). 



Meeker is known in the tech world for her annual Internet Trends Report and was a managing director at Morgan Stanley covering public technology companies before she shifted into venture capital in 2010.&nbsp;



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Beth Seidenberg, No. 59 on the list, also recently started her own venture investing firm. After 14 years at Kleiner Perkins, Seidenberg, a physician by training, founded Los Angeles-based Westlake Village BioPartners, which plans to focus on early-stage firms and to incubate life sciences companies. 



The firm launched its first fund with $320 million of committed capital in September 2018. &nbsp;During her tenure at Kleiner Perkins, the ex-chief medical officer at Amgen incubated eight companies and made big deals including Flexus Biosciences, which was acquired by pharma giant Bristol-Myers Squibb in 2015 for $1.25 billion. Another notable exit: cancer drug maker Tesaro, which was acquired by GlaxoSmithKline for $5.1 billion in 2018.



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Other Newcomers



Two other newcomer female VCs debuted on our list. Nisa Leung, managing partner at Qiming Venture Partners, ranked at No. 54, leads the Chinese firm’s health care investments. 



Notable deals include the acquisition of cell analysis instrument company ACEA Biosciences by Agilent for $250 million in November 2018, and the September 2017 initial public offering of drug developer Zai Lab. Before joining Qiming, Leung cofounded Biomedic Holdings, which invested in medical devices, pharmaceuticals and health care services. 



Outside of her venture role, Leung is a visiting lecturer at Harvard Law School and a member of the government of Hong Kong&#8217;s Committee on Innovation and Technology Development and Re-Industrialization.



Another newcomer: Anna Fang, partner and CEO of ZhenFund, an early-stage China-based firm that has backed more than 600 startups. Fang, who oversees the fund’s investments, portfolio management and operations, secured the No. 89 rank thanks in part to her investments in lifestyle and shopping site Xiaohongshu, also known as Red, which said it had more than 200 million users as of January 2019. Fang, who is based in Beijing, started her career as an investment banker at J.P. Morgan in New York covering consumer and retail companies.



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Repeat Appearances



In addition to Meeker and Seidenberg, six other women who were on last year’s Midas List are back again, including Jenny Lee, founder and partner at GGV Capital (No. 19); Ann Miura-Ko, cofounder and partner at Floodgate Fund (No. 57); Theresia Gouw, cofounder and partner at Aspect Ventures (No.65); Rebecca Lynn, partner at Canvas (No. 80); Aileen Lee, founder and partner at Cowboy Ventures (No. 82); Sonali DeRycker, partner at Accel Partners in London (No.83); and Kirsten Green, founder and managing partner at Forerunner Ventures (No. 95).



Two of these women jumped up quite a bit in the ranks since last year. Jenny Lee of GGV Capital rocketed up to No. 19 from No. 74 a year ago thanks to five initial public offerings in the past year: credit card service startup 51credit in July 2018, language platform LingoChamp in September 2018, scooter startup Niu in October 2018 and smartphone maker Xiaomi in July 2018, a personal investment. 



Lee, who has been a Midas lister since 2012, also led GGV’s fundraising efforts last year, culminating in $1.88 billion of new funds in October 2018. Twenty of her investments are valued at more than $400 million and seven have reached unicorn or “megaunicorn” (multi-billion dollar) valuations. &nbsp;



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Gouw, cofounder and managing partner of Aspect Ventures, moved up to No. 65 from No. 89 a year ago following two notable acquisitions of companies she’d backed: Slack picked up smart email assistant Astro in September 2018, and Airbnb said it would acquire Hotel Tonight in March 2019 for $465 million. Gouw tells&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;this year that she continues to focus on investments in artificial intelligence and machine learning “despite all the hype.” &nbsp;&nbsp;



An Imbalanced Industry



It’s common knowledge that the venture capital industry and the startup and investment ecosystem skew heavily male. Globally, only about 17% of investment-level positions at venture firms are held by women,&nbsp;according to PitchBook data&nbsp;this year. 



What’s more, the overall surge in venture capital funding in recent years hasn’t benefited female founders at the same rate as male founders,&nbsp;according to PitchBook. The total amount of capital going to female U.S. founders is increasing— barely. 



Companies founded solely by women claimed 2.3% of total capital invested in venture-backed startups in the U.S. in the last year, according to PitchBook in February, up from 2.2% a year earlier. Not much, but an uptick of 0.1% is better than a move in the opposite direction.



-Kathleen Chaykowski; Forbes Staff

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Meet The Top Women Investors Of The Midas List In 2019

Last week, the German billionaire Reimann family, whose JAB Holdings owns Krispy Kreme, Panera Bread and Pret a Manger, admitted to profiting from, and taking part in, Nazi abuses and slave labor during the Nazi regime.



The acknowledgement came after German newspaper&nbsp;Bild&nbsp;reported&nbsp;that Albert Reimann Sr. and Albert Reimann Jr., both dead, were active in the Nazi Party and used Russian civilians and French prisoners of war as slaves during World War II. The family—which includes four billionaire children of Reimann Jr. worth an estimated $3.7 billion each—plans to donate about $11 million to a “suitable organization,”&nbsp;according to family spokesperson Peter Harf, though it hasn’t yet announced which. Harf also claims the family had already been looking into its ancestral ties to Nazism, commissioning German historian Pauk Erker to do so in 2014; his work remains ongoing and is expected to be completed in 2020, a spokesperson told&nbsp;Forbes.



But the family was far from alone in participating in Nazi activities or profiting from the Nazi regime. More than a dozen European billionaires and their families whose business roots predate World War II—including Kuehne and Nagel’s Klaus Michael Kuehne and Knorr-Bremse AG’s Heinz Hermann Thiele—had ties to Nazism through contracts, slave labor, the appropriation of stolen goods or other means.



“These kind of stories never come as a surprise. In 1944, one third of the whole workforce in Germany was forced labor. This means that almost every company which produced back then was in one way or the other involved in the war economy,” says Roman Köster, a German historian. “From 1942 it proved very complicated [for German businesses] to maintain production [that] was not in one way or the other related with the war.&#8221; He adds that&nbsp;Bild&#8216;s findings in the case of the Reimann family are worse than others due to the abuse and mistreatment of these workers, though a Reimann family spokesperson says Albert Reimann Sr. and Albert Reimann Jr.&nbsp;did not personally assault or harm any laborers.



Many of these billionaire companies openly acknowledge, and apologize, for those ties, though monetary responses are more rare.



“With the passage of time, it gets increasingly difficult to make a legal argument around reparations, unless the claimant can show conclusive proof of theft by the defendant’s ancestors,” says Karthik Ramana, a professor of business and public policy at the University of Oxford whose research has also encompassed ethics. “What potential claimants are left with then is moral suasion—and given the stakes for incumbents, I wouldn’t hold my breath in expectation of a flood of reparations.”



As billionaire Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/global/2000/0807/0315036a.html#41e625474b69" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">told Forbes in 2000</a>regarding his teenage ties to the Nazi party, &#8220;Perhaps even you did something in your youth that you now know was stupid. Why did I not reveal this past foolishness myself? Simple. I was afraid it would hurt my business.&#8221; Kamprad died in 2018 and his three sons, all billionaires, inherited part of the Ikea empire and are among those whose family members had Nazi ties.



Businesses didn’t only profit from forced labor. “Contracts with the Nazis were not uncommon for an exclusive circle of entrepreneurs who were in the friendship circle of SS leaders or had other connections,” says Christopher Kopper, a German professor of economics and business history.



Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, the richest woman in the world with $53.3 billion, inherited a nearly $50 billion stake in beauty giant L&#8217;Oréal, a company that reportedly thrived under the Third Reich. Frenchman Eugène Schueller, L&#8217;Oréal’s founder and Bettencourt Meyers’ grandfather, was said to have been a known anti-Semite.



More notable was the fact that Schueller reportedly established a partnership between paint and varnish manufacturer Valentine, where he was a co-director, and German company Druckfarben to supply paint to the German Navy. Between 1940 and 1943, Schueller’s tax returns show his income increased nearly tenfold, from 248,791 francs to 2,347,957 francs, according to the 2017 book&nbsp;The Bettencourt Affair:&nbsp;The World’s Richest Woman and The Scandal That Rocked Paris. Scheuller was later charged with economic and political collaboration with the Nazis but never convicted. L&#8217;Oréal declined to comment.



While Schueller operated from France, German businesses more often had ties to the Nazis. “Like the majority of Germans, the majority of business owners acted in an opportunist way,” says Kopper.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5ca26a9931358e79cac06532/960x0.jpg?fit=scale" alt="quandt
"/><figcaption>Herbert Quandt (left), here pictured with his wife Johanna, and his father Gunther employed about 50,000 slaves laborers at family factories in order to fill Nazi army Contracts. The Quandt family is now the largest shareholder in BMW.AFP/GETTY IMAGES</figcaption></figure>



The free labor of those captured by Nazis—in concentration camps or as prisoners of war—was another way businesses profited from the war. The Quandt family, which is the largest shareholder in German car company BMW and includes billionaire Stefan Quandt (worth $17.3 billion) and Susanne Klatten (worth $20.1 billion), also had ties to the Nazis.



Family patriarch Gunther Quandt and his son Herbert (Stefan and Susanne’s grandfather and father)&nbsp;employed about 50,000 slave laborersfrom Nazi concentration camps at family factories during the Third Reich, according to German documentary&nbsp;Das Schweigen der Quandts,or&nbsp;The Silence of the Quandts. The slaves were used to fill Nazi army contracts, specifically for batteries, firearms and ammunition through the Quandts’ company Accumulatorenfabrik AG. The Quandts also acquired (without paying) a number of Jewish businesses seized by the Nazis—a practice of appropriation that was not uncommon, be it of stolen property, business or art.



BMW, in which the Quandt family became major shareholders after World War II and which accounts for the majority of their wealth, separately profited from forced labor and from the Nazis, as the company supplied the German army with arms,&nbsp;according to BMW’s website. &nbsp;A spokesperson for Quandt family did not reply to a request for comment, but as BMW celebrated its 100th year in 2016, the company released a statement&nbsp;saying that&nbsp;“To this day, the enormous suffering this caused and the fate of many forced laborers remains a matter of the most profound regret.” The company&nbsp;gave money to the German Economy Foundation Initiative&nbsp;which provided compensation for former forced laborers.



German media conglomerate Bertelsmann profited from both slave labor and more direct means. Prior to World War II, the company—whose vice chair, Elisabeth Mohn, is currently worth $3.2 billion—was a relatively small publisher. But by the late 1920s, it began publishing, and profiting from, antisemitic and nationalistic and Nazi texts, according&nbsp;to the company’s archive. It soon became&nbsp;the number one supplier of books to the German armed forces, publishing paperback books that were popular with soldiers. To increase its profit margin, the company likely used Jewish slave labor to make the books, according to a report commissioned by Bertelsmann in 1998. Heinrich Mohn, Elisabeth’s father-in-law and the son of Bertelsmann’s founder, was not a member of the Nazi party but nevertheless benefited from the economic growth, says Kopper.



Bertelsmann has since worked to make reparations for its actions. In 2000, it joined 6,000 German companies in paying a collective $4.5 billion to people who performed slave labor for the Nazis. And Elisabeth Mohn, a prominent philanthropist, has worked to promote Jewish-German relations, while her late husband, Reinhard Mohn, was one of the first to establish an independent commission to look into the company’s history with the Nazi party, a spokesperson for the company said.



Some wealthy European business leaders actively shunned working with the Nazis. Frenchman Marcel Dassault—whose grandchildren Olivier, Thierry, Laurent Dassault and Marie-Hélène Habert are each worth $6 billion—built fighter planes and bombers for the French army during the beginning of World War II, according to the company’s history. But after Germany seized control of France, Dassault—who was reportedly Jewish (he later converted to Catholicism and changed his last name from Bloch to Dassault)—refused to cooperate with the new regime. He was arrested by the Vichy government and labeled a “dangerous individual for national defense and public security.” He was eventually sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was offered a job running a factory in exchange for freedom. He refused the offer and remained in the camp until it was liberated in 1945.



But even some business tycoons who were anti-Nazi chose to work for the Nazis rather than lose their business or put themselves and their family in danger. Both Kopper and Köster point to engineering entrepreneur Robert Bosch, whose son Robert Jr. and his family were worth $4.6 billion in 2006.



“I am happy for the Jews, Turks, and Buddhists to worship their own gods and idols; as long as they are good people, I love them, too,” Bosch wrote in 1885 in a letter to his fiancé. He went on to become a founding member of the Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus, an organization similar to the Anti-Defamation League dedicated to fighting antisemitism, in Stuttgart in 1926, according to Bosch’s company historian.



“Bosch himself and parts of the management staff were strictly against Hitler and even supported resistance groups,” Köster says. “Nevertheless, the company was deeply involved in the war economy and employed thousands of forced laborers and very often did not treat them well.”



The company concedes&nbsp;that Bosch was “entangled with the rearmament” of the Third Reich. A spokesperson confirms that it employed about 20,000 slave laborers and had contracts with the Nazi party. But it also helped to rescue Jewish associates and support the resistance movement, providing money to help Jews emigrate and hiring them in an effort to help them avoid persecution.



So while the Reimann case may be disturbing, it would be foolish to believe it is rare. A number of long-rich European families— not to mention numerous major companies that still exist from that era but don’t have billionaire ties—have histories marred by their relationship with the Nazi regime.



“You would have a lot of trouble finding any ‘innocent’ companies which existed back then,” says Köster.



-Madeline Berg; Forbes Staff

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More Than A Dozen European Billionaires—Linked To BMW, L’Oréal, Bosch—Have Families With Past Nazi Ties

The tattered stretch of West Slauson Avenue just off Crenshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles isn’t the first place you’d expect to see a Cadillac Escalade roll up and deliver a Grammy-nominated musician. At the tiny strip mall on the south side of the street, storefronts include an off-brand taco joint, a Boost Mobile outlet and an accountant’s office advertising same-day tax refund advances up to $6,000.



This is where Nipsey Hussle decided to spend a recent Friday morning, and for good reason. His Marathon Clothing store, which peddles Crenshaw hoodies alongside his own music, occupies the corner of the L-shaped plaza. His history here goes back even further—in fact, it’s where he got his name.



“Before we was renting here, I was hustling in this parking lot,” says Nipsey, 33, born Ermias Asghedom. “It&#8217;s just always been a hub for local entrepreneurs.”



Change is coming to Crenshaw, and Nipsey is aiming to be on its bleeding edge: This month, Nipsey and business partner Dave Gross swooped in to pay “a couple million” for the plaza. Within 18 months or so, they’ll knock everything down and rebuild it as a six-story residential building atop a commercial plaza where a revamped Marathon store will be the anchor tenant.



In the meantime, a light rail line is rising to link Crenshaw—which, crucially, qualifies as a tax-advantaged Opportunity Zone—to Los Angeles International Airport and other key nodes of sprawling Southern California. The plaza will be among the first to benefit: There&#8217;s a brand-new train station under construction just steps away.



Nipsey may not be hip-hop&#8217;s biggest name, but he’s certainly among the genre&#8217;s most entrepreneurial. His slow-burn career started to catch fire six years ago when Nipsey offered 1,000 copies of his mixtape Crenshaw for $100 apiece—Jay-Z bought 100 copies—and rolled the profits into his label, All Money In. He released just 100 copies of a subsequent offering, Mailbox Money, with a price tag of $1,000.



“[Nipsey] was not trying to be independent just for the sake of it, but thinking about the benefits of being an independent artist,” says Chris Lyons, who has known Nipsey for several years and runs Andreessen Horowitz’s Cultural Leadership Fund, which counts Nas and Diddy as investors. “The most important thing is his ability to just see where future trends are going and not being afraid to pioneer.”



For Nipsey, the hustle started at home. He grew up down the road from the plaza, in what he calls “the worst house on the best block,” cutting grass and shining shoes to make extra cash as a kid before falling in with local gangs. Fortunately, his musical role models were entrepreneurs as well, offering a way out of a dead-end path.



Dr. Dre, from nearby Compton, built Death Row Records into one of the most influential labels in hip-hop history before eventually shifting focus to his namesake headphone line. Watching Dre from up close and moguls like Jay-Z and Diddy from afar gave Nipsey &#8220;the blueprint of what could be done with the platform of being a successful rap artist,&#8221; he says.



Nipsey started putting out mixtapes in 2005; on one of his early songs, Hussle In The House, he made sure to include a few financial lessons of his own. &#8220;Straight off the block, I sold dope to buy groceries,&#8221; he rapped. &#8220;Now it&#8217;s rap money, no advance, it&#8217;s all royalties.&#8221; Nipsey also prophetically flicked at his future Opportunity Zone gambit: &#8220;Pay taxes to these corners and put in work, it&#8217;s a policy.&#8221;



For his first music video, he wanted to do something that both represented his hometown and offered a path to earnings beyond music. Leafing through an old yearbook, he noticed a picture of local legend Darryl Strawberry in a vintage Crenshaw High School baseball jersey. Nipsey ordered a batch of throwback blue-and-yellow shirts with “Crenshaw” scripted across the front to wear in the shoot.



When the video ended up on MTV, scores of people started asking about “Crenshaw Clothing.” Nipsey had other ideas. A friend had given him a book called The 22 Immutable Laws Of Marketing, packed with Procter &amp; Gamble case studies. As Nipsey ruminated on these lessons in the context of his own journey, the word “Marathon” came to him—it had more potential, he thought, than Crenshaw, a location most people couldn’t place on a map.



Nipsey flirted with major labels, signing with Epic but leaving in 2010—with his catalog intact—after a management change left his official debut album in limbo. While continuing his prolific mixtape output, he became obsessed with the notion of social currency, prompting the release of his $100 mixtape in 2013.



“I believe that economics is based on scarcity of markets,” he told Forbes at the time. “And it’s possible to monetize your art without compromising the integrity of it for commerce.”



Meanwhile, Nipsey continued to give away other mixtapes to satiate his fans, who in turn supported him by buying concert tickets and merchandise. He turned down new record deals because the labels all seemed to want a piece of his burgeoning broader business.



He didn’t need the cash, thanks to his ancillary income and his TuneCore catalog, which was earning him monthly royalty checks in the low six figures. After a couple of years, though, Nipsey had built up a good amount of leverage. He decided to cut a deal with Atlantic that enabled him to make Victory Lap, his official major label debut.



“It&#8217;s a partnership. … I shook hands and said I wouldn&#8217;t give full details, but we’re sharing everything: profit, masters,” he says. “I was holding out for a long time for these terms.”



Nominated for Best Rap Album at this year&#8217;s Grammy Awards, the record paired his rapidly improving socioeconomic status with a career-long message of fiscal responsibility. In one verse, he blustered about Benzes and Bentleys—and touted his trust accounts alongside the &#8220;million-dollar life insurance on my flesh.&#8221;



At the same time, Nipsey was looking for other ways to expand his empire. He met Gross, a private-equity and real-estate investor, courtside at a Lakers game several years ago. (“We started drinking tequila,” says Nipsey. “By the third quarter, we was more friendly.”) They bonded over Gross’s idea for an inner-city co-working space now known as Vector90.



They eventually teamed up to buy the plaza on West Slauson, currently zoned for buildings that max out at 40 units. Nipsey and Gross are aiming for 100 units, which requires a lengthy entitlement process, so they’ve been working with the city and local council members on the details—hence the long timeline. And they’re building smart.



Buried in the tax overhaul of 2017 is a provision to encourage investment in state-designated low-income enclaves known as Opportunity Zones. Under the law, investors can shift capital gains into institutions located in these areas, where the capital is taxed at a reduced rate; new opportunity investments can grow tax-free.



There are basically no limits on the amount of money that can be plowed into an Opportunity Zone or the amount of tax that can be avoided. Is it possible the program is excessively business-friendly? Not for its ambitious goals, backers say.



&#8220;The incentive needs to be powerful enough that it can unlock large amounts of capital, aggregate that capital into funds and force the funds to invest in distressed areas,&#8221; billionaire Sean Parker told Forbes last year. &#8220;Instead of having government hand out pools of taxpayer dollars, you have savvy investors directing money into projects they think will succeed.&#8221;



Parker was part of a diverse group of Opportunity Zone proponents that included Senators Tim Scott of South Carolina, a Republican, and Cory Booker of New Jersey, a Democrat. Like Parker, they argue that bold moves are necessary to fix entrenched ills: To qualify for the program, an area must have a median household income 80% less than nearby neighborhoods&#8217; or a poverty rate of at least 20%.



Gross and Nipsey saw a perfect fit for Crenshaw.



“This is the quintessential Opportunity Zone investment,” says Gross. “The law is supposed to support ground-up entrepreneurship, giving opportunities and jobs to all communities and improving the neighborhood.”



The purchase of the plaza also marks the beginning of a coalition called Our Opportunity—led by Gross, with Nipsey as a founding partner—that will aim to team with local legends in 10 cities as part of a broader Opportunity Zone-based fund. From there, Nipsey envisions building a tax-advantaged lifestyle empire, all linking back to his music.



“The vision is to launch franchises,” says Nipsey, imagining a line of The Marathon Clothing stores, barbershops, fish markets, restaurants. “There&#8217;s such a narrative to this parking lot—that&#8217;s a part of my story as an artist.”



-Zack O&#8217;Malley Greenburg; Forbes Staff

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Back in 2012, it was a mystery to many why <a rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label=" (opens in a new tab)" href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/chey-tae-won/#421a66ff4bf9" target="_blank">Chey Tae-won</a> spent $3 billion to buy control of troubled Hynix Semiconductor. Ten years after being bailed out by South Korea’s government, the world’s second-largest chipmaker was losing money and its stock sliding amid a global slump in demand for PCs and memory chips. 



South Korea’s SK Group, the sprawling conglomerate Chey chairs, had a wireless carrier, an oil and gas company, a hotel operator but no presence in chipmaking.



“Pretty much everyone in the financial services industry thought it was a terrible purchase,” says Morningstar Research Director Dan Baker in Hong Kong. SK Holdings’ stock fell 15% between the day in November 2011 the deal was announced and the day it closed the following February.



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To Chey, though, the rationale was clear. “SK needed something else to grow,” he recalls during a rare interview held on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos. “Someone needed to step up. It made sense to me.” 



SK’s wireless subsidiary, SK Telecom, bought a 21% stake in Hynix from a group of creditor banks, and Chey, already chairman of SK Group and SK Holdings, gained a new title: co-CEO of Hynix, later renamed SK Hynix.



Chey’s foray into the volatile chip industry turned out to be one of his savviest investments, timed almost perfectly to take advantage of a nascent global boom in smartphones. SK Hynix earned an estimated $14 billion last year, up 40% from 2017, on revenue of $36 billion—an impressive 39% profit margin. The stock has climbed roughly 150% since SK took control. 



In September SK Hynix ranked No. 20 on the Forbes Digital 100, an inaugural list of the industry’s top publicly traded companies across 17 countries. Chey ranks No. 7 on the list of Korea’s 50 richest, with a net worth of $4.7 billion. 



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">“It has been a fantastic investment given the growth in the memory market,” says Baker. </blockquote>



The Hynix deal was also a turning point for Chey, now 58, emboldening him to make the kind of big bets that characterized SK under his father before his death in 1998. Chey demonstrated that confidence last June when SK Hynix joined a group of investors paying $18 billion to buy 49.9% of Japanese chip maker Toshiba Memory. Hynix also created an imperative for Chey to expand. 



SK Hynix now produces 70% of SK group’s net profits, according to the company, eclipsing its earnings from telecom, oil and chemicals and thereby posing a risk as big as it is successful, given the cyclical nature of the chip business. 



In a little over two years, therefore, SK group has spent $2.6 billion to venture into a range of new businesses, from ride-hailing apps and biopharma to food and beverages. “We need to explore other areas,” Chey says. “I cannot rely 100% on semiconductors.”    



SK was born in 1953, when the Korean War had just ended and Chey’s uncle Chey Jong-kun started making polyester. Sunkyong Textiles took advantage of government loans and tax incentives to expand, starting with exports of rayon to Hong Kong (SK is an abbreviation of Sunkyong). 



When Jong-kun died of lung cancer in 1973 at age 47, his three sons were too young to lead the fast-growing company. In keeping with Korean tradition, his younger brother and Chey’s father, Chey Jong-hyon, took over.



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Jong-hyon steered SK’s expansion into new industries with the purchase of two companies that now rank among SK’s biggest interests: in 1980, he bought 50% of Korea Oil from former U.S. oil giant Gulf (now SK Innovation), placing SK among Korea’s top five conglomerates, or chaebol, by assets (today it is No. 3 after Samsung and Hyundai). Then, in 1994, he led the $530 million takeover of state-owned Korea Mobile Telecommunications Services, renaming it SK Telecom.



In 1998, at the height of the Asian financial crisis, lung cancer claimed the life of Jong-hyon, thrusting his 37-year-old son, Chey Tae-won, into the role of group chairman. “It was a war situation,” Chey recalls. “There was only one thing on my mind: I have to survive.” Chey had been groomed to lead the Korean multinational: while studying at the University of Chicago in the late 1980s, he met his wife, Roh So-young, daughter of former South Korean president Roh Tae-woo. 



He joined SK in 1989 as a manager at a subsidiary in San Jose, California, moved two years later to the group’s U.S. headquarters in New York and returned to Seoul in 1994 as group managing director. By 1997, he had already been promoted from head of business development to CEO of SK Corp., then the group’s largest subsidiary.



Chey cut his teeth on smaller deals: in 2000, he engineered the takeover by SK Telecom of a smaller rival, Shinsegi Telecom, for 2.3 trillion won ($2 billion) in cash and stock. Buying Shinsegi boosted SK Telecom’s market share overnight to 57% from 43%. But Chey’s plans for an overseas push were put on hold when, in 2003, he was sentenced to three years in prison for accounting fraud. He was released after seven months and given a full presidential pardon in 2008. 



Chey didn’t manage to resume SK’s expansion until 2007, when he turned SK Corp. into a listed holding company, SK Holdings, for SK’s major subsidiaries; it is now the de facto holding company in which Chey and his family hold nearly a 30% stake. Chey then led SK into China, investing in oil exploration in the South China Sea as well as energy and chemicals in Shanghai and Wuhan.



Today, the SK group employs 93,000 people in 101 companies and generates an estimated $140 billion in combined revenues. Of these, 16 major companies operate autonomously, yet the CEOs of these firms convene monthly as part of a “Supex Council” to coordinate strategy under the slogan “independent yet united.”



When Chey first started looking at Hynix, it was a troubled company with a dominant position in the market for dynamic random-access memory, or DRAM, chips. The nine Korean banks that ended up its largest shareholders after its 2002 bailout had hunted for years for a buyer. U.S.-based chip company Micron Technology bid $3 billion in 2002, only to be rejected by Hynix’s board. 







Another Korean chaebol, Hyosung, dropped a $2.8 billion bid in 2009. Yet Chey had access to something the other bidders didn’t: SK Telecom’s figures for data traffic, which showed demand rising as older 3G networks were replaced by speedier 4G. Chey sensed that demand for the DRAMs to power the more data-hungry devices using these networks was set to take off.



He was right. Over the past five years the semiconductor industry has swelled by nearly 52% to $463 billion, according to research firm Statista. “With the adoption of 4G, smartphones required more memory and the demand for memory grew overall,” says Shawn Park, associate director of S&amp;P Global Ratings in Hong Kong. “That is part of what SK Telecom saw in the overall growth potential.”



The year after SK took it over, SK Hynix’s earnings rebounded to $2.7 billion from a loss of $148 million the year before. Chey wasn’t on hand to celebrate: in early 2013, he was arrested on charges of misappropriating company funds, convicted and sentenced in February 2014 to four years in prison. In August 2015, then-President Park Geun-hye pardoned Chey along with 16 other businessmen. Shares of SK Hynix, meanwhile, rose 51% while he was in prison as 2014 net profits climbed 40%; shares in SK Holdings almost tripled as its earnings soared 90%.



Chey returned in March 2016 as chairman of both SK Holdings and SK Hynix and led a renewed push for vertical integration at the chipmaker, buying suppliers of the wafers and gases that are SK Hynix’s raw materials. The next year, SK Hynix’s earnings more than tripled, and rose another 46% in 2018 to a record 15.5 trillion won. 



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That kind of growth was bound to attract competitors. Now China’s chip companies pose a growing threat. State-owned Yangtze Memory Technologies is building out its production of NAND chips that, unlike DRAM, can store memory without access to a constant power supply, like a USB drive. “China wants an in-house production to have a stable supply,” says Cliff Leimbach, a senior analyst for information provider IHS Markit.



SK Hynix has a head start in NAND chips, but lacks scale. It’s the world’s No. 2 DRAM producer, but only No. 5 in NAND production. Smartphones require both: DRAM to run increasing numbers of apps; NAND to store the exploding number of user photos, songs and other digital bric-a-brac. 



Last June’s Toshiba deal provided a stopgap. Toshiba Memory is the No. 2 producer of NAND. Its parent Toshiba was looking for cash to pay down debt at its U.S. nuclear energy business. Bain Capital knew just where to get it, forming a group that included Apple, Dell, Kingston Technology and SK Hynix to buy the stake in Toshiba Memory.



While seemingly straightforward, the deal took nine months to win approval from regulators in no less than eight countries, including China, which only dropped its objections in May as an apparent olive branch to Washington. Toshiba’s own hierarchy, Chey says, proved a high hurdle of its own. “The deal itself was so complicated,” he says. SK Hynix’s $3 billion contribution fetched it a 15% stake in the Japanese chipmaker. “Korea, U.S. and Japan; the purpose is cooperation,” Chey says.



Chey isn’t stopping there. In October SK Hynix opened a new NAND production facility in its home turf as part of an $18 billion investment over the next five years. Separately, in February, it announced a 10-year plan to invest $107 billion, starting in 2022, to house four large semiconductor plants and a network of suppliers. While analysts note that any 10-year plan can be subject to change, the announcement is a sign that Chey is thinking long-term with SK Hynix.



Chey has been diversifying into new industries, spending $3.2 billion to buy 12 companies in Europe, Southeast Asia and the U.S. in the past six years. In 2017, SK paid $459 million for two chemical lines from U.S.-based Dow Chemical. In March last year, it paid $75 million for a stake in Singapore-based ride-sharing company Grab. 



And in September, it paid $470 million for a 9.5%, stake in Masan group, a Vietnamese conglomerate whose portfolio includes food and beverages, livestock, mining and financial services. (Masan’s chairman Nguyen Dang Quang joined the Forbes Billionaires list this year with an estimated net worth of $1.3 billion.)



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Chey, who wrote a book on social enterprise during his incarceration, insists that SK’s investments won’t be based solely on scale and profits—they should also create social value. “My father had a philosophy,” he says. “He asked, ‘Why are we here?’ It’s about the people.” At Davos, he is hosting, for the first time, a panel with the Boston Consulting Group on social impact investing. “If we spend so much money,” he says, “it has to impact society.”



Asked how SK is making a difference, he cites a pilot program SK Innovation launched in September with rival refiner GS Caltex (a joint venture between Korea’s GS Holdings and U.S. oil giant Chevron), Korea’s CJ Logistics and logistics startup Zooma that lets online retailers use roughly 200 of SK’s 3,600 filling stations as merchandise distribution points. 



SK says this “Imagine Your Gas Station” project supports small entrepreneurs by lending its infrastructure to startups such as Zooma. While promising, others note the embryonic nature of this effort. “It’s still a minor part of the company’s business,” says Wan Hee Yoo, an analyst at Moody’s in Hong Kong. “It’s not a big revenue driver. We have to continue to watch it.”



Others worry SK’s overseas investment binge is an unwelcome diversion from its core businesses in Korea. “Investors do not like uncertainty,” says Yang Jong-in, an analyst at Korea Investments and Securities in Seoul. “Overseas investment success rate is so low. They prefer domestic services, not services by foreigners.”



Many analysts, however, say it makes sense for Chey to reduce SK’s dependence on income from a business that, as Hynix learned in 2001, is boom-and-bust. Despite its impressive earnings growth since 2013, SK Hynix now faces a downturn amid a looming glut of memory chips. 



“Weak demand and uncertainties with global trade are two of the common reasons that we are hearing,” says Leimbach. The smartphone market is saturated, he says. “Consumers are no longer replacing their phones as quickly as they were.”  



Taking a cue from Japanese tech giant Softbank, SK plans this year to convert SK Telecom into an intermediate holding company to channel the group’s tech investments. SK Telecom has already begun acting more like a private-equity firm. 



In the past year, SK Telecom’s chief executive Park Jung-ho has overseen the $650 million purchase from the Carlyle Group of a 55% stake in Korean security systems firm ADT Caps and secured $450 million in funding for Korean e-commerce company 11 Street. “There will be some failures,” says Baker, “But they are hoping to build a few sizable businesses out of all of these investments.”



At the group level, SK made its investment in Masan through a new, $500 million fund it set up last year in Singapore called the SK Southeast Asia Investment fund, which will receive another $500 million this year to invest in the region. “SK Group has been keen on the Southeast Asian market, which has much growth potential,” says Cho Dae-sik, who chairs SK’s Supex Council, in an email interview.



Chey, who will likely step down as chairman of SK Holdings this month to focus on his role as CEO, says Masan is also part of SK’s social impact efforts: “We didn’t look at their portfolio as much as we did their management.” He has also met with the Vietnamese government to suggest new engines for growth, particularly in areas that create social value such as the environment. 



“In the end, it’s the pursuit of happiness, for all of us. Some would say, ‘Just make more and more money,’ right? Actually, that’s not really true,” he says. “Think about why chaebols are looked down upon. I want to start changing that.&#8221;



-Grace Chung;Forbes Staff

gettyimages-1138773239-594×594

This Billionaire’s ‘Terrible Purchase’ Just Made $14 Billion In Profits, And Now He’s Ready For More

Budding African entrepreneurs can now apply for the Africa Netpreneur Prize Initiative (ANPI), founded by the Jack Ma Foundation, for a $10 million prize.



The application process which is
in partnership with Nailab was officially opened by Jason Pau, Senior Director
and Chief of Staff International to Jack Ma, Alibaba Group Executive Chairman.



“<a rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Africa Netpreneur Prize (opens in a new tab)" href="https://www.netpreneur.africa/" target="_blank">Africa Netpreneur Prize</a> is about looking for heroes. We are looking to shine the spotlight on existing African entrepreneurs’ whether they are in the traditional sector or tech sector or men or women who come from any of the 54 countries that are part of this continent” said Pau.  



Pau says for the next ten years the foundation will host a pitch competition in Africa where ten finalists from across the continent will compete for $1 million in total prize money. 



“Jack Ma will personally commit one million dollars in grant money. The trick to the part is for ten finalists to compete every year for the next ten years.  He wants to turn it into something like a show. A million dollars for entrepreneurs’ is not a lot of money but what we think we could do is to have their stories remembered and watched across the continent,” says Pau. 



The prospective entrepreneurs will get assistance from experts. 



On the advisory board is Jack Ma,
Ban Ki-moon, 8th Secretary-General of the United Nations and Graca Machel,
Chair of the Graca Machel Trust Board. 



Pau says he believes having the
Graca Machel Trust will expose the potential of women across Africa. He says
their aim is to uplift the confidence in women of ‘you can and you should’.



“Through their networks, I believe they can reach a million or more women across Africa. I believe it is two things, one is confidence building. I think a lot of times women don’t really believe they could compete with men for whatever reasons,” said Pau. 



Pau added that because the
majority of women in the continent are single parents and breadwinners, they
need all the support they can receive. 



“We need to find those breadwinners and a lot of them are women… we are not only looking for tech-entrepreneurs we want to include the traditional sector because a lot of women are active in sectors such as agriculture. So if we could include a prize in industries that women in Africa are strong at, then that is the prize,” said Pau. 



Shungu Gwarinda, Director of Programmes for Graca Machel Trust, says their mission is to connect women and put them at the center of Africa’s development.   



“We strongly believe that the social and economic transformation that we seek to see towards building the Africa that we want, that nascent potential lies with women. Seventy percent of production on your lower level is driven by women, but at a lower level,” she said. 



Gwarinda says she believes that
through the partnership with Jack Ma Foundation they will better amplify the
voices of women across the continent and build on their networks.

Jack Ma Attends Hupan University Opening Ceremony In Hangzhou

$10 million for Africa’s next great entrepreneurs

The computer geeks are taking over Wall Street. During a disappointing year that saw the average hedge fund manager lose money, elite quantitative traders stood out in 2018 from the rest of the trading crowd. More than half of the 20&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/hedge-fund-managers/list/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">highest-earning hedge fund managers and traders</a>&nbsp;in 2018 were associated with computer-driven algorithmic trading.



Jim Simons, the most famous quantitative trader ever, naturally led the way, earning $1.6 billion. He founded Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund firm that now manages $60 billion, and still plays an important role there even though he retired from day-to-day operations in 2010. 



The hedge funds Renaissance manages for outside investors performed well in 2018. For example, the Renaissance Institutional Equities fund last year returned 8.5% and the Renaissance Institutional Diversified Global Equities fund returned 10.3%. Simons’ earnings were further driven by Renaissance’s Medallion fund, a $10 billion black-box strategy that only invests money belonging to Simons and his Renaissance partners and employees.



 READ MORE |&nbsp; <a rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label=" (opens in a new tab)" href="https://www.forbes.com/pictures/5c896be3a7ea43206f1214ec/clone-of-2019-highest-ear/" target="_blank">Gallery: Highest-Earning Hedge Fund Managers &amp; Traders 201921 imagesView gallery</a>



The hedge fund industry had a miserable year in 2018. &nbsp;The average hedge fund manager returned -4.07%, according to HFR. That is slightly better than the U.S. stock market, which returned -4.38% last year. In total, the 20 highest-earning hedge fund managers and traders made a combined $10.3 billion in 2018.



 That’s a big number, but it is still the lowest such earnings figure since the financial crisis. In 2015, another weak hedge fund year,&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;reported that the 20 highest-earning hedge fund managers and traders made $11.4 billion, and in 2011 they made $11.7 billion.



Forbes&nbsp;includes in its analysis hedge fund managers and traders who now mostly or even exclusively manage their own money, and some of them can be found in the top 20 highest earners of 2018. Michael Platt’s BlueCrest Capital Management, for example, returned all outside capital to its clients in 2015. Since then, BlueCrest’s trading activities have performed very well, and in 2018 the firm returned 25% net of all expenses.&nbsp;Platt earned an estimated $1.2 billion last year.



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Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates, the world’s biggest hedge fund firm, with $160 billion under management, posted mixed results in 2018. Bridgewater’s investment process is data-driven, searching for economic and other signals. The firm does perform traditional fundamental analysis before turning its research into trading algorithms. 



Its big Pure Alpha hedge fund returned 14.6% net of fees in 2018. But Dalio’s important All Weather Fund, in which he is heavily invested, was down by about 6%.&nbsp;Dalio earned an estimated $1 billion in 2018.



Ken Griffin used quantitative and fundamental trading techniques to help build Citadel into a $30 billion hedge fund firm. He had a solid year in 2018, continuing a terrific run that has gone on ever since the financial crisis almost destroyed his him. 



Citadel’s flagship hedge fund returned 9.1% last year. Its other hedge funds returned between 6% and 9% net of fees. Griffin earned an estimated $870 million last year.



John Overdeck and David Siegel have built their quantitative trading firm, Two Sigma Investments, into one of the world’s biggest hedge funds.&nbsp;Its funds did well in 2018. For example, Two Sigma’s&nbsp;Absolute Return fund returned 11% and its Compass fund returned 14% net of fees. Overdeck and Siegel each earned an estimated $700 million in 2018.



Overdeck and Siegel met when they both worked at D.E. Shaw early in their careers. The quantitative trading firm was founded by David Shaw, a former computer science professor at Columbia University. 



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He took a step back from managing the firm’s operations, but remains involved in its success. D.E. Shaw now manages some $50 billion. It’s big Composite Fund returned 11% net of fees last year. Shaw earned an estimated $500 million in 2018.



Israel Englander is not known as a quant. He founded Millennium Management, a $35 billion hedge fund firm known for its multi-manager strategy that includes dozens of teams using various styles to trade all sorts of assets. Still, a big part of Millennium’s success has been is its WorldQuant unit, a quantitative trading outfit. Last year Millennium’s hedge fund returned 4.8% net of fees and Englander earned an estimated $500 million.



To determine the highest-earning hedge fund managers and traders of 2018,&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;examined hedge fund returns and worked to understand the fee and ownership structure of a wide array of money management firms. Hedge fund firms generally charge management fees of 2% and performance fees that give them 20% of the trading profits, but we found all sorts of variations on this theme. 



In addition, our earnings figures include the personal gain or loss of each manager’s interest in their funds. Our figures are pretax, account for firm expenses and profit-sharing arrangements, and exclude gains or losses stemming from ownership in the investment firms themselves or from investments held outside of the managed investment pools.



-Nathan Vardi Forbes Staff &#8211; Antoine Gara Forbes Staff &#8211; Additional reporting by Jennifer Wang

The Highest-Earning Hedge Fund Managers And Traders

Last October,&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;tracked the biggest billionaire philanthropists in the U.S. and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/denizcam/2018/10/03/the-new-forbes-400-philanthropy-score-measuring-billionaires-generosity/#208a22997e1d" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">ranked their efforts</a>&nbsp;with a new philanthropy score. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, cofounders of the Giving Pledge, led our list with $35.8 billion and $35.1 billion, respectively, in lifetime donations. George Soros was third, with $32 billion.



“No other country really rivals the history and tradition of charitable giving that exists in the U.S., which has supported a strong and vital civic sector over the years” says Phil Buchanan, president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy and author of&nbsp;Giving Done Right: Effective Philanthropy and Making Every Dollar Count. “The high levels of charitable giving here also have something to do with the more limited role government plays in this country than, say, in Canada or European countries. And, of course, the accumulation of wealth here has meant there are more mega-givers than there are in other countries.”



But change is in the air. Big gifts have begun to be handed out by billionaires outside the U.S. as well, following in the footsteps of their American counterparts. Since 2012, 28 non-American members of the&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;billionaires list have signed the Giving Pledge, promising to give at least half of their wealth away (in their lifetimes or after they die). Some, including those who didn’t sign the pledge, have already taken action toward their goal of 10-figure giving: six non-U.S. billionaires have committed more than $1 billion to philanthropic entities,&nbsp;Forbesconfirmed.



One Indian billionaire gave away not only money, but also a kidney. Kochouseph Chittilappilly built a fortune in electrical appliances. In 2011, two months after he turned 60, he&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/naazneenkarmali/2018/11/12/asias-2018-heroes-of-philanthropy-the-gift-of-life/#1d4cb620486f" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">donated&nbsp;</a>one of his kidneys to a complete stranger, and a year later, he launched a charitable foundation that focuses on health care and education. So far he’s donated $95 million, including a gift of $79 million to his foundation.



A small number of billionaires outside of the U.S. like Azim Premji—who recently told&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/naazneenkarmali/2019/03/13/indian-billionaire-azim-premjis-donation-to-his-charitable-foundation-rises-to-21-billion/#266e46802920" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Forbes</a>&nbsp;“To whom much has been given, much should be expected”—have put billions of dollars into charitable foundations and causes in their home countries and across the globe.In mid-March Indian tech tycoon Premji announced that he shifted a $7.5 billion stake in his IT outsourcing company, Wipro, to his charitable foundation. That move brought his lifetime giving to $21 billion, according to his foundation.



The news not only solidified Premji as the fourth most generous philanthropist in the world, but also makes him the biggest philanthropist outside the U.S. Premji has put 81% of his wealth toward charitable giving in his lifetime, more than any other current billionaire in percentage terms. A close second is hedge fund billionaire George Soros, who has donated more than 76% of his wealth to his Open Society Foundations. Former billionaire and philanthropy icon Chuck Feeney has given away almost all of his $7.5 billion fortune,&nbsp;Forbes<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2012/09/18/chuck-feeney-the-billionaire-who-is-trying-to-go-broke/#c386d96291c7" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reported&nbsp;</a>in 2012, and inspired Bill &amp; Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett to establish the Giving Pledge.



Two non-U.S. billionaires who have signed the Giving Pledge but not yet hit the billion-dollar giving mark are stepping up their philanthropic efforts. In Australia, Fortescue Metals founder<a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/andrew-forrest/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Andrew Forrest</a>&nbsp;and his wife Nicola donated about $600 million to their Minderoo Foundation, which launched its marine research initiative in 2018.



South African billionaire Patrice<a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/patrice-motsepe/" target="_blank">Motsepe</a>&nbsp;has donated over $500 million to projects in Africa pertaining to health, farming, agrobusiness, infrastructure, and music. Last year, the African Rainbow Minerals founder also pledged to donate $250 million to South African land reform and $100 million to education initiatives.



One billionaire, who appears to be incredibly generous, is not on the list below because of a technical reason. Dietmar Hopp, cofounder of German software company SAP, put over 60% of his SAP stake—currently worth $6.9 billion—into a charitable outlet that has distributed more than $800 million since 1995.&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;still counts the shares in Hopp’s charitable outlet as part of his net worth because he retains economic control over the shares and they are not irrevocably placed in a foundation.



Here is&nbsp;Forbes’ list of the biggest billionaire philanthropists from outside the US, measured by total dollar amount donated through mid-March 2019:



*Net worths are as of March 25, 2019.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="778" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/GettyImages-486155152-1024x778.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-39873" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/GettyImages-486155152-1024x778.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/GettyImages-486155152-300x228.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/GettyImages-486155152-600x456.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/GettyImages-486155152-768x584.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/GettyImages-486155152.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /><figcaption>BANGALORE, INDIA APRIL 27: Wipro Chairman Azim Premji during the announcement of Quarter 4 Results at Wipro Headquarters Sarjapur Road on April 27, 2011 in Bangalore, India. (Photo by Aniruddha Chowdhury/Mint via Getty Images)</figcaption></figure>



Azim Premji Citizenship: India Lifetime giving: $21 billion Net worth: $5 billion



Through his foundation, IT billionaire&nbsp;<a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/azim-premji/#276b20587924" target="_blank">Premji</a>&nbsp;has prioritized improving the public school system in some of the most underserved parts of India. He established the Azim Premji University in Bangalore in 2010, which plans to expand its student body from a current 1,300 students to 5,000 students, according to the foundation. 



Premji himself never graduated from college, dropping out of Stanford in 1966 to take over his family’s cooking oil business after his father died. He shifted into software and expanded the small company into Wipro, which had $8.4 billion in revenue in 2018. Premji serves as chairman.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/34250482/960x0.jpg?cropX1=0&amp;cropX2=807&amp;cropY1=61&amp;cropY2=713" alt="CHRISTOPHER HOHN"/><figcaption>Christopher Hohn, manager and founder of The Children&#8217;s Investment Fund Photographer: Andreas Scholz/Bloomberg NewsBLOOMBERG NEWS</figcaption></figure>



Christopher Hohn Citizenship: United Kingdom Lifetime giving: $4.5 billion Current net worth: $3.1 billion



Hedge fund manager&nbsp;<a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/christopher-hohn/#68abdad845c9" target="_blank">Hohn</a>&nbsp;cofounded the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) in 2002 with his then-wife Jamie. Hohn, who had been working at hedge fund firm Perry Capital since 1996, struck out on his own in 2003 to start a London-based hedge fund called the Children’s Investment Fund. Including an undisclosed donation by Perry Capital in 2002, Hohn and Jamie, who divorced in 2014, have given at least $4.5 billion to CIFF, moving assets from the hedge fund into the foundation. 



“The original mission in setting up CIFF was to improve the lives of children in developing countries who live in poverty,” says Hohn on CIFF’s website. “This hasn&#8217;t changed. I want to solve problems, not make grants.&#8221;



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/1014358766/960x0.jpg?fit=scale" alt="Lopez Obrador Meets Mexican Egineering Organizations"/><figcaption>Carlos Slim Helu (Photo by Carlos Tischler/Getty Images)GETTY IMAGES</figcaption></figure>



Carlos Slim Helu Citizenship: Mexico Lifetime giving: $4.2 billion Current net worth: $61.4 billion



A telecom tycoon,<a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/carlos-slim-helu/#686f80bf646b" target="_blank">Slim</a>&nbsp;early on was a critic of the Giving Pledge. &#8220;Many of the problems will be solved by business activity and development,” he said in 2011, adding that &#8220;Charity doesn&#8217;t solve poverty. How much charity has been done in the past years? Trillions of dollars.&#8221; Still, he believes in some forms of philanthropy. Since 2006, Slim’s spokesman says, he has donated $4.2 billion to his Carlos Slim Foundation. 



He gave $2 billion to his foundation in 2006 and the same amount again in 2010. Most of that money has come from dividends Slim collected from shares he owns in some of Mexico’s largest companies,&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;<a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2011/05/20/mexicos-carlos-slim-joins-ranks-of-worlds-biggest-philanthropists/#557909ea3b63" target="_blank">reported</a> in 2011. Over the past six years, he’s donated another $160 million to the outfit, which works on improving health conditions and education, among other causes, so people can work to support their families. Helu’s foundation has collaborated with nonprofit organizations, including the Clinton Foundation and the Gates Foundation.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5c993479a7ea43206f1337df/960x0.jpg?fit=scale" alt="Hong Kong Tycoon Li Ka-shing Retires"/><figcaption>Li Ka-shing, former chairman of CK Hutchison and CK Asset (Photo by Zhang Wei/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images)VCG VIA GETTY IMAGES</figcaption></figure>



Li Ka-shing Citizenship: Hong Kong Lifetime giving: $3.2 billion Current net worth: $32.5 billion



Since 1980,&nbsp;<a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/li-ka-shing/" target="_blank">Li Ka-shing</a>’s foundation has donated billions to education, medical services and research initiatives in 27 countries, including China, where he was born but was forced to flee in 1940 at the age of 12 after Japan invaded Southern&nbsp;<a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/luisakroll/2018/03/16/hong-kongs-richest-li-ka-shing-announces-plans-to-exit-after-68-years/#61eab98a3436" target="_blank">China.</a>&nbsp;



“When I received the&nbsp;Forbes’ Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006, I shared with everyone that my charitable foundation, founded in 1980, is like my third son to me,” he told&nbsp;<a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/luisakroll/2017/09/28/revered-asian-tycoon-li-ka-shing-named-one-of-worlds-100-greatest-living-business-minds/#30e574e23f32" target="_blank">Forbes</a>&nbsp;in 2017. “I hoped to persuade those who can, in Asia, support causes important to society as a duty in line with supporting our children.”



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5c996f9631358e79cabf92fc/960x0.jpg?cropX1=0&amp;cropX2=1999&amp;cropY1=516&amp;cropY2=1914" alt="Hansjoerg Wyss"/><figcaption>Hansjoerg WyssCOURTESY OF THE WYSS FOUNDATION</figcaption></figure>



Hansjoerg Wyss Citizenship: Switzerland Lifetime giving: $1.9 billion Current net worth: $5.9 billion



<a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/hansjoerg-wyss/#5cf046a666c0" target="_blank">Wyss</a>&nbsp;founded medical device manufacturer Synthes and sold it to Johnson &amp; Johnson in 2012 for $20.2 billion in cash and stock. Wyss is dedicated to protecting the environment not only in his home continent, Europe, but also in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. In&nbsp;an op-ed for the New York Times&nbsp;last October, he pledged to donate $1 billion to land and ocean conservation to protect 30% of earth’s surface by 2030. “Every one of us — citizens, philanthropists, business and government leaders — should be troubled by the enormous gap between how little of our natural world is currently protected and how much should be protected,” he wrote. 



He’s already put at least $1.9 billion into his foundation since 2001. The foundation has doled out $450 million to preserve land around the planet, and Wyss has additionally given $40 million to the same cause. In 2018, Wyss&nbsp;donated&nbsp;an undisclosed sum to the Trust for Public Land so it could buy and retire oil and gas leases on more than 24,000 acres in Wyoming where he resides.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5c996f35a7ea43206f133dd2/960x0.jpg?fit=scale" alt="Stephan Schmidheiny"/><figcaption>Stephan SchmidheinyCOURTESY OF PETER SCHUERMANN</figcaption></figure>



Stephan Schmidheiny Citizenship: Switzerland Lifetime giving: $1.5 billion Current net worth: $2.3 billion



<a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/stephan-schmidheiny/" target="_blank">Schmidheiny</a>&nbsp;became the president of Swiss Eternit Group, his father’s construction materials company, in 1976 when he was just 29. Since 2003, he has donated about $1.5 billion to charity, mostly in shares of his Latin American industrial assets that he placed in his charitable VIVA Trust. 



Schmidheiny—who helped organize the UN’s first conference on environment and development in 1992—has distributed more than $600 million to projects across the world that focus on sustainable development. In 2012 Schmidheiny was convicted &nbsp;by an Italian court of negligence by Eternit&#8217;s Italian affiliate that led to 2,000 asbestos-related deaths. Italy’s Supreme Court overturned the decision in 2014, acquitting Schmidheiny.



&#8211;Deniz Cam;Forbes Staff

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