It was another record year for the wealthiest people in America, as the price of admission to the country’s most exclusive club jumped nearly 18%. The minimum net worth to make The Forbes 400 list of richest Americans is now a record $2 billion, up from $1.7 billion a year ago. The group’s total net worth climbed to $2.7 trillion, up from $2.4 trillion, and the average net worth rose to $6.7 billion, up from $6 billion.
Even at these new heights, entrepreneurs are breaking into the ranks for the first time as they mint fortunes in everything from telecom to booze to fishing. There were 22 newcomers, 14 of whom are self-made entrepreneurs. Among the most notable: Arizona iced tea cofounder Don Vultaggio; Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings; Tito Beveridge, the creator of Tito’s Handmade Vodka; Chuck Bundrant, whose Trident Seafoods sells his fish to places like McDonald’s and Burger King; and Rocco Commisso, founder of cable TV and broadband firm Mediacom and owner of the New York Cosmos, a soccer club based in Brooklyn.
Every person in the top 10 got at least $1 billion richer in the past year.  Number one for the 24th consecutive year is Bill Gates, who is now worth $89 billion, up $8 billion from a year ago. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, whose fortune rose $14.5 billion in a year, retains the number two spot for the second consecutive year with a net worth of $81.5 billion, while Warren Buffett holds onto the number 3 spot. His net worth increased by $12.5 billion, despite giving away more than $3 billion of Berkshire-Hathaway stock in July. The biggest gainer (in dollar terms) is Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. His fortune jumped $15.5 billion, but in a crazy year like this one, it’s only good enough for him to hold onto his ranking as fourth richest.
<a href="https://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/list/#version:static" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: The Richest People in America List</a>
Gainers (there were 289) since last year’s list outnumbered losers (just 51) by more than five to one.  A strong stock market was the main reason for this record-breaking year. The S&amp;P 500, for instance, was up roughly 17% in the 12 months since the 2016 Forbes 400 list.
The most notable loser was President Donald Trump, whose fortune fell $600 million to $3.1 billion. A tough New York real estate market, particularly for retail locations; a costly lawsuit and an expensive presidential campaign all contributed to the declining fortune of the 45th president.
<a href="https://www.forbesafrica.com/billionaires/2017/10/18/donald-trumps-fortune-fell-600-million-one-year/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: How Donald Trump&#8217;s Fortune Fell $600 Million In One Year</a>
A record 169 billionaires were too poor to make the cut, including well-known figures such as activist investor Nelson Peltz and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg. Twenty-six members of the 2016 class fell out of the ranks. Among the most notable dropouts is Under Armour’s Kevin Plank, whose fortune fell to $1.7 billion, down from $3 billion, as the stock price of his sports apparel company unraveled by 60%. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross also fell out of the ranks, after filing disclosure forms showing a net worth of less than $1 billion. He told Forbes that he shifted billions to trusts for his family members, but did not provide evidence of having done so.
Our estimates are a snapshot of the fortunes of America’s wealthiest people using stock prices from September 22. Some of The Forbes 400 become richer or poorer within weeks, even days, of publication. We track these changes at <a href="https://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/list/#version:realtime" target="_blank" rel="noopener">forbes.com/forbes-400</a>. That&#8217;s where you&#8217;ll find more information on list members, as well as photos, videos, and coverage of these influential billionaires.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/richlist/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">LIST: Africa&#8217;s Billionaires</a>
Methodology: This is the 36th year of the flagship Forbes 400. Though we’ve been at it a long time, it’s always a challenge. Our reporters dig deep. This year we started with a list of more than 600 individuals considered strong candidates. When possible, we met with Forbes 400 members and candidates in person or spoke with them by phone. We also interviewed their employees, handlers, rivals, peers and attorneys. Uncovering their fortunes required us to pore over thousands of SEC documents, court records, probate records and web and print stories. We took into account all types of assets: stakes in public and private companies, real estate, art, yachts, planes, ranches, vineyards, jewelry, car collections and more.
We factored in debt. Of course, we don’t pretend to know what is listed on each billionaire’s private balance sheet, although some candidates did provide paperwork to that effect. Some billionaires presiding over private companies were happy to share their financial figures, but others were less forthcoming. To value the private businesses, we couple revenue or profit estimates with prevailing price-to-revenue or price-to-earnings ratios for similar public companies.
We didn’t include dispersed family fortunes. We did include wealth belonging to a member’s immediate relatives if the wealth could be traced to a single living person. In that case you’ll see “&amp; family.” We also include married couples who built fortunes and businesses together. In those instances, we list both names. The Forbes 400 is a list of American citizens who own assets in the U.S. &#8211; Written by By <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/#4a466b153523" target="_self">Kerry A. Dolan</a> and Luisa Kroll, FORBES STAFF

Forbes 400 2017: Meet The Richest People In America

When <span class="quotecard ng-isolate-scope" data-ticker="FB" data-exchange="NASDAQ" data-type="organization" data-naturalid="fred/company/15317" data-quotes-closing="153.91" data-quotes-now="153.4011" data-link="/companies/facebook/" data-name="Facebook"><a class="ng-binding" href="http://www.forbes.com/companies/facebook/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Facebook</a> filed to go public in early 2012, <a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/mark-zuckerberg/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Mark Zuckerberg</a> noted that the social network wasn’t originally designed to be a company. “It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected,” Zuckerberg wrote in Facebook’s S-1 filing, presenting the business as an engine supporting this goal.
Now, five years later, the social network’s CEO still believes Facebook’s primary purpose is a social one, but he’s ready to update this mission for the first time. At at time when Facebook has come under scrutiny for not adequately curbing the spread of false news and extremist activity on the social network, Zuckerberg is committing to making the world closer. On stage on Thursday at Facebook’s first Community Summit, a gathering in Chicago of leaders from 120 different Facebook Groups, Zuckerberg unveiled Facebook’s updated purpose: “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”
Facebook’s new mission, Zuckerberg said in an interview at the company’s Menlo Park, California headquarters last week, doesn’t mean that the company is shifting away from connecting friends and family, but rather, that it’s broadening its focus to enabling people to connect with meaningful communities, too. Why do these communities matter, Zuckerberg’s case goes? They help users find common ground, which helps people engage with new perspectives and become aware of different issues. Groups also offer individuals personal support, which gives them bandwidth to look outward and address the biggest human problems, like climate change and global health issues. Being exposed to common information and ideas isn’t enough to bring individuals together, the thesis continues &#8211; they need to identify with people who seem different from themselves to adopt new perspectives.
<blockquote>“For 10 years, we focused on doing everything around connecting people with their friends and family,” Zuckerberg said. “Now I think that there is a whole lot of similar work to be done around communities: Meeting new people, getting exposed to new perspectives, making it so that the communities that you join online can translate to the physical world, too.”</blockquote>
Zuckerberg described the new mission as an extension of Facebook’s original mantra, as opposed to an entirely new direction, and a focus that will guide the company over the next decade. The new mission is intended to reflect that Facebook’s responsibility has “expanded,” Zuckerberg said.
“We’ve been thinking about what our responsibility is in the world,” Zuckerberg said in an interview. “Connecting friends and family has been pretty positive, but I think there is just this collective feeling that we have a responsibility to do more than that and also help build communities and help people get exposed to new perspectives and meet new people &#8211; not just give people a voice, but also help build common ground so people can actually move forward together.”
A Decline In Community
The new mission was inspired by a shift that Zuckerberg said has become more pronounced over the past few years. When Facebook started, the idea of connecting the world wasn’t controversial. But increasingly, some movements in the world work against globalization, whether the exchange of policies, goods or ideas, and prevent the globe from coming together. Simultaneously, Zuckerberg noted, participation in communities has been declining around the world, in some places by as much as one quarter.
The decline in community activity is concerning, Zuckerberg noted, because while people can get personal and economic support from families and governments, people’s needs have historically also been filled by participating in other networks, revolving around everything from religion to sports, neighborhoods, health or shared values. Zuckerberg said the importance of community groups and leaders, like pastors and local advocates, and the impact of declining community membership, has been visible to him on his “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/25/technology/zuckerberg-harvard-commencement-road-trip.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">50 states tour</a>,”  which will ensure he meets people in every U.S. state to better understand how social networks affect their lives.
“I’ll go talk to people in a church, and a pastor will say, &#8216;I know that when a factory closes down in town, I’ll be doing marriage counseling with a lot of people in a month&#8217;,” Zuckerberg said. “Someone needs to do that, but that’s happening less and less. People’s support structures are going away.”
Common Ground
One of the primary benefits of being part of “meaningful groups,” Zuckerberg said, is the potential for that network to help members from a range of backgrounds and perspectives connect over shared values. Access to information alone isn’t a cure-all to helping people care about a broader set of global issues, Zuckerberg said. People often hone their perspective and become interested in new causes as a result of personal relationships.
Research suggests, Zuckerberg said, that in order for people to productively debate an issue, they need to first find recognize their common interests or beliefs. As the world’s largest social network with nearly 2 billion users, Facebook could have an unprecedented opportunity to promote these connections.
“People share more information, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that understanding is shared &#8211; that doesn’t mean the perspectives people have are getting closer together,” Zuckerberg said last week. “We can help you connect over things that you share before exposing you to debates that are really important to have productively.”
Community Tools
Currently, 1 billion Facebook users are part of groups, but only about 100 million are part of groups they would describe as meaningful, Zuckerberg said. For many, these groups can range from support networks for people experiencing or recovering from drug or alcohol addiction, like Affected by Addiction Support Group, to religiously-focused groups like Original Free Will Baptist Church group, run by a minister in Decatur, Georgia, who uses the app to chat with congregation members and share live videos of sermons to allow people to watch from their homes. Zuckerberg said Facebook has set a new goal to help 1 billion people join meaningful groups.
“A billion is a pretty important number in that, if we can do that, that will essentially reverse the whole decline in community membership around the world and start regrowing it to a point where it will have positive social effects,” Zuckerberg said.
Moving forward, a major new area of emphasis in Facebook’s product roadmap is building features that encourage users to find and join more groups that will be meaningful to them, as well as to make it easier for community leaders and Group admins to run groups and create new ones. It isn’t unusual for admins of large groups to spend several hours per day managing tasks like vetting requests from users to join, approving posts or addressing flagged content.
Facebook debuted a suite of new tools for Group admins on Thursday, including a new panel of real-time metrics called “Group insights”; a membership request filtering tool, which allows admins to organize requests through categories like gender and location; a “Removed member clean-up” tool, which makes it easier for admins to make groups safe by automatically deleting former users’ content; a post-scheduling tool to save admins and moderators time; and “Group-to-group-linking,” which allows admins to recommend similar or related groups to their members, aimed at helping sub-communities interact.
“The admins themselves are so critical because each group needs someone who’s going to look out for people,” said Zuckerberg, who noted that Facebook plans to continue rolling out additional tools to support admins over time. Facebook has also adjusted its algorithm to suggest Groups to people based on how meaningful the user will find the Group, as opposed to how likely that user is to join a particular Group.
As Facebook’s user base and the size and number of Groups continues to grow, Zuckerberg acknowledged that the company will need to continue improving its tools and policies for addressing bad actors and harmful activity. Addressing issues around harassment, discrimination and issues like recruiting by terrorist groups, requires a combination of human policies and moderating as well as artificial intelligence.
“There are boundaries,” Zuckerberg said. “Hate speech is certainly not allowed, terrorism is absolutely not allowed.”
Tackling Global Problems
Zuckerberg&#8217;s focus on community building ties back to the nearly 6,000-word manifesto he shared earlier this year, which pitches Facebook as digital social infrastructure that can be leveraged for good. Although the company&#8217;s new mission emphasizes community, Zuckerberg seems to view the individual as the immediate, critical unit for change at scale. Communities are important, Zuckerberg said, in large part because they help give people more bandwidth to look beyond their immediate surroundings and concerns.
“A more connected world is going to be necessary to take on the greatest opportunities and challenges for the next generation, everything from stopping climate change, to stopping pandemics, to funding research,” Zuckerberg said in an interview. “These are not fundamentally national problems anymore. In order to get there, you need to build a world where every person has a sense of support and purpose in their life so they don’t just focus narrowly on what’s going on in their lives, but can think about these broader issues as well.” &#8211; Written by <a class="link preload-hidden ng-binding" href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/kathleenchaykowski/" target="_self">Kathleen Chaykowski </a>, FORBES STAFF

Mark Zuckerberg Gives Facebook A New Mission

When Mike Lawrie fretted and sweated to connect Africa to the internet he expected a handful of dusty academics to use it. A quarter of a century on, African truck drivers, domestic workers and office clerks can’t live without it – the internet in Africa is as much a part of living as is breathing for millions.
“We know internet use in most of the continent has been growing. But it’s not even. So you have countries like South Africa and Kenya on the one hand where many people are using the internet. Then you have Ethiopia, the second largest population in Africa, and very few use the internet,” says Indra de Lanerolle, head of the South African Network Society project at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), in Johannesburg.
De Lanerolle is the author of The New Wave, a paper released in 2012 that looked at the internet users of Africa.
“The internet has grown, but there is one thing that hasn’t… fixed lines. Traditionally you would connect with a PC. But only two percent of households have a fixed line. PC penetration hasn’t been going up much. In that context it’s not surprising that it leaves us with mobile and mobile devices.”
“It’s a success story in one way that this infrastructure works. But it’s also evidence of a failure in another. Many African countries have failed to deliver those other networks, or they are way too expensive.”
Internet on the move is expensive. Net costs are high, which means the poor, without PCs, surf less.
“You are buying data in sachet size bytes, 5MB at a time, and you are rationing yourself. Our research shows you are very biased against services when you know how much data they use. One of the good things about Facebook is lowering the data consumption in order to use it.”
Internet means economic growth, says Ibrahima Guimba-Saidou, Senior Vice President Commercial Africa at SES.
“According to our research, if a developing nation has 10 percent more broadband connectivity, it results in a 1.38 percent GDP growth for that country. It is expected that Africa’s population will double to 2.4 billion people by 2050. In 20 years, the number of cities in Africa with over 10 million inhabitants will double. Remote areas are pulling African economies down. Today, over 300 million Africans live more than 50 kilometers from the nearest fiber or cable broadband connection – 400 million people have no internet access at all, that’s 700 million unconnected people. This equates to 60 to 70 percent of the African population living in remote areas, cut off from the bigger cities without access to information and the necessary facilities required for sustainable growth. These people, by no fault of their own, are pulling their country backwards as they are not able to contribute to the economy, as much as they no doubt would want to,” says Guimba-Saidou.
Language is also a barrier, says De Lanerolle. The language of technology tends to be in English, French or Portuguese, making it difficult for those who don’t speak them to navigate on their phones.
“At a bank machine you can get numerous languages but on an app its less. In general e-commerce is generally English in South Africa. If I am a Sepedi speaker in Polokwane, and I go to a shop, I can probably speak Sepedi to a shopkeeper. I can use Sepedi to transact. I can go to a post office and do the same thing,” says De Lanerolle.
“There are a lot of people in South Africa who do not read and write English easily. It’s a significant barrier, but is a solvable one. People, who design services and content, need to take account of that, especially when you have got these limits when you have reached the limit of your clientele.”
Internet users on the continent may be on the rise, but almost half the population lives below the poverty line. According to De Lanerolle’s research, in 2008, one in seven people in South Africa were online. In 2012, this grew to one in three. By 2016, there could be as many as two out of three, he says.
The research bears out that the younger you are, the more likely you are to use it. Almost 50% of those under 25 are internet users, while less than 20% older than 45 use the net. Businesses need to be cautious when it comes to developing apps.
“When people are launching the business they say let’s design an app for an IOS system. First, ask why do an app? If your target market is a low-end income user, they are most likely using a BlackBerry. Why use smartphones?”
“Research, from the US, shows that most users use only 10 apps. It’s quite hard to develop an app that is quite easy to use. More seriously, it’s harder to make an app absolutely necessary that will be in that top 10. Most apps will be used and then dropped in a very short time, like games,” he says.
For those who have dreams of becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg and designing a multimillion-dollar app in their garage in Africa, the road may belong and rocky. There is a shortage of developers in Africa, for a start.
“By far our biggest constraint is developers. I was speaking to a CEO of a fairly big company in Sandton; they alone have a hundred vacancies for developers. The problem is we don’t have enough, especially at an entrepreneur level. Because they have such shortages in Sandton, they are offering pretty good salaries. You have to be pretty brave and pretty confident to say ‘screw that I am going to do my own thing and hope I score.’”
Social media is the king of the internet. Seventy five percent of users have at least one account on Facebook, Twitter, Mxit or LinkedIn or other social platforms.
Dinesh Balliah, New and Social Media lecturer at Wits, has taught students to use the internet in journalism for four years. The growing generation of internet users are far less computer savvy than they are made out to be, she says.
“Students these days don’t even know how to burn a CD. I feel like the generation we have now, that deals in apps, don’t learn how to troubleshoot on a computer. Back [in 2000], if you stuffed up on a computer you had to fix it. Even a software error, you had to fix it. Now you just try something else, or reinstall. The way in which we learn about computers has completely changed.”
“I think social media has changed the game for everyone. What’s shifted drastically is initially when the internet came out it was very top down. Those who had power, money and influence were the people producing content. So you had very exclusive content producers. Then you shifted to Web 2.0, where internet users were producing internet content of their own. Now you have moved to a situation where it’s not very clear what production content is. Is a tweet content? Is a Facebook comment content? The individual matters now more than ever.”
The language of computers could be more important than learning Mandarin, she says.
“With me, my general rule with my kids is that they need to read and write properly first and then they can have access to a computer. If you look at people who became tech innovators, they played computer games. People have this aversion and get scared of games and computers, but we should be teaching our kids how to code through games,” says Balliah.
It may be for a privileged few, but it’s clear Africa is set to be changed even more by the growing, dynamic power of the internet.

Eat, Pray, eMail

At the beginning of last month, social networking giant Facebook filed for a $5 billion initial public offering (IPO) with the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC). Facebook is earmarked to raise about $10 billion from the offering, making it the biggest technology IPO ever. In 2004, Google managed to raise $1.9 billion and was valued at $23 billion. Only three companies have breached the $10 billion barrier: Visa Inc, General Motors and AT&amp;T Wireless.
Facebook is being valued between $75 billion and $100 billion, and if all goes to plan, the stock is expected to commence trading in May. The offering will make many of the internet company’s 3,000 employees Silicon Valley’s newest millionaires.
Chief executive officer and founder Mark Zuckerberg, aged just 27, owns 28% of the company. This IPO will propel him into the multi-billionaire league, making him the fourth-wealthiest man in the United States—remarkable for a guy who started the company in his Harvard University dorm room in 2004. Despite going public, Zuckerberg will retain effective control of Facebook through his holding of 57% of voting shares.
Investment banks will also be laughing all the way to the bank. They stand to make $100 million in fees, which will be a welcome boost for revenues, given the currently tough trading conditions being experienced by banks around the world. Morgan Stanley, the number one underwriter of US IPOs for three consecutive years, will lead the offering and will share the spoils with Wall Street’s usual suspects: Goldman Sachs; JP Morgan; Bank of America; Merrill Lynch and Barclays Capital.
Facebook boasts more than 845 million active subscribers, with over 10% of the global population using the platform to chat, play games and swap 250 million pictures daily. In 2011, the company reported revenues of $3.7 billion, 85% of which was generated from advertising. In the same year, the company reported profits of $1 billion. In a letter that accompanied the filing to the SEC, Zuckerberg said: “There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future.”
The Arab Spring, which started in 2011, is testament to the transformation Zuckerberg talks about. Protests were co-ordinated through Facebook and social networking sites.
In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, many African leaders and governments are only too well aware of the power that the electorate wields through social media. In fact, China blocked Facebook in 2009 following riots in Xinjiang which the authorities attributed to Facebook.
African governments will be wary of social unrest following the Arab Spring and their broken promises to their electorates. However, African governments are unlikely to go the China route and block Facebook and other social networking sites.
South Africa’s president, Jacob Zuma, recently opened a Facebook page to allow voters to communicate with him directly to voice service delivery concerns, which were taken into account during the state of the nation address last month. This was a welcome development and hopefully, many more African leaders will follow suit.

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