The man Warren Buffett expects to succeed him at the helm of Berkshire Hathaway is worth an estimated $484 million thanks to a stake in its privately held energy subsidiary, despite owning very little of Berkshire’s publicly traded stock.



At Berkshire’s annual meeting on Saturday, Buffett’s longtime lieutenant Charles Munger made an off-handed comment that “Greg will keep the culture” as Berkshire grows more decentralized, suggesting that the company’s vice chairman, Greg Abel, will succeed Buffett as CEO. Buffett later confirmed to CNBC that Abel is the current choice to take over, saying, “The directors are in agreement that if something were to happen to me tonight, it would be Greg who’d take over tomorrow morning.”



Abel has been a leader at Berkshire since the Omaha, Nebraska-based conglomerate bought MidAmerican Energy in 2000 when he was its president. He became CEO of the company now named Berkshire Hathaway Energy in 2008 and served in that role until becoming Berkshire’s vice chairman in 2018.



Abel owns a 1% stake in Berkshire Hathaway Energy, billionaire Walter Scott owns 7.9% and Berkshire Hathaway owns the remaining 91.1% of the company, according to BHE’s 2020 annual report. Berkshire repurchased $126 million worth of shares from Scott on March 5, 2020, according to its latest proxy statement, valuing BHE at $53.4 billion. That makes Abel’s stake worth an estimated $480 million (Forbes discounts ownership stakes in privately held companies).



Abel’s piece of BHE makes up the vast majority of his net worth, Forbes estimates. He owns only five Berkshire Hathaway Class A shares in a trust and 2,363 Class B shares as a custodian for members of his family, according to the proxy statement. With Class A shares worth more than $400,000 per share and Class B shares trading at $280 for share as of Monday’s market close, that stake is worth about $2.8 million.



Abel and Ajit Jain were&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2018/01/10/warren-buffett-adds-energy-head-greg-abel-and-insurance-maestro-ajit-jain-to-berkshires-board/?sh=5355b5717c73">named vice chairmen</a>&nbsp;at the same time in 2018, prompting speculation that both were in contention to move into the top job. Jain, a 35-year Berkshire veteran, manages its insurance operations, and Abel oversees everything else. Jain owns $185 million worth of Berkshire Hathaway shares, some of which are held by a private foundation. Abel, 58, is 11 years younger than Jain, which Buffett reportedly cited as a contributing factor to the decision. “They’re both wonderful guys. The likelihood of someone having a 20-year runway though makes a real difference,” Buffett told CNBC.



Although he is among the youngest members of Berkshire’s board of directors, Abel’s stake in the public company still stands out as strikingly small. Buffett’s 248,734 Class A shares make up the bulk of the Oracle of Omaha’s $106 billion fortune. Munger’s shares are worth $1.9 billion, and early investor David Gottesman owns a $2.6 billion stake. All but two others on Berkshire’s 14-member board have stakes worth much more than Abel’s. A company spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.



But as an added bonus to his lucrative Berkshire Hathaway Energy stake, Abel is paid handsomely in his role as vice chairman. His base salary was $16 million in each of the last three years, according to Berkshire’s proxy statement, and he received $3 million bonuses in 2020 and 2019 and a $2 million bonus in 2018. Buffett and Munger’s base salaries are a mere $100,000 annually.



Abel also serves on the board of Kraft Heinz and owns 40,036 shares individually, worth about $1.7 million. Berkshire Hathaway orchestrated the 2015 megamerger of Kraft and Heinz after buying both food companies with Brazilian private equity firm 3G Capital and is Kraft Heinz’s largest shareholder with a 26.6% stake.



By Hank Tucker, Forbes Staff

Inside The Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Annual General Meeting

Just How Rich Is Warren Buffett Successor Greg Abel?

Despite the pandemic, it was a record-setting year for the world’s wealthiest—with a $5 trillion surge in wealth and an unprecedented number of new billionaires.



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It’s been a year like no other, and we aren’t talking about the pandemic. There were rapid-fire public offerings, surging cryptocurrencies and skyrocketing stock prices. The number of billionaires on&nbsp;Forbes’&nbsp;35th annual list of the world’s wealthiest exploded to an unprecedented&nbsp;2,755—660 more than a year ago. Altogether they are worth&nbsp;$13.1 trillion, up from $8 trillion on the 2020 list.&nbsp;



There are a record high&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2021/04/06/nearly-500-people-have-become-billionaires-during-the-pandemic-year/?sh=386c528125c0">493 newcomers</a>&nbsp;to the list—roughly one new billionaire every 17 hours, including 210 from China and Hong Kong and 98 from the U.S. The richest newcomer, at $38.2 billion, is&nbsp;Miriam Adelson&nbsp;of Nevada, who inherited her husband Sheldon Adelson’s casino empire following his death in January. Other notable new entrants include movie and TV producer&nbsp;Tyler Perry, Bumble dating app cofounder&nbsp;Whitney Wolfe Herd—the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire, and Europe’s&nbsp;Guillaume Pousaz, founder of payments firm Checkout.com. Another 250 people who’d fallen off the billionaires’ list in the past came roaring back. Altogether, a staggering 86% of all billionaires are richer than a year ago.https://embedly.forbes.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fe.infogram.com%2F203c82a4-0962-4ff3-b2f9-883366e688b1%3Fsrc%3Dembed&amp;display_name=Infogram&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Finfogram.com%2Fdesktop-2021-billionaires-recirc-1ho16vojl5w8x4n&amp;image=https%3A%2F%2Finfogram-thumbs-1024.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com%2Fd1c81d9b-cd07-4ed9-ae1f-456751923c71.jpg&amp;key=3ce26dc7e3454db5820ba084d28b4935&amp;type=text%2Fhtml&amp;schema=infogram



Jeff Bezos&nbsp;is the world’s richest person for the fourth year running, worth $177 billion, up $64 billion from a year ago as a result of surging Amazon shares.&nbsp;Elon Musk—the biggest gainer in dollar terms—rocketed into the No. 2 spot with a $151 billion fortune, a whopping $126.4 billion more than a year ago, when he ranked No. 31 and was worth $24.6 billion. The main reason: a 705% climb in Tesla shares. French luxury goods tycoon&nbsp;Bernard Arnault&nbsp;holds onto his spot at No. 3 but his fortune nearly doubled to $150 billion, from $76 billion, due to an 86% rise in the shares of LVMH, owner of brands including Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior and cosmetics retailer Sephora.&nbsp;The top ten richest are worth $1.15 trillion, up by two-thirds from $686 billion last year. Altogether,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddawkins/2021/04/06/europes-billionaires-are-1-trillion-richer-than-a-year-ago/?sh=623d979f76e5">Europe’s billionaires</a>&nbsp;are $1 trillion richer than a year ago.



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<h3 id="h-net-worth-of-the-world-s-richest-person">Net Worth of the World’s Richest Person</h3>



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/606b6013b0a2afc5b16302b6/0x0.png?fit=scale" alt="Richest person net worth"/></figure>



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This year there are four people worth $100 billion or more—up from just one (Bezos) on last year’s list. Besides Bezos, Musk and Arnault, there’s&nbsp;Bill Gates, who ranks No. 4 at $124 billion, buoyed by the strength of shares he owns in Microsoft, Canadian National Railway and tractor maker Deere &amp; Company.



Rounding out the top five is Facebook founder&nbsp;Mark Zuckerberg, at $97 billion. He’s worth an eye-popping $42.3 billion more than a year ago; Facebook’s shares have risen 80% in the past year as people around the world used its social media platforms to stay in touch. (For more on the richest tech billionaires, see&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2021/04/06/here-are-the-richest-tech-billionaires-in-2021/?sh=691f42bb4d70">here</a>; and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/mominakhan/2021/04/06/the-10-richest-american-billionaires-2021/?sh=7e747aa4d981">here</a>&nbsp;for the richest Americans.) The richest woman this year is cosmetics heir Francoise Bettencourt Meyers of France; see here for the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/denizcam/2021/04/06/the-top-richest-women-in-the-world-in-2021/?sh=59cfe7094598">richest women</a>.



Warren Buffett&nbsp;is the world’s sixth richest person, worth $96 billion. It’s the first year since 1993 that the revered investor running Berkshire Hathaway has not appeared in the top five. Not that the 90-year-old Oracle of Omaha had a bad year—he’s still worth $28.5 billion more than he was on the 2020 list.



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<h3 id="h-number-of-billionaires-worldwide-and-combined-net-worth">Number of Billionaires Worldwide and Combined Net Worth</h3>



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/606b5e244876c7b64f423816/0x0.png?fit=scale" alt="Number of Billionaires and combined net worth"/><figcaption>Forbs.com</figcaption></figure>



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The&nbsp;U.S.&nbsp;still has more billionaires than any other country, with 724 (up from 614 last year), but China is closing the gap with 698 (including 71 from&nbsp;Hong Kong&nbsp;and 1 from&nbsp;Macao). Last year the U.S. had 614 billionaires and China had 456 (including 66 from Hong Kong and 1 Macao).&nbsp;India&nbsp;has the third highest number of billionaires, with 140. Altogether, the 1,149 billionaires from Asia-Pacific countries are worth $4.7 trillion, while the U.S. billionaires are worth a total $4.4 trillion.&nbsp; (For more on the countries with the most billionaires, see&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/giacomotognini/2021/04/06/the-countries-with-the-most-billionaires-2021/?sh=42c017c0379b">here</a>. Plus&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/jenniferwang/2021/04/06/the-10-richest-chinese-billionaires-in-2021/?sh=7e5164685ca2">China’s richest</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/jenniferwang/2021/04/06/asia-ascendant-the-richest-new-chinese-billionaires-in-2021/?sh=3361ff131a1a">China’s newcomers</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/naazneenkarmali/2021/04/06/indias-10-richest-billionaires-2021/?sh=2922cf8359b7">India’s richest</a>.)&nbsp;



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<h3 id="h-the-countries-with-the-most-billionaires">The Countries With The Most Billionaires</h3>



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/606b7cca1391bb569e6302b6/0x0.png?fit=scale" alt="Countries With The Most Billionaires"/><figcaption>Forbes.com</figcaption></figure>



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A record 1,975 billionaires are self-made, up from 1,457 last year. That equates to 72% of the list (vs. about 70% in 2020). It’s a marked change from the 2001 list of billionaires, when 49% of the total 565 billionaires were self-made.&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;uses the term “self-made” as a contrast to “inherited” and “inherited &amp; growing;” it’s not meant to indicate that someone created a billion-dollar fortune all on their own. To achieve such a feat takes teamwork.



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<h3 id="h-total-number-of-billionaires-and-self-made-status">Total Number of Billionaires and Self-Made Status</h3>



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/606c413115a36070b1428bf7/0x0.png?fit=scale" alt="Self-Made Status"/><figcaption>Forbes .com</figcaption></figure>



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One hundred and five of the list members are under 40, two-thirds of whom are self-made. The new youngest self-made billionaire is 26-year-old American&nbsp;Austin Russell,&nbsp;who dropped out of Stanford to found automotive sensor firm Luminar Technologies; he is worth $2.4 billion and ranked No. 1299. There’s a new youngest billionaire as well: 18-year-old&nbsp;Kevin David Lehmann&nbsp;of Germany, whose father Guenther Lehmann transferred his stake in drugstore chain dm-drogerie mkt to him; he’s worth $3.3 billion and ranks No. 925. (Read more about the youngest billionaires&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielshapiro/2021/04/06/the-worlds-youngest-billionaires-2021-include-a-teenager-from-germany-a-crytpo-magnate-and-a-stanford-dropout/?sh=5e87182a509d">here</a>.). At the other end of the spectrum,&nbsp;the oldest billionaire, at age 99, is U.S. insurance tycoon&nbsp;George Joseph.&nbsp;



Mukesh Ambani&nbsp;of India has become the richest person in Asia, ranked No. 10 and worth an estimated $84.5 billion. He nudges out&nbsp;Jack Ma&nbsp;of China, Asia’s richest person a year ago, whose rank dropped to No. 26 (from No. 17 last year) despite a nearly $10 billion jump in his fortune to $48.4 billion. The biggest gainer in percentage terms this year is from China:&nbsp;Zhong Shanshan&nbsp;took his bottled water company Nongfu Spring public last fall on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and shares soared, lifting his net worth to $68.9 billion, up 3,345% from $2 billion a year ago.



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<h3 id="h-total-new-billionaires-and-combined-net-worth">Total New Billionaires and Combined Net Worth</h3>



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/606b5ea2affa9dd12fb89021/0x0.png?fit=scale" alt="Total Newcomers over the years"/><figcaption>Forbes.com</figcaption></figure>



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<h2>#1 | Jeff Bezos</h2>



<h4>NET WORTH:&nbsp;$177 BILLION</h4>



<h4>SOURCE OF WEALTH:&nbsp;AMAZON</h4>



<h4>RESIDENCE: SEATTLE</h4>



<h2>#2 | Elon Musk</h2>



<h4>NET WORTH:&nbsp;$151 BILLION</h4>



<h4>SOURCE OF WEALTH:&nbsp;TESLA, SPACEX</h4>



<h4>RESIDENCE: AUSTIN, TEXAS</h4>



<h2>#3 | Bernard Arnault</h2>



<h4>NET WORTH:&nbsp;$150 BILLION</h4>



<h4>SOURCE OF WEALTH:&nbsp;LUXURY GOODS</h4>



<h4>RESIDENCE:&nbsp;PARIS</h4>



<h2>#4 | Bill Gates</h2>



<h4>NET WORTH:&nbsp;$124 BILLION</h4>



<h4>SOURCE OF WEALTH:&nbsp;MICROSOFT</h4>



<h4>RESIDENCE:&nbsp;MEDINA, WASHINGTON</h4>



<h2>#5 | Mark Zuckerberg</h2>



<h4>NET WORTH:&nbsp;$97 BILLION</h4>



<h4>SOURCE OF WEALTH:&nbsp;FACEBOOK</h4>



<h4>RESIDENCE:&nbsp;PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA</h4>



<h2>#6 | Warren Buffett</h2>



<h4>NET WORTH:&nbsp;$96 BILLION</h4>



<h4>SOURCE OF WEALTH:&nbsp;BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY</h4>



<h4>RESIDENCE:&nbsp;OMAHA, NEBRASKA</h4>



<h2>#7 | Larry Ellison</h2>



<h4>NET WORTH:&nbsp;$93 BILLION</h4>



<h4>SOURCE OF WEALTH:&nbsp;SOFTWARE</h4>



<h4>RESIDENCE:&nbsp;LANAI, HAWAII</h4>



<h2>#8 | Larry Page</h2>



<h4>NET WORTH:&nbsp;$91.5 BILLION</h4>



<h4>SOURCE OF WEALTH:&nbsp;GOOGLE</h4>



<h4>RESIDENCE:&nbsp;PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA</h4>



<h2>#9 | Sergey Brin</h2>



<h4>NET WORTH:&nbsp;$89 BILLION</h4>



<h4>SOURCE OF WEALTH:&nbsp;GOOGLE</h4>



<h4>RESIDENCE:&nbsp;LOS ALTOS, CALIFORNIA</h4>



<h2>#10 | Mukesh Ambani</h2>



<h4>NET WORTH:&nbsp;$84.5 BILLION</h4>



<h4>SOURCE OF WEALTH:&nbsp;DIVERSIFIED</h4>



<h4>RESIDENCE:&nbsp;MUMBAI, INDIA</h4>



By Kerry A. Dolan, Forbes Staff

Billionaire Elon Musk Receives Axel Springer Award

Forbes’ 35th Annual World’s Billionaires List: Facts And Figures 2021

Meet the billionaire winners and losers of the dot-com bubble, Great Recession and Covid-19 crash.



Crashes, wipe-outs, recessions.&nbsp;Fortunes are often forged, or fumbled away, in the fire of economic downturns. When the Covid-19 pandemic began to sweep the world in early 2020, the wealth of U.S. billionaires plummeted in lockstep with the stock market. Yet, just six months after the market bottomed out, and with the coronavirus still to be contained,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/">The Forbes 400 richest Americans are doing better than ever, worth a record $3.2 trillion</a>&nbsp;in all. In other words, the pain—at least for the ultra-rich—was remarkably short lived.



So&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;dug through the archives to compare how America’s billionaire class has fared during and after the past three big market drops: the dot-com crash of the early 2000s, the Great Recession of the late 2000s and the Covid-19 meltdown of this year. Each downturn hit different industries hardest, but a common theme is clear: The billionaires who are down are rarely out, and there are always clever thinkers amassing new riches, even when times are tough.



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<h1 class="has-vivid-red-color has-text-color has-text-align-center">The Dot-Com Crash</h1>



As a huge wave of consumers around the globe joined the internet, rabid investors hoping to get in on the tech boom poured funds into wildly unprofitable startups promising to change the world. The S&amp;P 500 hit a record high in March 2000. Then the bubble began to burst, sending the S&amp;P down 50% over the next two and a half years. Jeff Bezos began an April 2001 letter to Amazon shareholders with a single word: “Ouch.” There were 298 billionaires on the 2000 Forbes 400 list, worth a total of $1.2 trillion; by 2002, the list had lost 73 billionaires and $350 billion in aggregate net worth. Markets, which were also hit by the 9/11 terror attacks, didn’t fully recover until May 2007—more than seven years after the bubble popped.



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<h1 class="has-vivid-red-color has-text-color has-text-align-center">Losers:</h1>



<h3>Bill Gates</h3>



<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter size-large"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" width="1024" height="683" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/GettyImages-1185999096-1024x683.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-47334" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/GettyImages-1185999096-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/GettyImages-1185999096-scaled-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/GettyImages-1185999096-scaled-600x400.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/GettyImages-1185999096-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/GettyImages-1185999096-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/GettyImages-1185999096-2048x1365.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /><figcaption>(Photo by Mike Cohen/Getty Images for The New York Times)</figcaption></figure></div>



Shares of Microsoft plummeted 63% in 2001, helping shave $9 billion off Gates’ net worth for the 2001 Forbes 400 (and he’d drop by another $11 billion in 2002). Yet there were promising signs: The federal government announced that it would no longer seek to break up Microsoft, which was just a month away from releasing a new product: the hit Xbox.



<h3>Monte Zweben</h3>



Of the 51 people who fell off The Forbes 400 in 2001, none fell harder than Zweben, who took his ecommerce software startup Blue Martini public in 2000—then&nbsp;watched as 98% of his $1.4 billion fortune evaporated in less than a year when shares nosedived. Zweben has founded and run a handful of tech outfits since, but has never made it back onto The Forbes 400.



<h3>Stanley Druckenmiller</h3>



The head of George Soros’ Quantum Fund, Druckenmiller struck gold shorting the British Pound in 1992 but eight years later made an ill-timed bet on tech at the height of the bubble. “I bought $6 billion worth of tech stocks, and in six weeks I had lost $3 billion in that one play,”&nbsp;<a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://theirrelevantinvestor.com/2018/05/16/druckenmillers-big-mistake/" target="_blank">he later recalled</a>. “I didn’t learn anything. I already knew that I wasn’t supposed to do that. I was just an emotional basketcase and I couldn’t help myself.”



<h1 class="has-vivid-red-color has-text-color has-text-align-center">Winners:</h1>



<h3>Mark Cuban</h3>



<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter size-large"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" width="1024" height="683" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/GettyImages-1158140219-1024x683.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-47631" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/GettyImages-1158140219-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/GettyImages-1158140219-scaled-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/GettyImages-1158140219-scaled-600x400.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/GettyImages-1158140219-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/GettyImages-1158140219-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/GettyImages-1158140219-2048x1365.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /><figcaption> (Photo by Rich Fury/Getty Images)</figcaption></figure></div>



He got rich selling internet radio company Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in cash and stock in 1999—near the top of the dot-com bubble. Then he made an even smarter move, using collars to protect his Yahoo stock from a price drop, which soon came when the shares plummeted 90% in 2000.



<h3>Leon Levy</h3>



The investor who helped build Oppenheimer &amp; Co. made more than $100 million shorting the Nasdaq as the&nbsp;market sputtered. When the longtime optimist spoke with&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;in 2002, he was still bearish about a market recovery. “The outlook for profits is disappointing,&#8221;&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2002/1209/174.html#4b3528df476b">Levy warned</a>.



<h3>Thomas Bailey</h3>



The founder of mutual fund giant Janus Capital managed to find a way to sell his shares high, even during the market low—thanks to an unusual agreement that gave him the right to sell his stake to Janus’ parent company for a price based on the prior year’s profits. In 2001, with Janus struggling along with the rest of the economy, Bailey decided to sell—forcing the company to purchase his shares for&nbsp;<a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-oct-12-me-56332-story.html" target="_blank">double their market value</a>.



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



<h1 class="has-vivid-red-color has-text-color has-text-align-center">The Great Recession</h1>



A real estate market run rampant came crashing down in late 2007, sending the U.S. economy spiraling into a historic recession. The federal government&nbsp;<a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/heres-how-much-2008-bailouts-really-cost" target="_blank">spent some $500 billion on bailouts</a>&nbsp;for the likes of big banks, automakers and insurers. In 2009, more than two-thirds of the list was poorer than the year before as the aggregate wealth of the bunch fell by $300 billion. The S&amp;P, which peaked in October 2007, didn’t make up its losses for five and a half years.



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<h1 class="has-vivid-red-color has-text-color has-text-align-center">Winners:</h1>



<h3>Warren Buffett</h3>



The crash hit the Oracle of Omaha hard at first, with Berkshire Hathaway stock tumbling 32% in 2008, along with the broader market. But the famed value investor, who has long preached being “fearful when others are greedy” and “greedy when others are fearful,&#8221; used the crash to go&nbsp;<a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/17/opinion/17buffett.html" target="_blank">bargain hunting</a>. He snapped up preferred stock of titans like Goldman Sachs, General Electric and Dow Chemical on the cheap, bets that earned billions as the companies recovered.



<h3>Andrew Beal</h3>



In 2004, as personal and corporate debt ballooned in the market runup, the shrewd banker began hoarding cash. He struck when the markets began to tumble in 2007, gobbling up loans and assets from struggling banks for pennies on the dollar, quickly juicing his profits. “This is the opportunity of my lifetime,&#8221;&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/2009/04/03/banking-andy-beal-business-wall-street-beal.html#3d7b4261a4d5">Beal told&nbsp;Forbes</a>&nbsp;in the middle of the crisis.



<h3>John Paulson</h3>



The biggest short: Paulson, a hedge funder who was convinced the economy was on the verge of collapse, began shorting the subprime real estate market before the crash. He&nbsp;pocketed some $4 billion from the bold bet, catapulting him from less than $300 million in net worth to a spot on The Forbes 400 in a single year. By 2008, he’d be worth $4.5 billion.



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<h1 class="has-vivid-red-color has-text-color has-text-align-center">The COVID Crash</h1>



The Covid crash came on fast, with S&amp;P 500 diving 34% from its February 2020 peak in less than a month, as the virus spread around the globe. But, for most members of The Forbes 400, the downturn didn’t last long. The S&amp;P recouped all of its losses in just 181 days, and was again hitting new record highs by August 18. America’s richest billionaires are, once again,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/">richer than ever</a>.



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<h1 class="has-vivid-red-color has-text-color has-text-align-center">Losers:</h1>



<h3>Micky Arison</h3>



<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter size-large"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" width="855" height="1024" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/GettyImages-614064188-855x1024.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-47632" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/GettyImages-614064188-855x1024.jpg 855w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/GettyImages-614064188-scaled-300x359.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/GettyImages-614064188-scaled-600x718.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/GettyImages-614064188-251x300.jpg 251w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/GettyImages-614064188-768x920.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/GettyImages-614064188-1283x1536.jpg 1283w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/GettyImages-614064188-1710x2048.jpg 1710w" sizes="(max-width: 855px) 100vw, 855px" /><figcaption> (Photo by Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images)</figcaption></figure></div>



Like other cruise operators, his Carnival Corp. has been crippled by the coronavirus. In early 2020, more than 700 passengers on a ship operated by Carnival’s Princess Cruises&nbsp;<a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/cruises/2020/04/24/coronavirus-cleanup-how-cruise-ship-sanitized-after-outbreak-diamond-princess/5136469002/" target="_blank">reportedly became infected</a>&nbsp;with the virus. In May, Congress said it’s probing the company’s virus policies. (Carnival has said it will cooperate with the investigation.) Meanwhile, shares sunk 68% from last year’s Forbes 400 list through late July 2020, knocking Arison’s fortune down by 31%, to $5.6 billion.



<h3>Edward DeBartolo, Jr.</h3>



The real estate mogul, who pleaded guilty to not reporting a bribe from a Louisiana government official in 1998, got a presidential pardon from Donald Trump in February. Financially, things have been a bit rockier: Shares of Simon Property Group, which make up much of his fortune, have fallen 60% since last year’s list as America’s largest mall owner reels from the crisis. He and his family sold their DeBartolo Realty to Simon in 1998 for $1.5 billion in stock.



<h3>Harold Hamm</h3>



&#8220;It just grabbed my imagination that anybody could find this hidden, ancient wealth and it was yours,&#8221; the fracking pioneer&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0202/066.html#73d8b86d3681">gushed to&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;about his love of the oil business in 2009</a>. What a difference a decade makes. With a price war and lower demand for fuel cratering oil prices, Hamm’s having a tough go of it these days. His fortune has fallen $3.7 billion since last year’s Forbes 400 as shares of his Continental Resources have dropped 43%.



<h1 class="has-vivid-red-color has-text-color has-text-align-center">Winners:</h1>



<h3>Eric Yuan</h3>



<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter size-large"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" width="1024" height="684" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/GettyImages-1173631560-1024x684.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-47633" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/GettyImages-1173631560-1024x684.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/GettyImages-1173631560-scaled-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/GettyImages-1173631560-scaled-600x401.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/GettyImages-1173631560-768x513.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/GettyImages-1173631560-1536x1025.jpg 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/GettyImages-1173631560-2048x1367.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /><figcaption> (Photo by Michael Short/Bloomberg via Getty Images)</figcaption></figure></div>



With the world working from home, the Zoom founder <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2019/04/19/zoom-zoom-zoom-the-exclusive-inside-story-of-the-new-billionaire-behind-techs-hottest-ipo/">is cashing in big</a> as his video conferencing app has become a corporate darling. Shares are up more than 500% since Zoom’s April 2019 IPO, launching Yuan onto The Forbes 400 list for the first time, with an $11 billion fortune.



<h3>Reed Hastings</h3>



His stay-at-home staple Netflix has reaped the rewards of a world in quarantine, with hits like “Tiger King” and “Extraction.” The streaming service&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/dawnchmielewski/2020/09/07/how-netflixs-reed-hastings-rewrote-the-hollywood-script/#5620b13215df">has added around 1 million subscriptions a month</a>&nbsp;in the U.S. and Canada, plus another 2 million a month abroad, since the pandemic began.



<h3>Ernest Garcia III</h3>



Carvana—the “Amazon of used cars” that he cofounded as part of his billionaire father Ernest Garcia II’s DriveTime Automotive Group—is another Covid lockdown hit, with shares up 77% since last year’s list. Carvana, which the Garcias spun out of DriveTime and took public in 2017, allows customers to buy and sell cars online.



-Chase Peterson-Withorn, Forbes Staff

Forbes Media Centennial Celebration

Billionaires On The Brink: How The Forbes 400 Makes And Loses Billions During Market Crashes

From pig-manure power to wind farms, Virginia’s Dominion Energy is transforming itself into a renewable energy powerhouse—and Berkshire Hathaway’s cash will only accelerate the process. 



“Pigs are extremely efficient,” says Kraig Westerbeek, who oversees renewable energy production for Smithfield Foods, the world’s biggest pork producer. For what farmers put into them, they get a lot out. “They eat 2.4 pounds of feed per pound of gain,” he says. “And they produce more gas per pound of live weight.”



Westerbeek is talking about greenhouse gases emitted by the millions of pigs his industrial farms produce each year. Inside his giant barns, manure and urine ooze through holes in a concrete floor before getting piped to open-air ponds called lagoons—some the size of four football fields. In these lakes of livestock waste naturally occurring bacteria—called methanogens—continue to feed and fart out more gas. All this methane ends up in the atmosphere, and that is bad news for the planet. Pound for pound, methane packs 25 times the greenhouse effect as the standard environmental villain, carbon dioxide. To make matters worse, it’s long been standard practice for farmers to spray the odoriferous lagoon waste on croplands as rich fertilizer—subjecting Smithfield and its former hog-producing subsidiary, Murphy-Brown, to environmental litigation and scathing publicity as local communities cope with the stench and health risks.



But today, Westerbeek has a better story to tell. In recent years Smithfield has been working to perfect methods of capping lagoons with heavy plastic covers that trap the methane (and much of the reek). The gas inflates the plastic domes in amounts sufficient for people to walk on—like an extremely gross air mattress. Smithfield has partnered with Richmond, Virginia-based utility giant Dominion Energy to market the gas. Under the plan, Dominion will siphon the pig gas out of these anaerobic digesters, inject it into interstate pipelines and sell it to green-minded customers looking to cut their carbon footprints. The end result is arguably the cleanest electricity in the nation, says Dominion Chief Operating Officer Diane Leopold. “It’s a win-win-win.” With renewable energy projects, she says, “it’s about how many boxes you can check. This one has an extra box.”



Over the next decade, Dominion aims to invest $650 million into agriculture-derived gas projects. Smithfield will contribute another $250 million. The expected result: 8 billion cubic feet per year of livestock gas—thus preventing the emissions equivalent of 3.5 million tons per year of carbon dioxide. That’s like taking 750,000 cars permanently off the road, or planting 60 million new trees every year. It may sound gimmicky, but replacing just 12% of fossil fuel gas with methane captured from pigs, dairy cows or landfills “can make everything net zero” on an emissions basis, says Leopold.



Helping to underwrite those investments will be the $10 billion ($4 billion cash; $6 billion assumed debt) that Berkshire Hathaway&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2020/07/06/berkshire-hathaway-dominion-energy-natural-gas-pipeline/#204094d3481c">said Monday</a>&nbsp;it will pay for Dominion’s 7,700 miles of long-haul gas pipelines. Dominion had to sell its pipelines to fund investment into renewables, says Hugh Wynne at SSR. And that gave Warren Buffett the opportunity to double down on Berkshire’s pipeline holdings, at a good price. “Buffett is taking advantage of their situation,” says Wynne.



For Buffett, the deal complements Berkshire Hathaway’s existing 16,000-mile pipeline network, thus supporting his bet that natural gas will put the final bullet into coal and be a mainstay of U.S. power generation for decades to come. Berkshire already owns massive wind farms that generate 6,600 megawatts across the West—so it is also knee-deep in renewable energy. And Berkshire’s money will do double environmental duty, as Dominion will use some of the cash to help build its green future. All told, Dominion expects to make some $55 billion of investments by 2035 into low-carbon energy sources—spurred on by Virginia’s aggressive new mandate for 100% carbon-free electricity by 2045.



What a departure this is from the old Dominion Energy. The utility was founded as Virginia Railway &amp; Power Co. in 1909 by Frank Jay Gould, son of robber baron Jay Gould. Its roots are firmly planted in Appalachian coal. Even as late as 1995, when its current CEO Tom Farrell came on board as general counsel, more than half of its power came from burning coal.



Over the past 15 years, Dominion has slashed its carbon dioxide emissions by 52%, first by replacing coal-fired power plants with cheap and plentiful natural gas, and more recently by investing in solar and other renewables. In a decade the carbon intensity of Dominion’s power generation has fallen from more than 1,200 lbs. of CO2 per megawatt-hour to less than 600 pounds. This is in the lowest quartile of American electric utilities, according to consultancy MJ Bradley Group.



A big contributing factor: the changing economics of renewable power. “Solar was not affordable; five years ago we didn’t have a single panel,” Farrell says. Now Dominion, which had profits of $1.4 billion on revenues of $16.5 billion in 2019 (and whose dividend yields 5%), is the fourth-largest solar operator in the country.



Dominion is far from alone in its rush into renewables. Since 2003—when coal provided 51% of America’s electricity—the nation’s power utilities have dramatically cut back their combustion of coal in favor of renewables and cleaner-burning natural gas. Currently, coal fuels just 17% of electricity, and renewables have surpassed it for the first time ever. This trend is just getting started. With its new 2045 mandate for zero-carbon electricity, Virginia joins California, New Mexico, New York, Washington and Hawaii.



After $40 million in R&amp;D write-offs they settled on perfecting the systems being deployed today, whereby each farm’s manure lagoons have been turned into anaerobic digesters that capture its gas and sends it via pipeline to a centralized processing plant. After about three weeks in the digester, what’s left of the manure comes out the other end as sterile, nutrient-rich organic matter used as fertilizer or even livestock bedding. The now less odoriferous water is sprayed on crop fields. The Dominion/Smithfield joint venture will deploy systems at hog operations in North Carolina, Virginia and Utah.



Dominion is also working with startup Vanguard Renewables, which deploys similar systems at dairy farms. Vanguard is backed by the foundation of eBay billionaire Jeff Skoll, among others. It already has 42 diary farms signed up. Vanguard’s president, Kevin Chase, says that even though so-called dairy digesters had been perfected in heavily subsidized Europe over the past decade, owners of natural gas pipelines were initially skeptical at letting in bovine gas. “It was guilty until proven innocent,” says Chase, whose Wellesley, Massachusetts-based company has since landed long-term contracts with Vermont Gas, Middlebury College and Polar Beverages.



Though plenty of municipal sewage systems utilize similar digesters to process human waste, these aren’t as cost-effective because of the plethora of other stuff people put down the drain. “Animal waste is cleaner and more homogenous,” says Chase, because we know that the hogs and cows are eating and what’s coming out. A solution for chicken waste remains an elusive “Holy Grail” because its high ammonia content makes it extremely caustic and tough to process.



Renewable fuels are a priority at the EPA. To ensure that refineries and utilities use the mandated volumes of green fuels, the EPA requires that they either generate or trade for compliance credits (called Renewable Identification Numbers). Thanks to its negative-carbon attributes, livestock gas qualifies for the highest-value credits—meaning that customers could pay Dominion ten times more for hog gas than for the same quantity of gas fracked out of shale formations. That could be enough to generate an additional $100 million a year in revenue.



Not everyone is impressed by the potential for renewable natural gas. “Putting it into a pipeline is better than letting it go loose,” says William McDonough, visionary architect and author of <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://mcdonough.com/cradle-to-cradle/" target="_blank">Cradle To Cradle</a>, about the need for a circular carbon economy. “But it’s still a fugitive carbon. To say it’s the cleanest energy is not correct, if you’re considering climate change.”



McDonough favors using ever-cheaper solar and wind power to electrolyze water into hydrogen. “Green hydrogen” and other climate-friendly efforts are already in the works at Dominion. COO Leopold says they’ve successfully blended 10% hydrogen into their gas-fired power plants; “It’s expensive at the moment, but solar was expensive, too.”



In the years ahead, Dominion could well become Virginia’s biggest private landowner due to all the solar panels it expects to install. And it’s begun replacing diesel-powered school buses with electric ones statewide. Offshore in the Atlantic Ocean, Dominion this summer has installed the first two of what could be hundreds of 800-feet-tall offshore wind turbines generating 2,600 megawatts.  (Reflecting its renewable energy efforts, Dominion has been named to Forbes’ annual <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/maggiemcgrath/2019/11/12/inside-the-2020-just-100-how-we-rank-americas-best-corporate-actors/#6e3a06d55bc4">Just 100 list</a> of socially responsible companies.)



Even after Dominion has transitioned from nearly all-coal to zero-carbon in a generation, it will still be looking for the next best thing. Maybe nuclear fusion? “I don’t doubt it,” says Farrell. “A sustainable company is one that adapts to challenges and weathers the storm.”



&#8211; <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/">Christopher Helman</a>, Forbes Staff, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/energy">Energy</a>

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How Buffett’s $10 Billion Pipeline Deal Is Doing Environmental Double Duty Helping Dominion Energy Turn Acres Of Manure Into Clean Power

It’s not just Amazon stock that has boosted the fortunes of its billionaire backer. Dramatic changes in the share prices of Tesla, Reliance and Microsoft have reshuffled the ranks of the top ten richest in the world since March.



 Between last Friday afternoon after markets closed and 1 p.m. on Tuesday, Jeff Bezos’ net worth fell by $8 billion. That’s a huge sum — the combined value of the NFL’s New England Patriots ($4.1 billion) and the New York Giants ($3.9 billion). But for Bezos, who’s worth about $181 billion, it was just a routine couple of days on the job —and a 4.4% decline in his fortune.



Since March 18, the date that Forbes used to calculate net worths for the 2020 World’s Billionaires list, and days after the President declared a national emergency due to the coronavirus, Amazon’s stock price has soared nearly 69%. As shoppers who sheltered at home during the pandemic turned to Amazon for ordering more purchases, its market cap reached a record $1.5 trillion, and Bezos’ fortune jumped $68 billion. Even with the slight downtick in the last two days, investors aren’t worried – mostly chalking it up to portfolio rebalancing, or momentum stocks retreating a bit after a strong run.



Bezos is not the only billionaire to get much richer during the pandemic. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has gone from No. 31 wealthiest in the world in mid-March to No. 9 as of Tuesday. His net worth has nearly tripled in the last four months, to $69.1 billion from $24.6 billion, largely due to a massive 320% rally in Tesla’s stock. It’s the first time Musk ranks among the world’s top ten richest. “I really couldn’t care less,” Musk told Forbes in early July, commenting on the size of his fortune. “Those numbers rise and fall, but what really matters is making great products that people love.”



Another big gainer of the past several months is Mukesh Ambani, an Indian business magnate and chairman of Reliance Industries, whose telecom firm Reliance Jio has attracted billions of dollars in investments in 2020, including $5.7 billion from Facebook in April and $1.2 billion from U.A.E.’s sovereign wealth fund Mubadala in June. On July 15 Google confirmed it would invest $4.5 billion in Jio. That, in turn, has helped lead to a surge in the share price of Reliance. Ambani is now the seventh richest person in the world, worth $71.4 billion, nearly twice his net worth in mid-March. The last time Ambani was in the top 10 was in 2011, with a $27 billion fortune.



Also new to the top ten since March: Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft. Microsoft stock is up a striking 47% since mid March, landing Ballmer at the world’s No. 6 richest, worth $72.1 billion.



Whiplash 2020: Shakeup Among Top 10



Musk and Ballmer join the ​upper echelon, while Buffett falls to his lowest rank in at least 20 years.



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large is-resized"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/billionaires.png" alt="" class="wp-image-46513" width="686" height="664" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/billionaires.png 592w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/billionaires-300x290.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 686px) 100vw, 686px" /></figure>



Of course, as some climb up the ranks, others must go down – and some go up and down a lot. Bernard Arnault was worth $108 billion in late January. He fell to $76 billion in mid March, as people worried about spending on luxury goods. He is back up to $111.1 billion, and number three in the world.



Despite only a $3.5 billion drop in his net worth since March, Warren Buffett, one of the most successful investors of all time, is down four spots and now the eighth richest person in the world. It’s the lowest Buffett has ranked in at least 20 years. The Waltons, the family behind Walmart, had three members – Jim Walton, Alice Walton and Rob Walton – who rounded out the top ten in mid-March. While their net worths on Tuesday were actually up $3 billion, those increases were not enough for them to hold onto their spots as others including Musk, Ambani and Ballmer surged ahead.



The only certainty with markets like this is that billions can be gained – and lost – and regained in a matter of hours.



&#8211; <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/angelauyeung/">Angel Au-Yeung</a>, Forbes Staff, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/worlds-billionaires">Billionaires</a>

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Why Jeff Bezos Lost $8 Billion In The Last 2 Days – And Why That’s Not A Big Deal

Topline:&nbsp;Following his annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders over the weekend, billionaire investor Warren Buffett told CNBC in an&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/24/warren-buffet-interview-live-updates.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">interview</a>&nbsp;on Monday that the coronavirus is “scary stuff” for businesses and investors, but that the outbreak has “not changed” his long-term optimistic outlook on stocks.



<ul><li>Stocks plunged on Monday, with all three major U.S. benchmark indexes <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/02/24/markets-plunge-dow-drops-900-points-as-global-coronavirus-outbreak-worsens/#353cf5f46658">losing more than 3%</a>, as a rising number of coronavirus cases outside of China stoked fears that the outbreak could turn into a global pandemic.</li><li>Speaking with CNBC on Monday morning, Buffett <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-berkshire-buffett/warren-buffett-calls-coronavirus-outbreak-scary-stuff-but-says-he-wont-be-selling-stocks-idUSKCN20I1AB" target="_blank">called</a> the coronavirus “scary stuff,” saying that the outbreak is now “front and center” the main threat to U.S. companies and the economy.</li><li>He further <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/24/warren-buffett-says-us-economy-is-strong-but-a-little-softer-than-it-was-6-months-ago.html" target="_blank">warned</a> that a “very significant percentage” of Berkshire Hathaway’s businesses—it owns more than 90, from American Express and Coca-Cola to Geico and Dairy Queen—could “very well” be negatively impacted by the coronavirus, though he remains optimistic about their long-term prospects.</li><li>More broadly, Buffett said that the U.S. economy is <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/24/warren-buffett-says-us-economy-is-strong-but-a-little-softer-than-it-was-6-months-ago.html" target="_blank">still “strong,”</a> though it had become “a little softer” than it was six months ago: “Business is down but it’s down from a very good level,” he described. </li><li>Despite the coronavirus’ impact on markets, Buffett, who is famous for his long-term  investing, <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/24/warren-buffett-doesnt-worry-how-current-events-will-affect-the-market.html" target="_blank">said</a> that investors shouldn’t panic by selling stocks based or get caught up in “today’s headlines.” </li><li>The Oracle of Omaha actually sees a positive in the ongoing market sell-off, <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/24/warren-buffet-interview-live-updates.html" target="_blank">telling</a> CNBC that Berkshire Hathaway would “certainly be more inclined” to buy stocks at the lower prices caused by the coronavirus.</li></ul>



 What to watch for: Buffett also <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/24/warren-buffett-says-apple-is-probably-the-best-business-i-know-in-the-world.html" target="_blank">spoke</a> to CNBC about some of his favorite investments right now. He called Apple, which is Berkshire Hathaway’s third-largest holding (with a roughly 5.5% stake) behind insurance and railroad companies, “probably the best business I know in the world.” Buffett added that he especially likes bank stocks, which are a big part of Berkshire Hathaway’s portfolio—with big names like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America among its top holdings. Buffett <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/24/warren-buffet-interview-live-updates.html" target="_blank">called</a> banks “very attractive compared to most other securities I see.”  



Surprising fact:&nbsp;Buffett also recently spoke about the coronavirus to his “science advisor,” billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates: “I talked to him in the last few days about it, and he’s bullish on the long-term outlook for a universal prevention of it,” he&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/24/warren-buffet-interview-live-updates.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">said</a>.



Crucial quote: “We’re buying businesses to own for 20 or 30 years,” Buffett, who Forbes estimates has a <a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/warren-buffett/#3a87d5e14639">net worth</a> of $87.3 billion, <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/24/warren-buffet-interview-live-updates.html" target="_blank">said</a> on CNBC. “We think the 20- and 30-year outlook is not changed by the coronavirus.”



Key background:&nbsp;Stocks&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/02/24/markets-plunge-dow-drops-900-points-as-global-coronavirus-outbreak-worsens/#353cf5f46658">plummeted sharply</a>&nbsp;on Monday, amid news that the coronavirus outbreak has now infected more than 79,000 people globally and killed over 2,600. The number of cases outside of China surged over the weekend, causing concern among global investors as countries like Italy, South Korea and Iran emerge as new coronavirus hot spots. The Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 1,000 points, dropping 3.5% for its worst day since February 2018. The S&amp;P 500 similarly fell 3.5%, its worst drop since October 2018. Monday’s sell-off completely erased both indexes’ gains so far in 2020. The Nasdaq Composite index, on the other hand, declined 4%.&nbsp;



Tangent:&nbsp;Buffett was also asked about U.S. politics during his&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/24/buffett-on-bernie-sanders-us-can-do-better-for-those-left-behind-but-cannot-kill-capitalism.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">interview</a>. The billionaire investor said he would “certainly” vote for Mike Bloomberg. “I don’t think another billionaire supporting him would be the best thing to announce,” Buffet&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/24/buffett-on-bernie-sanders-us-can-do-better-for-those-left-behind-but-cannot-kill-capitalism.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">said</a>, “but sure, I would have no trouble voting for Mike Bloomberg.” While he said he sympathizes with Democratic front-runner Senator Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) message about income inequality, Buffett doesn’t think socialism is the answer,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/24/buffett-on-bernie-sanders-us-can-do-better-for-those-left-behind-but-cannot-kill-capitalism.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">saying instead</a>, “I don’t believe in giving up the capitalist system.”



Further reading: <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahhansen/2020/02/22/buffetts-letter-to-berkshire-shareholders-reveals-5-billion-in-stock-buybacks-and-plans-for-his-berkshire-stake/#140c5c2d39d4">Buffett’s Letter To Berkshire Shareholders Reveals $5 Billion In Stock Buybacks And Plans For His Berkshire Stake</a> 



&#8211;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/">Sergei Klebnikov</a>, Forbes Staff, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/markets">Markets</a>.

Conference On Issues Affecting U.S. Capital Markets Competitiveness

Here’s What Warren Buffett Says About The Coronavirus And His Outlook On Stocks

Investors expecting big changes in tone, or radical shifts in strategy from Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger in Berkshire Hathaway&#8217;s 2018 shareholder letter were once again disappointed. Berkshire didn&#8217;t unveil a dividend, both believe the whole of the conglomerate is worth more than the sum of its component parts, and they didn&#8217;t brag that hunting for acquisitions in today&#8217;s market was easy.



But there were a few important developments of note. For years, investors have studied succession plans at Berkshire for Buffett, 88, and Munger, 95, and this year&#8217;s letter gave further evidence of what they will be. 



In 2018, Berkshire named Ajit Jain head of its sprawling insurance activities, led by GEICO, National Indemnity and its reinsurance operations, and Greg Abel as head of of its non-insurance operations. Those businesses span utilities, railroads, energy, chemicals, aviation, paints and housing and athletic wear, among others.



A year in, Buffett and Munger seem pleased with the performance of both, who are also now vice chairmen. &#8220;Berkshire is now far better managed than when I alone was supervising operations. Ajit and Greg have rare talents, and Berkshire blood flows through their veins,&#8221; the letter said. &#8220;These moves were overdue.&#8221;



In 2018, Berkshire&#8217;s insurance businesses returned to profitability and ended the year with a record $122 billion in float. Its railroad, utilities and energy business saw operating profits rise 30% to $7.8 billion and the bevy of other businesses that Abel was tasked with overseeing generated a further $9.3 billion in operating earnings, up 29%.



&#8220;Buffett threw a bone to those wanting more on succession by formalizing and endorsing the Ajit Jain and Greg Abel organization structure,&#8221; said Drew Wilson, a portfolio manager at Fenimore Asset Management, which has owned Berkshire shares with little turnover since around the time of the 1987 market rout. 



However, this year Buffett and Munger didn&#8217;t mention their investing lieutenants Ted Weschler and Todd Combs by name in the shareholder letter. &#8220;I&#8217;m guessing we&#8217;ll get a lot of questions wanting more detail at the annual meeting,&#8221; added Wilson, who co-manages the $1.1 billion in assets FAM Value Fund.



 Another wrinkle was Buffett&#8217;s decision to downplay Berkshire&#8217;s book value, an accounting metric that has headlined the company&#8217;s annual results for decades. &#8220;Long-time readers of our annual reports will have spotted the different way in which I opened this letter. For nearly three decades, the initial paragraph featured the percentage change in Berkshire’s per-share book value. It’s now time to abandon that practice,&#8221; said Buffett.



According to him, book value has lost relevance because Berkshire&#8217;s gargantuan $173 billion investment portfolio is a fraction of the firm&#8217;s overall assets, which are now weighted to operating businesses, led by insurance. New accounting rules, he argued, undervalue these operating businesses. Most important, Berkshire expects to repurchase a ton of stock, likely at prices well above book value. 



&#8220;The math of such purchases is simple: Each transaction makes per-share intrinsic value go up, while per-share book value goes down. That combination causes the book-value scorecard to become increasingly out of touch with economic reality,&#8221; Buffett said.



An unsurprising point, Buffett reiterated his belief that the easy buys of the post-recession market are gone. Thus Berkshire didn&#8217;t make major acquisitions in 2018, but bought $43 billion in public securities, primarily Apple. There were three finer points of Berkshires earnings and shareholder letter worth dwelling on.



<h4>Seeing The Forest From The Trees</h4>



No one wants to lose $25 billion in the span of 90-days, especially Buffett. But that&#8217;s exactly what Berkshire reported as it marked its books for a quarter in which U.S. stock markets slumped in October, and then plunged through December. Berkshire&#8217;s investment portfolio was marked down by $27 billion and it recorded a $3 billion impairment related to its share of Kraft Heinz&#8217;s recent $15.4 billion write down, where it&#8217;s a large holder.



 That mark-to-market loss more than wiped out $5 billion plus in operating profits, driving a $25 billion quarterly loss. For 2018, Berkshire lost $17 billion on marks to its investment portfolio, though virtually all of those were on paper, thus overall net income was just $4 billion for the year, a 90% drop.



The loss, however, may go a long way in proving an important point in the shareholder letter. Buffett insisted investors look at the totality of Berkshire&#8217;s assets and the advantaged way in the way they&#8217;re housed. Said Buffett: &#8220;Investors who evaluate Berkshire sometimes obsess on the details of our many and diverse businesses – our economic “trees,” so to speak. 



Analysis of that type can be mind-numbing, given that we own a vast array of specimens, ranging from twigs to redwoods. A few of our trees are diseased and unlikely to be around a decade from now. 



Many others, though, are destined to grow in size and beauty… Fortunately, it’s not necessary to evaluate each tree individually to make a rough estimate of Berkshire’s intrinsic business value. That’s because our forest contains five “groves” of major importance, each of which can be appraised, with reasonable accuracy, in its entirety.&#8221;



The mark-to-market loss may prove the point. There are few, if any, entities on the planet that could bear such marks. In fact, Berkshire still saw its overall cash and book value grow for the year. Those stuck looking at trees might obsess over the daily or quarterly marks of Berkshire&#8217;s growing investment portfolio, or have doubts when specific stocks like Apple falter, but the bigger picture is that its portfolio is housed in a structure that can bear the market&#8217;s inherent volatility. It is one of the biggest advantages Buffett&#8217;s enjoyed in beating the market over many decades.



<h4>Stock Buybacks And Retained Earnings</h4>



There are many examples of companies who should be criticized for buying back their stock at overvalued prices thus wasting money, or simply spending cash they don&#8217;t have. The tens of billions of dollars that banks like Lehman, Bear , Goldman, Merrill, Morgan, Citigroup and BofA spent collectively to buy back their shares in 2007 and 2008 as the housing market began cratering is one of the unforgivable sins of the crisis. They didn&#8217;t have the money for buybacks, but used them to delay a reckoning. When each imploded, or had to dilute their stock in government rescues, the folly of Wall Street&#8217;s biggest financiers was astounding.



For companies that do have the money, however, buybacks can still be effective.



Buffett did a good job showing this, using Berkshire&#8217;s holdings in American Express. Berkshire hasn&#8217;t traded Amex in the past eight years, because the company bought tens of billions in stock Berkshire&#8217;s holding has gone from 12.6% of Amex&#8217;s shares outstanding to 17.9%. As a result, Berkshire&#8217;s portion of the $6.9 billion Amex earned was about $1.2 billion, in theory. &#8220;When earnings increase and shares outstanding decrease, owners – over time – usually do well,&#8221; said Buffett.



What was unique in this explanation is Buffett didn&#8217;t dwell on stock prices. Berkshire&#8217;s $1.2 billion theoretical claim on Amex&#8217;s 2018 profits is about equal to the $1.3 billion cost it paid for its shares. 



The price at which buybacks occur does matter, but the most important element in this explanation is whether investors&#8217; holdings are increasing in a sustainably profitable business. In the case of Amex, it is the company&#8217;s fundamentals over time that have likely proven more important to Berkshire&#8217;s gains than the exact price of buybacks. Failed buybacks come at bad prices, but mostly because the business is bad.



<h4>When Berkshire Invests It Isn&#8217;t Just Stocks And Elephant-Sized Deals</h4>



A theme that deserves more study at Berkshire is how it invests cash into its operating businesses. These divisions are becoming more sizable, so it should be no surprise the size of investments are growing. Last year, Berkshire recorded nearly $10 billion in depreciation and amortization on the assets of its operating businesses and invested a record $14.5 billion in plant, equipment and other fixed assets.



As Buffett notes, &#8220;Berkshire’s $8.4 billion depreciation charge understates our true economic cost. In fact, we need to spend more than this sum annually to simply remain competitive in our many operations. Beyond those “maintenance” capital expenditures, we spend large sums in pursuit of growth. Overall, Berkshire invested a record $14.5 billion last year in plant, equipment and other fixed assets, with 89% of that spent in America.&#8221;



This spending may well be among the conglomerate&#8217;s most important and highest return in coming years. As profitable as Berkshire&#8217;s operating businesses were last year, Buffett, Munger, Jain and Abel decided in favor of growth investment, over billions in added profits they could have recorded to impress shareholders. 



What will be the outcome of growth capex at BNSF versus spending cuts by many of its rail peers, or at Berkshire Hathaway Energy for that matter? Don&#8217;t sleep on Jain and Abel as investors, Berkshire&#8217;s owned businesses generated $37.4 billion in operating cash flow last year.



 -Antoine Gara; Forbes Staff

Fortune Magazine Hosts “The Most Powerful Women” Summit In Washington

Three Big Ideas In Warren Buffett’s 2018 Letter To Berkshire Investors

The once and future richest person in the world (once the Bezos divorce finalizes), Bill Gates will happily apply the dispassionate, sharp-elbowed logic that made him one of the most fearsome business minds of the past century—even when the subject, abstractly, is him, as well as the other, suddenly unpopular members of the Three Comma Club. 



“I think it’s fascinating that for the first time in my life people are saying, ‘Okay, should you have billionaires?’ ‘Should you have a wealth tax?’ I think it’s a fine discussion.” 



It’s a discussion that took place yesterday just a block from Trump Tower, home of America’s first-ever billionaire president. “My opinion is that there should be an estate tax and maybe even higher than we have today. Among The Forbes 400, I don’t think we’d get a majority—Warren [Buffett] and I are sort of against interest on that,” says Gates. “So I think there’s plenty of debate about how capital should be taxed, how estates should be taxed.” 



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But as for the kind of disincentivizing economics lamented by the Beatles in “Taxman” and increasingly championed by America’s far left, Gates remains clear: “The idea that there shouldn’t be billionaires—I’m afraid if you really implemented something like that, that the amount you would gain would be much less than the amount you would lose.” 



In looking at how Gates now deploys tens of billions philanthropically—both the money he and his wife Melinda put into their eponymous foundation, the world’s largest, and that given and pledged by Buffett—it’s critical to understand that perspective. 



Just as Gates views, correctly, that a tax system moving from progressive to confiscatory creates less wealth and innovation overall, he and Melinda examine issues systemically. 



“It’s more evocative to say you’re saving one life than to say you’re saving a million,” he says. “It’s a weird thing.” 



That worldview comes through in the 2019 edition of the Gateses’ annual letter, released this morning. Ostensibly, this year’s letter, which lays out their philanthropic observations and priorities, focuses on nine surprises that have inspired the Gateses to take action. In reality, it’s a valentine to the power of philanthropic investment—the idea of giving not to salve problems, but to solve them. 



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">“I think it’s fascinating that for the first time in my life people are saying, ‘Okay, should you have billionaires?’”</blockquote>



The Gateses write about Becoming A Man (BAM), a group counseling program that helps teenage boys stay in school by channeling their anger. (Bill Gates says he had a “touching experience” sitting in on a group, and even took his turn to vent—about learning that global polio cases were going up.) 



And their “toilet fair” in Beijing, designed to inspire a next-gen toilet that can alleviate sanitation issues. Their fixation on Africa, whose young population promises to transform the global labor force. 



All of these initiatives tell a similar story. They’re about “picking novel ideas” or “off-the-wall theories,” as Gates says, and then proving that the concepts work. “Once you find a solution and want to scale that up, it’s usually government money.” 



That’s a sticking point when dysfunctional Washington can’t enact even the most obvious forward-thinking policies. Take foreign aid, less than 1% of the U.S. budget and an expenditure that, since the Marshall Plan, has consistently generated positive ROI, in terms of creating stability and vital trading markets and stemming deadly diseases. 



While Congress rejected President Trump’s proposed foreign aid cuts, Gates remains worried. “It just can’t be ignored, given the intensity of political debate over domestic issues—and if you have one party saying, ‘Hey, helping foreign countries, that’s kind of a sucker’s deal, does it even benefit us?’” 



This shortsighted nationalist streak is a global issue. “We’re very worried that if Brexit goes poorly, at least for a time, [the U.K.] might not see [foreign aid] as a priority at all,” he says. “If the French domestic stuff gets too painful, will they stay generous?” 



In education, Gates has faced similar headwinds. “You get into political policy things in terms of what you’re trying to achieve. It’s tricky.” The most obvious example here: his previous battle for the Common Core education standards, which critics like Diane Ravitch undermined by terming such efforts a “billionaire boys club.”



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“The attack that ‘Why should you even have a say in setting the agenda?’—that has a certain resonance to it,” admits Gates. 



So why should billionaires get to choose what problems we’re solving? 



“Philanthropy is there because the government is not very innovative, doesn’t try risky things and particularly people with a private-sector background—in terms of measurement, picking great teams of people to try out new approaches,” says Gates. “Philanthropy does that.”



Philanthropy, as practiced by the Gateses, also takes risks in the existential terrain political leaders would rather bury their heads in. Bill Gates still worries about nuclear proliferation, an area his partner-in-crime Buffett has championed. He’s been the global leader on the risks around pandemics and also, to a lesser degree, climate change, where his $1 billion Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund makes big bets. 



Artificial intelligence looms on the horizon as the newest threat brought on by innovation. “In the long run,” says Gates, “AI is a tough problem.”



Notably, Gates does not feel that way about social media. Last century’s boy wonder, who faced scrutiny for what the federal government saw as Microsoft’s monopolistic tactics, clearly has empathy for this century’s boy wonder, Mark Zuckerberg, now a lightning rod for Facebook’s role in the erosion of democracy, as most recently outlined by Facebook investor Roger McNamee. 



“I think what Roger [McNamee] has said is completely unfair and kind of outrageous,” says Gates. “They’re blaming Mark for everything. I mean, Trump was not elected because of Facebook. They say ‘filter bubble.’ All these polarization things. … Well, be clear. I get to read whatever I want to read, I get to listen to right-wing radio, I get to listen to Fox News. You kill Facebook and I can still live in my filter bubble. But filter bubble is not just my Facebook feed, so acting like, ‘Hey Mark, wake up someday and solve the filter bubble problem.’ No, Roger McNamee has no practical solution to the filter bubble thing.” 



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">“They’re blaming Mark for everything. I mean, Trump was not elected because of Facebook.”</blockquote>



(“It’s hard when you’re in this vortex,” adds Gates. “I was in such a vortex once upon a time. A little bit different because mine was more of a court-related thing than the broad view of whether the software was good or not.”) 



Ultimately, Gates, whose net worth, even after large donations to the foundation, approaches $100 billion, views philanthropy as a vital force for good. And he thinks that potential critics—even a loony potential British prime minister—will come around to that view. 



“When I met with Jeremy Corbyn for the first time, does he view me as the billionaire guy who collected more money than he thinks anybody is supposed to collect?” recalls Gates. 



“Or does he view me as the philanthropist who’s helping improve Africa and hopefully learn about education? Fortunately he was very nice, he viewed me as the second. But I’m sure he had to hesitate: ‘This guy is one of those people that maybe there should be none of’.”



-Randall Lane, Forbes Staff

China International Import Expo (CIIE) – Day One

Bill Gates Gets Why People Are Doubting Billionaires—And He Has A Defense (Even For Mark Zuckerberg)

The gap between the really rich and the merely rich continues to widen, as fortunes soar to new heights. A record 2,208 billionaires made Forbes’ 32 annual ranking of the world’s billionaires. Altogether they are worth a record $9.1 trillion, up 18% from a year ago. The 20 richest people on the planet are worth a staggering $1.2 trillion, a sum roughly equivalent to the annual economic output of Mexico. In aggregate, they may represent less than 1% of total billionaires but their riches amount to 13% of the total fortune of all billionaires worldwide.
<a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/jeff-bezos/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Jeff Bezos</a> is the richest person on the planet and the first centi-billionaire atop our annual ranking. Shares of his e-commerce giant Amazon rose 59%  in 12 months, helping boost his fortune by $39.2 billion. It was the biggest one year gain since Forbes started tracking billionaires in 1987. He easily moved ahead of Microsoft cofounder <a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/bill-gates/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Bill Gates</a>, who ceded the top spot for only the sixth time since 1995.
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France’s <a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/bernard-arnault/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Bernard Arnault</a> had the second best year after Bezos. Record results at his luxury goods empire LVMH and a deal to buy out nearly all of Christian Dior helped boost Arnault’s fortune by $30.5 billion. He is the richest European for the first time since 2012 and number four richest in the world.
Two tech entrepreneurs from mainland China climbed into the top 20 for the first time. <a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/ma-huateng/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Ma Huateng</a> (also known as Pony Ma) is Asia’s wealthiest person, ranked number 17 in the world, thanks in part to his firm Tencent’s WeChat, a ubiquitous social-messaging app with nearly 1 billion active users. Tencent also has stakes in Tesla, Snapchat parent Snap and music-streaming service Spotify. <a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/jack-ma/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Jack Ma</a>, the 20th richest person, is the chief of another e-commerce giant Alibaba, whose shares increased 76% in a year.
Forbes pinned down 259 newcomers who made their fortunes in everything from tech and aerospace to private aviation and wedding dresses. China has the most new faces with 89, while the U.S. is next with 18. That is helping close the gap between the two nations. Altogether the U.S. has more billionaires than any country in the world with 585, while greater China (mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan) has 476.
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On this year&#8217;s list, the billionaires hail from 72 countries and territories, including the first ever from Hungary and <a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/cover-story/2014/02/01/dealing-corruption-simple-just-say-no/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Zimbabwe</a>. One country not represented: Saudi Arabia. Forbes chose to leave off all 10 Saudis given reports of asset seizures after the Saudi Crown Prince detained some 200 people, including some billionaires, some for as long as three months.
While the vast majority of the world’s billionaires added to their fortunes in the past 12 months, 16% had fortunes that slipped. One notable loser was President <a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/donald-trump/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Donald Trump</a>, whose fortune fell $400 million since March 2017 to a current $3.1 billion. He is now ranked 766 in the world, down from 544.
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Go <a href="https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">here</a> for the full list of all the world&#8217;s billionaires.
Methodology
The Forbes World’s Billionaires list is a snapshot of wealth using stock prices and exchange rates from February 9, 2018. Some people will become richer or poorer within weeks—even days—of publication. For example, Jeff Bezos’ net worth climbed more than $12 billion in the two weeks between our measuring date for stock prices and when this issue went to press. We list individuals rather than multigenerational families who share large fortunes, though we include wealth belonging to a billionaire’s spouse and children if that person is the founder of the fortune. In some cases we list siblings or couples together if the ownership breakdown among them isn’t clear, but here an estimated net worth of $1 billion per person is needed to make the cut. We value a variety of assets, including private companies, real estate, art, yachts and more. We don’t pretend to know each billionaire’s private balance sheet (though some provide it). When documentation isn’t supplied or available, we discount fortunes. For daily updates of net worths, go to <a href="http://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires" target="_blank" rel="noopener">forbes.com/real-time-billionaires</a>. &#8211; Written by <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/luisakroll/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-ga-track="contrib block byline">Luisa Kroll</a>, FORBES STAFF

Forbes Billionaires 2018: Meet The Richest People On The Planet

Some of the world&#8217;s richest people &#8211; including Warren Buffett, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos &#8211; lost billions apiece on Monday as stocks took an ugly nosedive.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 1,175 points, or 4.6%, marking the largest one-day drop the blue-chip index has ever seen and wiping out its gains for the year. The Dow, which tracks 30 U.S. companies, is now down 2% so far this year. The S&amp;P 500 and Nasdaq also fell by about 4% each on Monday.
Warren Buffett was hit the hardest by the sell-off: The drop shaved $5.3 billion off his net worth &#8211; a nearly 6% drop in just one day. He is still the third-richest person in the world with a net worth of $84.6 billion, according to <a href="https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/#version:realtime" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Forbes real-time billionaire rankings.</a>
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was next in line, shedding $3.6 billion, or 4.7% of his net worth, as shares of his social media company dropped 5%. He finished the day with $73.1 billion to his name.
Amazon&#8217;s Jeff Bezos, the richest person on the planet, saw his fortune drop $3.2 billion. That erases <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurengensler/2018/02/02/jeff-bezos-adds-3-4-billion-to-fortune-as-amazon-investors-cheer-record-profits/#4c957c231a72" target="_blank" rel="noopener">the $3.2 billion he gained</a> one day last week after his company announced blockbuster quarterly results. He is still worth an astounding $115.7 billion, which puts him $25 billion ahead of the second-richest person on the planet, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates.
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Meanwhile, Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin each lost $2.2 billion as shares of their parent company, Alphabet, fell by 5%. Oracle founder Larry Ellison&#8217;s fortune also dropped by $2.2 billion.
Altogether, the six billionaires that suffered the most from the market rout saw their fortunes shrivel by a whopping $18.8 billion in a single day. Many of the world&#8217;s richest people have their net worth tied up in shares of their publicly-traded companies and are vulnerable to fluctuations in the market.
To be sure, these billionaires have benefited hugely from a relentless bull market that is coming up on its nine-year anniversary. The S&amp;P 500 gained 19% in 2017, driven in part by record corporate profits and an improving economy. Jeff Bezos, for instance, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/katevinton/2017/10/27/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-is-the-richest-person-in-the-world-again/#ca192ca19480" target="_blank" rel="noopener">has become $28 billion richer</a> in just the last four months as shares of Amazon rose 30%. &#8211; Written by <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurengensler/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-ga-track="contrib block byline">Lauren Gensler</a>, FORBES STAFF

Buffett, Zuckerberg & Bezos Lose Billions As Dow Drops Over 1,000 Points

Warren Buffett may not know the way to Midland Road, Worcester, yet be sure he has looked very closely at the cost of making the ocean of spicy, black liquid that emerges from it to add millions to his balance sheet every year.
You can’t help thinking of Buffett’s long-term investment homilies as you walk through the Victorian red-brick portals of the Lea &amp; Perrins building. It is as steeped in history as it is in the pungent odour of churning vinegar and spices.
For this is a factory that is 120 years old; it grew from a family business that took root in this city 180 years ago. It survived two world wars and heaven knows how many recessions. Even a fire, in 1964, merely disrupted production for a few days. It also survived corporate takeovers; it sold out to HP Sauce in 1930 and became part of the Heinz stable, in 2005, through an $885 million acquisition from the French food outfit Groupe Danone. It is now owned by the world’s fifth largest food company Kraft Heinz, following a merger in 2015 – creating a food giant that made $26.5 billion in sales in 2016, according to company figures.
The Oracle of Omaha, through his holding company Berkshire Hathaway, owns 19.5% of Kraft Heinz – that is 325,634,818 shares, worth around $31 billion, his single largest holding.
Midland Road also makes Amoy Chinese sauce, another Kraft Heinz product in the competitive and crowded sauce market.
For Lea &amp; Perrins, that market is that bit tougher because, despite the fact the sauce is made from a secret recipe, there are plenty of imposters. At least one, made far from Worcestershire, carries the name, but tastes like spiced caramel with bits in it.
“It is not a protected name. We are not like Champagne. We just have to hope people recognize our quality,” says Nigel Dickie, the London-based spokesman for Kraft Heinz, in Worcester.
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Lea &amp; Perrins enjoys a bit of snob value with its royal warrant, granted by Edward VII in 1904, to supply the regal household.
<div id="attachment_34583" style="width: 260px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-34583" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class=" wp-image-34583" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Lea-Perrins-Nigel-Dickie-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="250" height="375" />Nigel Dickie at the factory gates. (Photo by John Bray)</div>
It was a foothold in the market created by two entrepreneur chemists, who saw an opportunity, thanks to a stroke of luck, and made a fortune from it.
The two, John Lea and William Perrins, owned a chemist’s shop in Broad Street – the street where I bought my first beer – in the heart of Worcester. They were trying to make a sauce with onions, garlic, tamarinds, vinegar, anchovies and spices in a barrel; concluded that it tasted foul and cast it into a dark corner of their cellar. Nearly two years later, during a clear out, Lea and Perrins came across the barrel and tasted the contents. They found that maturation, unbeknown to either of them, had woven magic. The sauce was spicy and beautiful.
The two didn’t waste any time. They set up a makeshift operation at the back of the chemist shop and by 1837 it was selling fast; by 1843, it was selling 14,500 bottles a year.
It didn’t let its humble origins, in a humble county, hold it back: its spicy richness splashed across the food of the rich in New York steakhouses; into the cocktails of Manhattan and on the battlefields of Africa.
There is evidence that the handful of defenders of Rorke’s Drift, in KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, splashed the sauce on their food as they steeled for the fight of their lives against 4,000 equally brave Zulu warriors.
“While here we lived like fighting cocks as we managed to get potatoes now and then and occasionally a bottle of Worcestershire Sauce, without which you could not distinguish the ration beef from leather,” wrote one red-coated soldier at Rorke’s Drift before the famous battle in the heat of January 1879.
Nearly 140 years later, around 40 employees in Worcester make the dark sauce that tastes much the same as it did on the eve of battle against the Zulus.
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They turn out a staggering 26 million bottles every year. That’s almost enough to give the entire population of Mozambique one each. A mere eight million are sold in the United Kingdom and the rest are exported to 130 countries.
Of these, 100,000 bottles are sent to South Africa; another 400,000 to the Middle East from where, the manufacturers believe, many of these are re-exported to Africa.
It’s a massive job that belies the low key, yet industrious, operation in Worcester. Everyone in the factory has work clothes on; you expect to see suites of offices, filled with suits, until you remember the head office is in Chicago.
Most of the noise comes from huge plastic barrels full of onions and garlic. They swirl for weeks as part of the nearly two-year maturation process – about 30,000 liters of the stuff is on the go on this day. These days, huge paddles do the stirring; in the old days, there were workers called barrel rockers, whose job it was to turn wooden barrels every few hours.
Workers mix in anchovies, tamarind, molasses, salt and sugar. Then it is pasteurized to make sure the sauce never goes off whatever steamy clime it ends up in.
One of the men in charge of the process is Joe Neary, a racing man from Liverpool, who married a Worcester woman and runs a few livestock on his smallholding near the city. He came to work at Lea &amp; Perrins, 25 years ago, from the Guinness factory in Runcorn and believes the sauce ages like wine.
“The taste improves with age over about seven years. What I do is buy a six pack and every time I take one out I buy a new one to put at the back,” he says.
<div id="attachment_34584" style="width: 510px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-34584" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-34584" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Lea-Perrins-Joe-Neary-e1512031326158-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="500" height="333" />Joe Neary inside the Lea &amp; Perrins factory. (Photo by John Bray)</div>
There is something worse that has longevity too – the unholy odour. Now, I love the smell of malt vinegar, but even I was knocked back at the door. I can shut my eyes and suffer it now. It is a pungent, sickly, sweet stench, that is hard to describe and even harder to get rid of.
“I used to go out at lunchtime to put a bet on the horses. The bookie used to tell me that until late afternoon the punters would come in, sniff the air, and say: ‘I see Joe has been in!’” chuckles Neary.
As for Worcester itself – population around 100,000 – the sweet sound of industry, of which Lea &amp; Perrins is a vestige, has long gone. When Worcester City played its last ever football game at its doomed St George’s Lane ground in April 2013 – before developers covered it with houses – the club put a bottle of Lea &amp; Perrins on the center spot before the game. It was a sad, unconscious nod to industrial decline; the sauce is one of the last manufactured products of the city.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/extreme-execs/2017/09/15/29-year-old-named-chief-financial-officer-kraft-heinz/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: The 29-Year-Old Who Was Named Chief Financial Officer Of Kraft Heinz</a>
I grew up around Worcester; my family has lived in Worcestershire for nearly 400 years. It was where I kicked my first ball, earned my first penny, had my first kiss and wrote my first story. In the 21st century, my city looks down-at-heel.
Journalist Mike Grundy, Worcester-born-and-bred, has chronicled the county for 60 years and believes the hi-tech industries that have come in place of heavy industry have not yet caught up when it comes to employment.
Grundy also believes the city missed a trick in the destructive years between the 1930s and 1960s when town planners pulled down scores of picturesque black-and-white Tudor houses around the cathedral. They had become slums, but foresight could have saved them.
“We could have been a real medieval tourist town like York,” laments Grundy.
“Maybe we need a Donald Trump character to make us great again,” he chuckles.
Trump probably doesn’t know the way to Worcester either, but at least Buffett is keeping his millions in Lea &amp; Perrins alive and, like the sauce itself, he is in it for the long run.

The Bottling Outpost Of The Buffett Billions

The old man would have been proud. You could find your way to the party of the year, blindfolded, by following the skirl of the pipes and whiff of fine whiskey.
The lowly Scottish roots of Bertie Charles Forbes – the son of a humble tailor of New Deer, Aberdeenshire – were bound up with the celebration of 100 years of the glossy world famous billionaire’s magazine that he founded. Pipers in tartan kilts blasted out the sound of the Highlands at the entrance to the big name party at Chelsea Pier, overlooking the Hudson River, in New York, in tribute to the journalist and entrepreneur. A man who never forgot where he came from and lies buried beneath the damp soil of New Deer thousands of miles across the Atlantic.
Parsimony could have been his middle name. Forbes, who grew up poor as a church mouse, was a struggling immigrant to this city who carved out a life by writing about money and avoiding lending or spending it – a lesson for us all. He bootstrapped his magazine to world fame, with a tiny investment, by keeping a careful eye on the pennies.
“My grandfather once asked me ‘how do you make copper wire?’ Simply get two Scotsmen to fight over a penny!” says grandson Steve Forbes, editor-in-chief of the magazine, in his element on stage.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/cover-story/2017/11/03/lessons-ideas-100-greatest-living-minds/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: Lessons And Ideas By The 100 Greatest Living Business Minds</a>
BC Forbes, who worked as a journalist in South Africa on his way to fame and fortune, died in 1954 in New York, the city where he worked his way up from walking the streets, jobless, to the top tables. He was there, in spirit, in the shape of one of his favorite tailored tweed suits worn by grandson Kip Forbes. It was made in the 1940s, yet looked like it was cut yesterday.
“I managed to rescue it from the mothballs and felt it was important to wear it tonight,” Kip told me.
Was his grandfather really that parsimonious?
“I think he was very shrewd. My grandfather used to say: I don’t give advice, I sell it!’” says Kip with a broad smile.
Kip’s favourite story was he the time his grandfather questioned, angrily, his gentle grandmother, Adelaide, over her frivolous spending.
“But I like spending money,” she replied sweetly and slowly to the old man’s exasperation.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/homepage/2017/09/22/cheer-better-times-ahead-world-economy-steve-forbes/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Cheer up, better times ahead for world economy &#8211; Steve Forbes</a>
In later years, Adelaide was described by her son, Malcom, who took over the editorship of Forbes from his father, as an early Keynesian who believed that prosperity came through increased spending. If his father hadn’t been dead already, the thought of her spending would have killed him – in fact, Malcom said, it could have been enough to resurrect him.
Wally Forbes, now in his 90s, the youngest and surviving son of BC Forbes, attended the 100th birthday dressed in a kilt. He recalled, as a young man, he took some friends for lunch at the famous New York Athletic Club where his father was a member.
Soon afterwards came a terse, angry note from his father asking: “Who, for example, ordered the $5 lobster, I would personally never consider indulging in such extravagance.”
<div id="attachment_34301" style="width: 511px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-34301" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class=" wp-image-34301" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Patrice-Motsepe-Forbes@100-e1510041659749.jpg" alt="" width="501" height="341" />Patrice Motsepe (left) and Jacqueline Novogratz (right) are joined onstage by other influential business people and philanthropists. (Photo by Getty Images)</div>
Many of the billion-dollar names who came to Chelsea Pier, to pay homage to their chronicler Forbes, are not bothered in the slightest by extravagance. Wherever you looked there were people who know how to make money, in weird and wonderful ways, and spend it.
“Look, there’s the founder of Tinder,” a fellow guest nudged me.
The big names were everywhere: Jerry Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys; Steve Wynn; Muhammad Yunus; Steve Case and Jack Welch. Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs, worth $130 million according to Forbes, placed a huge wet kiss on the back of the head of Steve Forbes as he bounded on stage, as one of the 100 best business brains, to one of the biggest cheers of the night.
At the centre of it all was Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha, who appears to improve with age as much as his investments.
“Forbes is living proof that you should never sell short,” he quipped to more cheers.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/focus/2017/09/20/forbes-magazine-100-years-hits-flops/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: Forbes Magazine: 100 Years Of Hits And Flops</a>
True enough, Forbes is a worldwide concern now, with versions in scores of countries from Mexico to Russia and Azerbaijan. FORBES AFRICA was proud to become the 16th English language version, in 2011, going from strength to strength. It was an honor for us to be there on this historic night.
Speaking of historic there was no messing around when it came to bringing a legend onstage to top the night off. On came Stevie Wonder, almost as seasoned as the magazine, alone with a keyboard and straight into: My Cherie Amour.
<div id="attachment_34302" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-34302" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class=" wp-image-34302" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Warren-Buffett-Forbes@100-e1510041870963.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="419" />Warren Buffett onstage with other influential business people and philanthropists at the Forbes@100 celebration. Photo by Getty Images)</div>
Thirty seven years ago I danced, slowly, in the dark, with a young lady at the town hall to Wonder’s beautiful: Lately. “I’m a man of many wishes… ”
On that night, this then-awkward-and-confused teenager dreamed of exploring the whole wide world. Yet, if you had told me then that I would stand a few yards from the great man, in New York, I would have accused you of drinking too much of the rough cider that used to flow over the town hall bar like water. A lifetime later, I have explored the world, I was in New York, with the garnered skill to write about it; unforgettable and priceless in a room where wealth was everywhere.
The last words of the night went to Steve Forbes, who was fast becoming the wit of Chelsea Pier. He pointed out that Forbes had been launched in the same year as the Russian Revolution in 1917.
“My grandfather would have been very proud that his magazine outlived communism,” says Forbes to applause.
“We look forward to celebrating our next century and, if medical technology advances far enough, many of you will be there to celebrate it with us.”
As the laughter died down Forbes could not resist another light-hearted dig at his grandfather’s parsimonious Scottish roots as he lifted a fine glass of 18-year-old single malt Scotch – courtesy of one of the sponsors of the night – to his lips. The toast was Forbes, 100 years&#8230;
“My grandfather would have appreciated us toasting this anniversary with Scotch whiskey… especially as it is free!”
A final reminder that the Forbes founder’s innate care with money fostered a magazine that has survived the outrageous fortune of turbulent history with all its wars, revolutions and depressions. Cheers to the millions who read Forbes from Africa to Azerbaijan – may it enrich your lives.

The Night Of The Century

Lessons And Ideas By The 100 Greatest Living Business Minds

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

For the 30 years FORBES has been tracking global wealth, only five people have ranked on our annual compendium of wealth as the richest person on the planet. In between those annual lists, at least two people have briefly become the world&#8217;s richest, the most recent of whom was Jeff Bezos, who overtook Bill Gates as No. 1 on July 27 as Amazon stock surged.
Gates has held the title for 18 of the past 23 years. So who were the other richest people in the world in the three decades FORBES has been tracking wealth?
<a href="https://www.forbesafrica.com/billionaires/2017/07/28/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-reign-worlds-richest-lasted-just-hours/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Reign As World’s Richest Lasted Just A Few Hours</a>
Amazon founder and CEO Bezos<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/katevinton/2017/07/27/jeff-bezos-overtakes-bill-gates-to-become-worlds-richest-man/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"> overtook Bill Gates</a> to become the richest person in the world on Thursday morning July 27, with a fortune topping $90 billion for the first time ever.When markets opened Thursday, Bezos had a net worth of $90.6 billion, putting him $500 million ahead of Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates.
Gates was previously surpassed on <a href="https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/#version:realtime" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Forbes’ real-time rankings</a> for just two days nearly a year ago by Spanish clothing retail tycoon <a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/amancio-ortega/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Amancio Ortega</a>. Forbes started tracking billionaires around the globe in 1987.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/richlist/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">African Billionaires</a>
Bezos became the seventh person to hold the title of the world’s richest person and the third American to top the global ranks besides Gates and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett.
The founder of Spanish clothing retailer Inditex (known in the U.S. for its Zara stores), topped Gates as the richest on Forbes&#8217; real-time rankings for a few hours in Oct. 2015 and for two days in Sept. 2016 but just as quickly fell out of the top rank. Ortega, the world&#8217;s wealthiest retailer, typically earns more than $400 million in dividends a year.
When shares of Ortega’s business Inditex ticked up 2.5% in 2016, his fortune <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2016/09/08/amancio-ortega-richest-bill-gates-world-spain-inditex-microsoft-zara/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">was boosted by $1.7 billion</a>, then fell 2.8% two days later.
The son of a railway worker from La Coruña, Spain, Ortega is as reclusive as he is rich. He started his career as a store clerk in his hometown before opening his own business. Beginning with less than $100, he and his then-wife Rosalia Mera began making lingerie, pajamas and nightgowns in their living room.
In 2010, a billionaire from a country other than the U.S. or Japan topped the list for the first time: telecom tycoon <a href="https://www.forbes.com/2010/03/09/worlds-richest-people-slim-gates-buffett-billionaires-2010-intro.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Carlos Slim Helu</a>. Riding the surging stock price of his telecom firm America Movil, the Mexican tycoon beat out Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to become the world&#8217;s richest. He held onto the top spot for four years.
<a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/warren-buffett/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Warren Buffett</a> rose to the top in 2008. Gates&#8217; fortune had tumbled after Microsoft&#8217;s failed attempt to merge with Yahoo. That was also the year Gates stepped down as Microsoft chairman to focus on the Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation. He reclaimed the top ranking in 2009 with a much smaller fortune of $40 billion.
An American first took the top spot on Forbes annual World&#8217;s Billionaires list in 1995. That was the year Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates climbed to number one with a net worth of $12.5 billion. He was one of just 365 billionaires that year and has held the title of world&#8217;s richest for 18 of the past 23 years.
<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2016/03/05/the-four-people-besides-bill-gates-whove-been-the-worlds-richest-person-in-the-past-30-years/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Gates&#8217; rise</a>, though meteoric, was not instant. He cofounded Microsoft in 1975 but didn’t top our list for another two decades. In 1995, Microsoft stock was rising as tech firm valuations skyrocketed. Gates&#8217; net worth was $12.9 billion, and it continued to grow astronomically over the next four years.
At its height, in 1999 near the peak of the Internet-fueled boom, Gates’ fortune reached $90 billion. Today, he remains a board member of Microsoft, the software firm he founded with Paul Allen.
In 1991, Taikichiro Mori became the world’s richest person with a $15 billion fortune. <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2016/03/05/the-four-people-besides-bill-gates-whove-been-the-worlds-richest-person-in-the-past-30-years/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">An economics professor</a>, he quit the university in 1959 and went into business, constructing office buildings in Tokyo’s Minato ward. He had 65 office buildings with 7.7 million square feet of floor space when Forbes first named his fortune the world’s largest.
The richest person on FORBES&#8217; very first World Billionaires List in 1987 was Japanese billionaire Yoshiaki Tsutsumi, who had a $20 billion net worth at the time. Tsutsumi was one of 140 billionaires around the world on that first ranking of the world&#8217;s 10-figure fortunes, worth a combined $295 billion.
Tsutsumi&#8217;s wealth came from real estate and retail through his Seibu Group at the height of the Japanese real estate bubble. After being beaten out by Mori in 1991, Tsutsumi was back on top two years later with a $9 billion fortune and was also the richest person the next year for the last time.
A decade later, Tsutsumi had a fall from grace: His Seibu Group was delisted in 2004 due to years of reporting errors. He was arrested the next year, fined $42,000 and received a four-year suspended prison sentence. Tsutsumi fell off of the Billionaires List entirely in 2007. &#8211; Written by <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/katevinton/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Kate Vinton</a>, FORBES STAFF

Tag: Warren Buffett

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