Poor old Bill Gates, he has slipped from being richest man in the world, all the way down to the number three spot, so says the latest annual rich list from Forbes magazine. The new number one is Warren Buffett, the Sage of Omaha, who is now worth $62bn.
Mr Buffett has a commonsense attitude to investing. He once famously said, “My favourite timespan for holding an investment is forever.”
Last year he said he was investing in overseas companies because he believed the dollar was set to fall. This week, he said that by “any common sense definition” the US was already in recession.
He is also a great critic of financial derivatives, calling them “weapons of mass financial destruction.”
The world’s second-richest man is the Mexican businessman Carlos Slim.
Number four on the list is British resident Lakshmi Mittal, worth $45bn. Roman Abramovich is in 15th spot.
Interestingly, there are just four Americans in the top 25, but seven Russians. The fourth, fifth, sixth and eighth richest men in the world are all Indian. The top 25 also boasts two men from Hong Kong and two Frenchmen. There are no Brits in the top 25, in fact you have to go all the way down to the 46th spot, before you find the richest Brits, the Duke of Westminster, Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor family, worth £14bn.
The next-richest British citizen is Philip Green, at 107th spot, and worth £8.bn.
The average age of the 25 richest men is 61. The youngest billionaire in the world is Mark Zuckerberg, the man behind Facebook. Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, are 34th and 35th respectively.
Out of the world’s 1,062 billionaires, 18 are 90 or over, 35 are British, and around 450 are from the US.
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