Megabuck Bill back on top
September 22nd 2008 23:40
Mark Zuckerberg: from Facebook to cheque book
Warren Buffet knows his place. Having briefly been impertinent enough to move past Bill Gates and become America's richest person, Forbe's magazine's latest list of the lavishly laden has Bill back in front and Warren in the number two spot he knows so well.
Shares in Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway investment group have slipped 15 percent since February, cutting Warren's personal wealth to US$50 billion, a cool $7 billion behind Bill, who has done well in the past year due to buoyant sales of Windows XP following the release of Vista.
A new arrival in the billionaire club was Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook. He is worth US$1.5 billion. He is aged 24. If no expletive appears anywhere in the rest of this sentence, it is due only to extreme self-control.
Stockmarket turmoil made a mess of several fortunes, with no fewer than 33 people suffering the humiliation of falling off the billionaire list.
The biggest victim of stockmarket woes was casino owner Sheldon Adelson, whose fortune fell $13 billion in 12 months. That's $1.5 million an hour. Adelson still has $15 billion left but he slid to 15th place in the American rich-list, which has to hurt.
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