Last month, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos added a third to their very exclusive club of two.
Until then, the two richest people in the world were the only ones to crack the $100 billion mark, and then Bernard Arnault came along.
When Forbes released their annual ‘World’s Richest People’ list back in March, Arnault ranked fourth after Warren Buffett. Gates held second place, and Bezos clung to the number one spot.
According to Fortune, when it comes to the Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index, as with Forbes’ list, Bill Gates has never ranked lower than number two.
Until now…
That run ended Tuesday when the Microsoft Corp. co-founder dropped to No. 3 behind France’s Bernard Arnault.
LVMH, Arnault’s luxury-goods maker, advanced to a record in Paris and pushed his net worth to $107.6 billion and ahead of Gates by more than $200 million. Arnault has added $39 billion to his fortune in 2019 alone, the biggest individual gain by far among the 500 people in Bloomberg’s ranking.
French business tycoons have been doing very well this year. Arnault, Kering SA’s Francois Pinault, and cosmetics heir Francoise Bettencourt Meyers have tacked on a combined $57 billion.
Arnault entered the luxury-goods market in 1984 by acquiring a textile group that owned Christian Dior. Four years later, he sold the company’s other businesses and used the proceeds to buy a controlling stake in LVMH. His art collection of modern and contemporary paintings includes pieces by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Damien Hirst, Maurizio Cattelan, Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso.
Here’s the top 10 as they currently stand:
You can check out an interactive graph that maps his wealth and growth since 2018 here.
What’s important to note here is that Bill Gates could be the richest person in the world, but he chooses to give a lot of his money away to various philanthropic causes.
Gates has donated more than $35 billion to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
So while he might only be third in the world, at least he isn’t a complete capitalist monster.
[source:fortune]
