Absolutely copied the 20-page 2015 Tech Billionaires feature on forbes.com to create this single-page version. For images, and for click-monkeys, please go to the original.
1. Bill Gates
Net Worth: $79.2 billion
Bill
Gates is once again the richest person on the planet, a title he's held
for 16 out of the last 21 years. He recaptured the top spot in March
2014 after a four-year run by Mexico's Carlos Slim Helu as No. 1. Early
on, the stellar performance of Microsoft, which he cofounded in 1975,
boosted his net worth but he's been steadily selling his shares in the
software company for at least 15 years. He unloaded one third of his
remaining stake over the 12 months through February 2015. That included a
gift of shares worth $1.5 billion to The Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation in November 2014, which brought his lifetime giving up to
$29.5 billion. Gates, who spends most of his time focused on
philanthropy, laid out some decisive goals for his Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation in his annual January letter. While continuing to work
on improving U.S. education and global health, the foundation is also
committed to getting Africa to feed itself and wants to help spread
mobile banking so that the poor can transform their lives.
2. Larry Ellison
Net Worth: $54.3 billion
Larry Ellison is arguably the first Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur to live
large and fast. He never met his biological father and was raised in a
middle-class Chicago home by his great aunt. After building databases
for the CIA, Ellison founded database software firm Oracle in 1977 and
has overseen its tremendous growth--revenues in fiscal 2014 grew to
$38.3 billion. In September 2014, Ellison shocked the business world by
announcing plans to step down as CEO; he is staying on as Oracle's
chairman and chief technology officer. A sailing fanatic, he's the main
backer of America's Cup winner Oracle Team USA. Ellison has continued to
gobble up properties on the Hawaiian island of Lanai, which he bought
for a reported $300 million in 2012, and is said to own every hotel room
on the island. His daughter Megan Ellison has found success as a film
producer; her Annapurna Pictures produced hits like Zero Dark Thirty and
American Hustle.
3. Jeff Bezos
Net Worth: $34.8 billion
Despite a rough 2014 marked by the failure of Amazon.com's first smartphone and continued pressure from investors, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos started 2015 strong. Amazon.com won
its first ever Golden Globe awards for its original television series
"Transparent," for best TV series and best actor in a comedy. Now Amazon
is gearing up to jump into the movie business. No longer just an online
retailer, the Seattle-based company is responsible for everything from
providing servers to host web content to selling diapers. While
investors continue to question if the company is spreading itself too
thin, Bezos, who still owns 18% of Amazon's shares, will keep on
investing in new businesses that he believes will make customers more
and more dependent on the brand. Bezos studied electrical engineering
and computer programming at Princeton, then worked for hedge fund D.E.
Shaw before founding Amazon in 1994.
4. Mark Zuckerberg
Net Worth: $33.4 billion
Facebook cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has led his social network to new
heights, even as some younger users have grown tired of it. Revenue grew
58% in 2014 to $12.5 billion, supported by a jump in mobile ads. Some
1.4 billion people around the globe are on Facebook, and those users are
watching 3 billion videos a day on the site. Its Instagram unit has
more than 300 million users, while mobile messenging app WhatsApp, which
it purchased for $19 billion in cash and stock in 2014, has 700 million
users and is growing. Zuckerberg is aiming to turn virtual reality
headset maker Oculus VR, for which it paid $2 billion in 2014, into a
next generation computing platform. First, however, Oculus has to come
out with a product. On the personal front, in October 2014 Zuckerberg
plunked down $100 million for 700 acres in Hawaii on Kauai's north
shore, sources told Forbes. Zuckerberg is also philanthropically active:
he and his wife Priscilla Chan committed $25 million to fight Ebola in
October 2014 and $75 million to a new trauma center at San Francisco
General Hospital in February 2015.
5. Larry Page
Net Worth: $29.7 billion
Google
CEO Larry Page runs what is arguably the most influential company of the
digital era. Besides dominating in online search, with a 65% share of
the global market, there are now more than a billion active devices
using its Android operating system, one for every seven people. Page
oversaw a string of acquisitions in 2014, including programmable home
thermostat maker Nest for $3.2 billion and video monitoring outfit
Dropcam for $555 million. In October 2014, he transferred most of his
daily responsibilities to Sundar Pichai so he could focus on longer-term
strategy. A clean energy advocate, Page's network of houses in Palo
Alto use fuel cells, geothermal energy and rainwater capture. In
November 2014, Page's family foundation gave $15 million to aid the
fight against Ebola.
6. Sergey Brin
Net Worth: $29.2 billion
Google cofounder Sergey Brin runs Google X, the secretive division of the
search engine company that focuses on risky projects, such as smart
contact lenses, airborne wind turbines and the ill-fated Google Glass.
In January 2015, Google announced it would stop making the current
version of the augmented reality spectacles, which had become Brin's
signature accessory and were slated to be sold commercially. Brin made
headlines in the fall of 2013 for his affair with a 27-year old Google
executive, which caused him to separate from wife Anne Wojcicki and
reportedly sparked a rift with Page.The son of two academics, Brin
emigrated to the U.S. from Moscow when he was six. He founded Google
with Page in 1998, when they were both computer science Ph.D. students
at Stanford University. Google has 40,000 employees in 40 countries and
still dominates online search, with a 65% share of the global market.
7. Jack Ma
Net Worth: $22.7 billion
Former English teacher Ma captured the world stage like no other Chinese
businessman in September 2014 with the record-breaking $25 billion
initial public offering of his e-commerce powerhouse Alibaba Group on
the New York Stock Exchange. His Ant Financial Services Group, is
pushing beyond its Alipay online payment business into financial
services, including a consumer money market fund and a private bank. Ma
has said he plans to take it public in China. He also has more than a
dozen other investments, from a stake in a soccer team to a film
production studio. An active philanthropist, he sits on the board of the
Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences with fellow billionaires Mark
Zuckerberg and Yuri Milner. Ma has claimed that he got rejected from
Harvard 10 times.
8. Steve Ballmer
Net Worth: $21.5 billion
Steve Ballmer retired as CEO of Microsoft in February 2014 and didn't take
long to move onto his next job, boss of the Los Angeles Clippers. In
August he closed a $2 billion purchase of the team, the highest price
ever paid for an NBA squad. Ballmer's passion for basketball is nothing
new. He began buying season tickets to the Seattle SuperSonics in the
1980s, and Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, owner of the Portland Trail
Blazers, encouraged Ballmer to buy a team of his own. He failed in two
previous bids - one to buy the SuperSonics in 2006 and another to
acquire the Sacramento Kings in 2013 - before purchasing the Clippers.
Detroit native, Ballmer dropped out of Stanford M.B.A. program to join
Harvard classmate Bill Gates 1980 as employee number 30. He officially
became Microsoft's largest single shareholder in April 2014, as Gates
continued to sell shares as he diversifies his fortune.
9. Laurene Powell Jobs
Net Worth: $19.5 billion
Laurene Powell Jobs is making more of a name for herself as a political and
social influencer, more than three years after the death of her husband
Steve Jobs. She is the founder and chair of the Emerson Collective, an
organization that focuses on using entrepreneurship to advance social
reform and help under-resourced students, and College Track, a nonprofit
college completion program. In conjunction with President Obama's "My
Brother's Keeper" program, Emerson Collective and its partners announced
a $50 million commitment in July to collaborate with certain school
districts to design better high school programs. Powell Jobs is among
the top donors to Ready for Hillary, a super PAC that has already raised
millions of dollars in support a Hillary Clinton presidential run. She
also makes regular visits to Capitol Hill to discuss pathways to
citizenship for children of illegal immigrants, an issue she describes
as "a waste for our country not to have the human capital that we
developed." The Laurene Powell Jobs Trust is the largest individual
shareholder in Disney, with a 7.7% slice of the company, a result of
Disney using its shares to buy animation studio Pixar, run by Steve
Jobs, in 2006. The Disney stake is worth more than $13 billion. An angel
investor, Powell Jobs is a backer and board member at startup Ozy
Media. She also sits on Stanford University's Board of Trustees.
10. Michael Dell
Net Worth: $19.2 billion
Michael Dell says his computer company is thriving since he took it private in
October 2013. The business no longer has to disclose its financials, but
Dell claims it is growing faster than its rivals Oracle, IBM, Cisco and
Hewlett-Packard. He founded the eponymous company in his Texas dorm
room with $1,000 in 1984 when he was 19. Four years later, it went
public with a market capitalization of $85 million. By the time Dell
took it private again in 2013, the company was worth $25 billion. He
still holds a 70% stake in the company, but he keeps most of his fortune
in his private investment firm MSD Capital, whose wide array of
investments includes the the Four Seasons in Maui, PVH Corp. (parent to
Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein), and DineEquity (operator of IHOP and
Applebee's). Dell and his wife started the Michael & Susan Dell
Foundation in 1999 and have since given away more than $1 billion,
putting most of their money toward promoting education in the United
States, South Africa and India
11. Azim Premji
Net Worth: $19.1 billion
Tech
tycoon Azim Premji's Wipro, India's third-largest outsourcer, reported a
9% rise in net profits to $348 million in the last quarter, on the back
of new business from clients such as Levi Strauss and Cairn India. But
it still lags rivals like Tata Consultancy Services, flagship of the
Tata Group. Premji has denied rumours that his son Rishad, who heads
strategy and also overseas Wipro's $100 million venture capital fund,
will be appointed on the board and named as vice chairman. Premji's
private investment arm has picked up stakes in e-tailer Myntra-now part
of Flipkart, which is India's Amazon. com, and e-commerce company
Snapdeal. Premji is among Asia's most generous tycoons, having given
away more than $4 billion of his fortune. Wipro was set up 70 years ago
by his father as Western India Vegetable Products.
12. Paul Allen
Net Worth: $17.5 billion
Paul
Allen went to the same private Seattle high school as Bill Gates,
dropped out of Washington State to work at Honeywell in Boston, then
cofounded Microsoft with high school buddy in 1975. He left 8 years
later, after being diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease. He has been living
large ever since, as the owner of 3 megayachts known to land at places
like Cannes and the Sochi Olympics. He plays guitar in a rock band
called the Underthinkers and owns an aircraft company aiming to put
people into space. He also has three professional sports franchises. He
bought the first one, the Portland Trail Blazers, for $70 million in
1988. Local politicians talked him into buying the Seattle Seahawks for
$288 million in 1997. They were just trying to keep the team from
moving, but it turned out to be a great investment. The Seahawks are now
worth $1.33 billion, coming off of two straight Super Bowl appearances.
Plus he has an interest in the Seattle Sounders, the most valuable
Major League Soccer team in America, worth $175 million. A two-time
cancer survivor, Allen has given away over $1.5 billion, including a
half billion to his Allen Institute for Brain Science, which studies the
brain's connections with health and disease
13. Pony Ma Huateng
Net Worth: $16.1 billion
Ma
Huateng, also known as "Pony" Ma, turned Chinese Internet firm Tencent
into a giant on the back of profits generated from online games,
offering them alongside free services like messaging. Tencent's weChat
mobile texting service has attracted nearly 440 million users who are
introduced to Tencent's revenue-generating offerings. In the past two
years, the company has taken stakes in logistics firm China South City
and e-commerce firm JD.com to make more inroads in e-commerce. Ma,
chairman and CEO of Tencent, has made good use of his computer science
degree, obtained from Shenzhen University in 1993.
14. Robin Li
Net Worth: $15.3 billion
Robin Li is
the CEO of Nasdaq-listed Baidu, China's largest online search company.
Through acquisitions, Baidu has bolstered its wireless business, and it
is working full speed on the next generation of search through voice and
image recognition. After getting an undergraduate degree in information
science, Li obtained a master's degree in computer science in the U.S.
in 1994, and worked as a consultant at a subsidiary of Dow Jones. He
later joined search engine InfoSeek in Silicon Valley as a senior
engineer. Li cofounded Baidu in China in 2000. He has become more
involved in politics; in 2013 he became a member of the Chinese People's
Political Consultative Conference.
15. Shiv Nadar
Net Worth: $14.8 billion
Shiv
Nadar, cofounder of the $6.5 billion (revenues) HCL Group added $3.7
billion to his fortune on rising shares of software outfit HCL
Technologies, which reported net profits of $1 billion on revenue of
$5.3 billion in the year ended last June. The company caused a stir in
the IT industry when it rewarded its best performing executives with
such perks as a Mercedes Benz car and foreign vacations. Nadar's newest
venture is in health care: he's set up HCL Avitas to build a chain of
clinics in partnership with John Hopkins Medicine International. He
denied reports that he was mulling selling out of HClL saying his
daughter, Roshni, who's CEO of holding outfit HCLCorp., wants to keep
the business.
16. Lei Jun
Net Worth: $13.2 billion
Known by
many as the Steve Jobs of China, black-jeans-and-t-shirt-wearing Lei Jun
co-founded fast-growing mobile phone maker Xiaomi in 2010 with his
friend and fellow billionaire Lin Bin. Xiaomi has become hugely popular
because its phones offer the high power of rivals at a much lower price.
A serial entrepreneur, he also chairs gaming company Kingsoft. Its
spinoff, Cheetah Mobile, which provides mobile application software,
went public in New York in May 2014. Another company backed by Lei,
Internet services supplier Xunlei, went public on the Nasdaq in June
2014. He also chairs U.S.-traded YY, a Chinese social site he
co-founded. He sits on the board of Wuhan University, where he earned a
BA in computer science in 1991.
17. Hasso Plattner
Net Worth: $9.1 billion
In
1972, Hasso Plattner and four colleagues left IBM to found German
software company SAP (Systems, Applications, Products), which went
public in 1988. He has served as chairman of the supervisory board since
May 2003, when he stepped down as CEO. Now a market leader in the B2B
space (enterprise and mobility applications, analytics, databases, cloud
computing services, etc.), SAP has over 74,000 employees worldwide and
generates annual revenue in excess of $20 billion. Passionate about
promoting scientific and technological research, innovation and
entrepreneurship, Plattner founded the Hasso Plattner Institute for IT
Systems Engineering at the University of Potsdam in 1998. At HPI, as the
institute is known, he serves as a professor of enterprise software
systems. He also has a business incubator and venture capital fund,
Hasso Plattner Ventures, to support young entrepreneurs in the IT
sector, and a foundation that has made contributions to institutions in
South Africa to support medical research on HIV/AIDS and promote
healthcare and health education, as well as projects providing daycare
and sports activities for children. In 2008, Hasso Plattner Ventures
Africa began operating in Cape Town with a $50-million fund. In 2013, he
signed The Giving Pledge, thereby committing to give at least half of
his fortune to philanthropic causes either during his lifetime or in his
will. (Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates formed The Giving
Pledge in 2010, originally seeking to enlist American billionaires.) A
sports enthusiast, Plattner sails competitively on his yacht, Morning
Glory, as well as skis, snowboards and plays tennis. Also an avid
golfer, he owns Fancourt Golf Estate, a luxury golf course and hotel in
South Africa's Western Cape province, a region where he likes to spend
time. In the U.S., Plattner is an investor in San Jose Sports & Entertainment Enterprises, which owns the San Jose Sharks, and other
related properties as well as managing the city-owned SAP Center at San
Jose. In 2013, Plattner bought out two of the partners in SJS&E and
began serving as the Sharks' representative on the National Hockey
League's Board of Governors.
18. Eric Schmidt
Net Worth: $9.1 billion
Google
executive chairman Eric Schmidt has sold off some of his Google holdings
to diversify his assets and gift stock to nonprofit foundations, but he
still owns more than 4.5 million shares of each class of Google stock.
He earned an electrical engineering degree from Princeton and a PhD in
computer science from U.C. Berkeley, then worked in software at Bell
Labs and Xerox PARC. In 1983, before its IPO, he joined Sun Microsystems
where he led the development of Java and rose to chief technology
officer. He headed Novell before serving as CEO of Google from 2001 to
2011. He now serves as Google's global ambassador, traveling to Cuba,
Myanmar and North Korea to promote an open internet and taking a
seven-city tour of Europe after a European court ruled in 2014 that
people have a right to be removed from search results. His Schmidt Ocean
Institute is working to preserve reef habitats and study pollution. He
is also a founding partner of Innovation Endeavors, a venture capital
fund that invests in emerging technologies that target global markets.
19. Hiroshi Mikitani
Net Worth: $8.7 billion
Hiroshi
Mikitani, Chairman and CEO of Japan's biggest e-retailer, Rakuten, is
always on the hunt for a deal. His latest acquisition: Ebates, an online
rebate site in the United States that allows people to earn cash back
when buying goods at stores like Macy's and Home Depot, which he bought
for a cool billion.He heads the Japan Association of New Economy, a
group of technology companies that work with Japan's Prime Minister Abe
to ramp up the country's economic growth. Mikitani is building a $20
million-plus home in Tokyo's trendy Shibuya ward; he's also made the
U.S. his second home.
20. Klaus Tschira
Net Worth: $8.6 billion
In
1972, Klaus Tschira and four colleagues left IBM to found German
software company SAP (Systems, Applications, Products), which went
public in 1988. Tschira retired from the company in 1998, and stepped
down from its supervisory board in 2007. Now a market leader in the B2B
space (enterprise and mobility applications, analytics, databases, cloud
computing services, etc.), SAP has over 74,000 employees worldwide and
generates annual revenue in excess of $20 billion. For many years in its
estimate of Tschira's net worth, Forbes excluded the value SAP shares
held by his charitable foundation, believing them to be irrevocably
owned and controlled by a charity. It turns out that the foundation,
founded in 1995, is a limited liability company with a charitable
purpose, over which Tschira has full control. One of Germany's largest
philanthropic organizations, it has provided over $350 million in
funding and in-kind donations to promote science, mathematics and
computer science in schools and extracurricular settings, and to support
research projects by young scientists and to improve the communication
skills of scientists. "I can create more benefit for society by
directing the money than if I left it to the state through taxation,"
the benefactor told the Wall Street Journal. A trained physicist,
Tschira has taken up astronomy as a hobby, and has an asteroid between
Mars and Jupiter named after him
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