All of the top 10 World's Richest People are over the age of 52.  They're over the hill.  They're old.    Of course it makes sense that the world's richest people are older, after all it takes awhile to accumulate billions of dollars.  The World's richest man is 70 years old and has 53.5 Billion dollars.  He's Carlos Slim Helu from Mexico.  At # 10 Karl Albrecht of Germany has a net worth of 23.5 Billion but he's 90 years old! (pictured at right, owner of Aldi grocery stores) It's not until #221 on the Forbes list (http://www.forbes.com) that we hit a billionaire in his 20s.  That's why Mark Zuckerberg gets so much attention.  He's young and he's loaded, and he's the World's youngest Billionaire.

Self-made Billionaire Mark Zuckerberg is from Palo Alto, California.  He's got a net worth of 4.0 Billion dollars, a fortune he earned as the owner and creator of Facebook and he's only 25 years old.  Zuckerberg started the social-networking site in his dorm room at Harvard University (he'd eventually drop out from Harvard) in 2004.  Since then the site has boomed.  It increased its user base by 130% in the last year to an astounding 400 Million.  That's greater than the population of the United States (309 Million)!  Oh, and ladies....he's single!

Above: Mark's facebook fan page.

Mark made his fortune thanks to the World Wide Web.  Internet is a major driving force behind globalization and it's part of the reason the world is become more and more interconnected each day.  The  map shows internet users worldwide.  You can see that the U.S. and Eastern Asia are the two places where internet use is the greatest.  Therefore it's no wonder we see Billionaires popping up in both places from the internet world.  The Forbes American 400 list is dominated by rich website owners like Google owners Larry Page (#11), and Sergey Brin (#11) and in general the top of the list contains many computer/technology related business owners. (i.e. Microsoft/Dell)

0 comments