Forbes Billionaires: Full List Of The World's 500 Richest People

Bill Gates saw the potential in PCs before anyone else truly grasped the commercial value of the concept. His foresight allowed him to build Microsoft into a $400 billion behemoth, and made him a passionate believer in the system that allowed him to do so. ”Some people, through luck and skill, end up with a lot of assets. If you’re good at kicking a ball, writing software, investing in stocks, it pays extremely well. Capitalism has worked very well,” he said in 2010. To those not as enraptured with capitalism, he offered a curt suggestion: “Anyone who wants to move to North Korea is welcome.”

Capitalism has indeed worked well for Gates, who’s back on top of the Forbes billionaires list for the first time in four years. It’s been good to the other 1,645 people on the wealth ranking. Staggering figures–record figures actually. Combined, the billionaires are worth $6.4 trillion, a greater sum than any other Forbes has previously calculated. Perhaps equally suggestive of the prosperous economic times is the fact that 268 folks are joining the billionaire’s club for the first time, the largest freshman class ever, beating the 226 newcomers in 2008.

To make digesting the ranking and our work easier, what follows is a simple list of the 500 richest. They’re collectively worth $4.4 trillion. Taken together, it is a roll of familiar names (people like Warren Buffett, Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump), as well unfamiliar ones. You’ll spot Jan Koum, the WhatsApp founder, and Alexander Vik, the financier who has enriched himself from every modern financial bubble and left in his wake countless scorned investors. And foreigners like Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, the grandson of the Lego founder, and Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken, one of the richest woman in the world thanks to her family stake’s in the eponymous beer company. All share a commonality: they too have made capitalism work very well.