Bill Gates' fortune increased from $75bn to $86bn, thus, he tops the Forbes rich list. The next place is for the investor Warren Buffett, who has $75.6bn. It was a bad year for US President Donald Trump, who slipped 220 spots to 544 and has just $3.5bn.
Forbes stated the $1bn fall in Trump's wealth was due to the slow US property market. There were 183 tech billionaires on the Forbes list. The BBC reports this list is dominated by US billionaires. Others in the top 10 included Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder, who moved up to number three with the biggest gain, a $27.6bn rise in his fortune of $72.8bn.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, was number five and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison was number seven. The global population of billionaires increased to 2,043. The number of US billionaires on the Forbes list was 565, China was second with 319 billionaires, and Germany was third with 114.
Billionaire women, Trump
The number of women on the Forbes list rose to 227 from 202, giving them a net worth of $852.8bn as a whole. France's Liliane Bettencourt, the L'Oreal cosmetics heiress, was the world's richest woman with a $39.5bn net worth. Most of the richest women inherited their fortune, but the list also contained 15 new "self-made" women, mostly from Asia, including Vietnam's Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao of budget airline VietJet air.
Forbes attributed the US president's slide to the sluggish Manhattan property market, which is responsible for a huge amount of his wealth. Forty percent of Donald Trump's fortune is tied up in Trump Tower and eight buildings within one mile of it. Forbes also said that his wealth was hit by $66m in political spending on his presidential campaign, as well as $25m to settle litigation he allegedly ripped off students at Trump University.
