There are 1,426 billionaires in the world this year. They are the wealthiest of the wealthy. But only 29 members of this elite list are under 40 years old, with that exciting combination of money and youth.
Those 29 have a total of $119 billion between them. 10 of them come from the technology sector, including four from social networking giant Facebook.
11 come from the United States, the rest from other parts of the world. Five are newcomers to the billionaire ranks.
Read the list of the first ten “under 40” billionaires:
Dustin Moskovitz
Age: 28
Net Worth: $3.8 billion
Country: United States
Mark Zuckerberg’s former roommate and Facebook co-founder, Dustin Moskovitz may no longer be with the Menlo Park, Calif.-based social networking giant, but he still holds a significant financial stake in the company. That stake got a little smaller over the summer as he proceeded to sell 7.5 million Facebook shares. Still, as of February, he still owns more than five per cent of the company’s outstanding stock.
Facebook’s third employee, he dropped out Harvard with Zuckerberg and moved to California to work for the social-networking firm full-time. He left in 2008 to start Asana, a software company that aims to improve how people work with project collaboration tools.
Engaged to former journalist Cari Tuna, Moskovitz and his fiancee founded Good Ventures and plan to publish their grants and conversations with charities with the goal of rewarding results over crafty fundraising techniques.
He is also a signee of Bill Gates’ and Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge. Moskovitz bikes to work, flies commercial, and pitches his own tent at Burning Man.
Mark Zuckerberg
Age: 28
Net Worth: $13.3 billion
Country: United States
Few Chief Executive Officers of any age are under more media scrutiny than 28-year-old Mark Zuckerberg. Since taking Facebook public in May 2012, the hoodie-wearing founder has seen his net worth rise and fall with every fluctuation of the stock price, which fell under $20 in August 2012. The stock has since rebounded more than 30 per cent as of February on confidence that Facebook may end up figuring out how to make money on mobile ads.
Zuckerberg, a signatory of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge, showed his generosity during the holiday season, gifting 18 million Facebook shares to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation in December for education initiatives.
Based on share prices at the time, that gift was worth nearly $500 million and was one of the largest gifts to education in 2012.
He has also expressed his willingness to become more involved in the political sphere, hosting a re-election fundraiser with his wife Priscilla Chan for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie in February. His big early 2013 exploit was the launch of Facebook’s Graph Search, which will allow users to comb their friend network based on shared interests and experiences.
Albert von Thurn und Taxis
Age: 29
Net Worth: $1.5 billion
Country: Germany
Albert von Thurn und Taxis first appeared in Forbes’ billionaire rankings at age eight but officially inherited his fortune in 2001 on his 18th birthday. In June 2008, he received an M.A. in economics and theology from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. His assets include real estate, art and 36,000 hectares of woodland in Germany, one of the largest forest holdings in Europe. His plan to build one of the world’s largest solar energy installations in Bavaria, southern Germany, was put on hold after government subsidies were cancelled.
He lives in the family castle, Schloss Emmeram. The eligible bachelor is also a race car driver and tours with a German auto-racing league.
Scott Duncan
Age: 30
Net Worth: $5.1 billion
Country: United States
Scott Duncan is the youngest of the four children who inherited the massive fortune of late energy-pipeline entrepreneur Dan Duncan, founder of Enterprise Products Partners. Thanks to Enterprise’s impressive rise on the New York Stock Exchange, Scott and his siblings each find themselves $900 million dollars richer than a year ago thanks to the rising value of Enterprise shares and the partnership’s large payout plan. Dan Duncan, formerly the richest man in Houston, died in 2010 at age 77. He grew up poor and formed Enterprise Products with two trucks in 1968, selling door to door. Today Enterprise owns more than 50,000 miles of natural gas, oil, and petrochemical pipelines.
Eduardo Saverin
Age: 30
Net Worth: $2.2 billion
Country: Brazil
Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin renounced his United States citizenship in 2011, news of which broke days before the company’s IPO and drew accusations of tax evasion.
His response: “My decision to expatriate was based solely on my interest in working and living in Singapore, where I have been since 2009.”
Saverin, immortalized in The Social Network as Mark Zuckerberg’s onetime best friend, provided Facebook with early seed money, earning him a one-third stake. This fell to 30 per cent when Zuckerberg’s roommate, Dustin Moskovitz, joined. When the others dropped out of Harvard to relocate to California, Saverin stayed behind.
Facebook later sued him for allegedly interfering with business and insisting on keeping a 30 per cent stake; Saverin countersued. The parties settled, with Saverin apparently receiving a five per cent stake and a co-founder bio on Facebook’s site. He has since sold more than half his stake in Facebook and has started to invest in startups including Qwiki and Jumio, which created the online payment Netswipe.
Huiyan Yang
Age: 31
Net Worth: $5.7 billion
Country: China
Huiyan Yang, the daughter of the co-founder of real estate developer Country Garden Holdings, is once again China’s richest woman with shares of her company up by 46 per cent since September. Yang Huiyan’s father Yeung Kwok Keung transferred his stake to her before the company’s IPO in 2007. Revenue in the first nine months of 2012 was up by 22 per cent to $3.7 billion. Profit rose by 34 per cent to $617 million. The company in January sold $750 million of 10-year bonds to help fund its vibrant portfolio of some 110 projects underway as of mid-2012, many in its home base of Guangdong province. Country Garden is also adding 17 hotels to the 29 it already owns or operates, mostly under the Phoenix brand, and is buying up land in Malaysia. The previous holder of the title of China’s richest woman, Wu Yajun, had her fortune splintered in a divorce last year. Yang has a degree from Ohio State University.
Fahd Hariri
Age: 32
Net Worth: $1.35 billion
Country: Lebanon
Fahd Hariri is the youngest son of slain Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. He graduated from the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture de Paris in 2004. While still a student, he ran an interior design studio on the outskirts of the city and sold furniture to clients in Saudi Arabia. While he reportedly hasn’t set foot in Beirut since his father’s assassination in 2005, he develops residential buildings in there, and credits his father for his love of real estate development.
Marie Besnier Beauvalot
Age: 32
Net Worth: $1.5 billion
Country: France
Marie, 32, along with siblings Emmanuel, 42, and Jean-Michel, 45, inherited French dairy giant Lactalis, producers of popular Président brie among hundreds of other cheese, milk and yogurt brands. Between them, they own 100 per cent of the company their grandfather founded in the 1930s. Lactalis’ once fairly opaque financials were brought to light when the Besnier family, through another holding company, acquired a majority stake in publicly traded Italian milk manufacturer Parmalat in 2011, rescuing it from bankruptcy after the infamous 2003 collapse that landed its founder in jail.
Sean Parker
Age: 33
Net Worth: $2 billion
Country: United States
Sean Parker is turning his big vision and huge Rolodex to fighting cancer–in December he joined “Stand Up To Cancer” to help build an immunology dream team. Parker, 33, is also revamping his much hyped start-up, Airtime, with the hopes that the video chat site will have the impact of his other Web companies–Napster and Facebook. Facebook’s stock comeback helped add $700 million to his fortune since last August. At 19, Parker skipped college to disrupt the recording industry with music swapping site Napster and later advanced viral marketing with his Web address book Plaxo.
He served as Facebook’s first president at age 24, helping streamline the product and organizing the company to ensure his pal Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, maintained control. He’s fixing the same music industry he helped dismantle a decade ago as director and cheerleader for hot–and legal–music platform Spotify.
Ayman Hariri
Age: 34
Net Worth: $1.35 billion
Country: Lebanon
Ayman Hariri is the son of slain Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. He’s involved in running Saudi Oger, one of Saudi Arabia’s biggest construction companies and the source of the Hariri family fortune. Oger was part of a venture that won a $653 million contract in January 2013 to build a local branch of the Louvre museum in Abu Dhabi, due to open in 2015. His other interests include telecommunications; Oger has a major stake in Turk Telekom. It also owns shares in Middle Eastern banks, such as Jordan’s Arab Bank, which hasn’t fared so well. Saudi Oger had to take out a $1 billion loan in February 2013 to refinance debt related to its investment in Arab Bank.
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