Want to join the upper crust of the billionaire ranks? Building a tech company could be your way in: Seven of the world’s 15 richest self-made billionaires earned their wealth through a technology business.
FORBES ranked the 15 richest tech billionaires, altogether worth $426 billion. Their wealth is up 11.6% from last year’s group. Take a look at who made the list.Want to join the upper crust of the billionaire ranks? Building a tech company could be your way in: Seven of the world’s 15 richest self-made billionaires earned their wealth through a technology business.
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.
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. A trained physicist, Tschira has taken up astronomy as a hobby, and has an asteroid between Mars and Jupiter named after him.
No comments :
Post a Comment