Net Worths Of America’s Top 30 Business Tycoons

Trista November 25, 2020

Buffet donates most of his money to charity. Photo Credit: StockBasket

5. Warren Buffet – $78.9 billion

Buffet is an American business tycoon and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. He is an investor and philanthropist and is considered one of the best investors with a $78.9 billion net worth. Since a very young age, he had keen business skills. As a result, in 1956, he laid the Buffet partnership Ltd. foundation and took total control in 1965. Buffet is a business-minded person, and at the age of six, he bought his first stock for about $38. He created Buffett Associates Ltd. in 1956 and made his first million-dollar investment in a company of windmill manufacturing in Dempster.

Berkshire Hathaway bought GATX and Arcata in 1981 and 10% of Wells Fargo by 1990. Furthermore, Berkshire also invested in many companies that generated high revenues. In June 2006, Buffet had announced that he would be giving the entire fortune to charity. In turn, he committed 85% of it to the foundation of Bill Gates. This donation became the most massive act of charitable giving in United States history. He is popularly known as Oracle of Omaha and owns more than sixty companies, including Duracell and the Dairy Queen restaurant chain. Gates and Buffet launched the Giving Pledge in 2010, requesting billionaires to donate half of their money to a charitable trust.

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Musk has many endeavors from cars to spaceships. Photo Credit: Shutterstock

4. Elon Musk – $82.3 billion

Musk, an American entrepreneur, has a net worth of $82.3 billion. He is the chief executive officer of reputed automaker Tesla, a maker of electric vehicles, and CEO of Space Exploration Technologies, a rocket manufacturer. He was born in June 1971 in South Africa. Musk also co-founded a famous electronic firm PayPal. Furthermore, he was the first significant investor and CEO of Tesla. He was born to a Canadian mother and a South African father. Early on, he displayed talent in computers and entrepreneurship at a young age. Not surprisingly, he created a video game at the age of 12 and sold it to a computer magazine.

In 1988, he obtained a Canadian passport, and after that, he left South Africa because of the search for bigger economic opportunities in the United States. Musk attended Queen’s University in Kingston and transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a bachelor’s degree in economics and physics in 1997. Afterward, he enrolled at Stanford University but left after two days because he realized that the internet could change society more than physics. In 1995 he founded a company named Zip2 that provided business directories and maps to online newspapers. Musk founded X.com, an online financial services company that later became PayPal.

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He created Facebook, a social media giant. Photo Credit: Shutterstock

3. Mark Zuckerberg – $102 billion

Zuckerberg, 36, is an American entrepreneur with a net worth of $102 billion. He is a philanthropist and the youngest among the hundred wealthiest people across the globe. His fortune is attributable to the Facebook shares. He owns 400 million current Facebook shares that are broken up into several classes with different voting privileges. There is around 12 million class A shares of Facebook and Class B shares of 365 million. Furthermore, Zuckerberg has 53% voting rights through the Class B supervoting shares over the company. He controls Dustin Moskovitz’s voting rights; thus, Zuckerberg has 58% of its total voting power. The entrepreneur topped $100 billion in August 2020 for the first time.

By the time Zuckerberg got to Harvard, he had a reputation as a programming prodigy and tech wunderkind. Zuckerberg studied computer science and psychology and was a member of Kirkland house and Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity. To work on Facebook full-time, he dropped out of Harvard. Zuckerberg pledged to give 99% of the wealth in his lifetime and owns $200 million in real estate in the US. With his fortune, he paid $43 million to overtake four homes in Palo Alto’s vicinity and paid $145 million for 840 acres on the Hawaiian Island of Kauai.

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The average American can recognize Bill Gates. Photo Credit: Shutterstock

2. Bill Gates – $114 billion

William Henry Gates III is an American business tycoon who held the prominent Chairman, CEO, and Chief Software Architect position at Microsoft. As a result, Gates’s net worth is $114 billion as of 2020. Because of his amassed wealth, he and his wife Melinda own the charitable foundation Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest charitable foundation. It works to eliminate polio, improve global health, and save lives. Gates founded Microsoft in April 1975 with childhood friend Paul Allen. Originally it was based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and relocated to Washington State in 1979. At that time, Microsoft was a budding multinational technology company specializing in computers and software that became an international giant. Microsoft’s most significant success came in 1980 when IBM made a contract to pay $430,000 to Microsoft.

1994 was a marked year for Gates, who became the richest man in America at 38 with $9.35 billion in combined wealth. In turn, the company entered the commercial consumer market with sales reaching $3.7 billion, and 1995 was a new era of success and wealth for Gates. He prepared the staff for an internet tidal wave that made hopes to place Microsoft at the forefront of the worldwide web industry. In March 2020, he announced to step down from the boards of Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway. However, his charitable foundation spent up to $100 million on the COVID pandemic.

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Mr. Amazon tops the list with over $200 billion. Photo Credit: Shutterstock

1. Jeff Bezos – $205 billion

Bezos, a 56-year-old American entrepreneur, founded an e-commerce solution in 1994 in Seattle, Washington. Currently, he has a net worth of $205 billion that, as a result, makes him the world’s wealthiest person. He is the Chairman and CEO of Amazon. Bezos is a Computer Science and Electrical Engineering graduate from Princeton. This billionaire began his career in 1987 with Fitel and worked with many prestigious organizations. In 1988, he worked with Bankers Trust and D.E Shaw & Co. from 1990 to 1994. Bezos founded Amazon in 1994, followed by Blue Origin in 2000. Blue Origin is working on building and launching reusable rockets.

Blue Origin, Boeing, SpaceX, and NASA work jointly on a project working towards sending humans to the Moon by 2024 and colonies on Mars by the 2030s. This billionaire has many ideas that span a wide range of investments, from real estate to the retrieval of rocket ship engines from the ocean floor. Furthermore, Bezos has substantial holdings in traditional assets like real estate. He owns two huge homes in Beverly Hills and an apartment in Manhattan’s Century Tower. He also owns lavish lakeside property in Washington State with a living space of around 3,000 square feet thanks to his pace-setting net worth.

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