The Wealthiest Man in the World Is…

Last Wednesday Forbes came out with the updated list of The World’s Billionaires. The surprise is that The Richest Man in the World title did not go to Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, and for the first time it went to a billionaire from a developing country – Mexico. His name is Carlos Slim Helu and he took the first place from Gates leading by about half a billion dollars – $53.5B. 

Carlos Slim’s empire holds businesses in almost every aspect of the Mexicans life. Despite the criticism of creating a monopoly that suffocates entrepreneurship in the developing country where 17% of the population lives in poverty, Carlos Slim added $18.5 billion to his net worth over the past 12 months.

The surge of the financial markets after the first quarter of 2009 made a lot of billionaires regain their wealth as well as added 97 new members to the list, making the total number of billionaires in the world 1011. A big surge of wealthy people is observed in countries outside of Western Europe and the U.S. The full list showed Taiwan tripling its number of billionaires to 18, Turkey more than doubling to 28, and Brazil increasing by 50 percent to 18. Russia also rebounded, almost doubling its number of billionaires to 62. U.S. still keeps its dominance by increasing the American billionaires count by 40 to 403. That is more than six times second-place China with 64 billionaires.