The Forbes 400 Richest People in America
AMERICA’S RICHEST HAVE BEEN TREADING WATER FOR THE PAST 12 MONTHS. THE AVERAGE FORTUNE OF THE LIST MEMBERS IS UP JUST 2.2% TO $7.4 BILLION, AND THE $2.1 BILLION ENTRY POINT IS UNCHANGED. STILL, MOST HAVE COME A LONG WAY. THIS YEAR WE ARE HIGHLIGHTING THEIR PROFESSIONAL BEGINNINGS, FROM STOCKING SHELVES TO STARTING A SKI TUNING BUSINESS IN A BASEMENT AND EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN.
1. JEFF BEZOS $114 BILLION SELF-MADE SCORE: * SOURCE: AMAZON AGE: 55 RESIDENCE: SEATTLE PHILANTHROPY SCORE:
In the costliest divorce ever, Bezos transferred a quarter of his Amazon shares, now worth $36.1 billion, to MacKenzie, his wife of 25 years, earlier this year (though he kept the voting rights of those shares). Bezos also sold $2.8 billion worth of Amazon stock. He still has a nearly 12% stake in the $230 billion (2018 sales) e-commerce behemoth and remains the world’s richest person despite a $46 billion drop in the past year. Bezos, who at age 16 spent a summer as a cook at a McDonald’s, where he learned to crack an egg with one hand, raised the minimum wage for 350,000 U.S.-based Amazon full-time, part-time, temporary and seasonal employees last November to $15 an hour. In 2018 his philanthropic vehicle, Bezos Day One Fund, donated $97.5 million to 24 organizations helping homeless families. In September, Bezos announced that his company would spend $100 million on reforestation projects around the world, weeks after wildfires in the Amazon rainforest made headlines. He also said Amazon would purchase 100,000 electric delivery vehicles.
2. BILL GATES $106 BILLION SELF-MADE SCORE: * SOURCE: MICROSOFT AGE: 64 RESIDENCE: MEDINA, WA PHILANTHROPY SCORE:
Gates responded to the public backlash against billionaires by reiterating his support for a higher estate tax. In the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s annual Goalkeepers Report, published in September, he and Melinda are up-front about being born to “white, well-off parents” who sent them to excellent schools, while noting that hardship is the rule for hundreds of millions of other people. Their foundation, they say, is working to create equal opportunities for people around the globe. He is the subject of a three-part Netflix documentary, Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates, that first aired in September. At 16 Gates spent a year working on a computer programming project for the Bonneville Power Administration, which controlled Washington State’s electric grid. He and his high school classmate Paul Allen (d. 2018) soon had plans to develop software for the growing personal computer market. Gates left Harvard in 1975 to pursue that idea.
3. WARREN BUFFETT $80.8 BILLION SELF-MADE SCORE: * SOURCE: BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY AGE: 89 RESIDENCE: OMAHA PHILANTHROPY SCORE:
The legendary investor continues to run conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway, which owns stakes in everything from Apple to Delta Air Lines to JPMorgan Chase. He started his first business at age 7, selling chewing gum and Coca-Colas door-to-door on hot evenings. Buffett went on to work at his grandfather’s grocery store, Buffett & Son, at age 10, then used his early savings of $114.75 to buy three shares of Cities Service preferred stock. This past April, his Omaha-based firm agreed to spend $10 billion buying shares in Occidental Petroleum if it completed its acquisition of energy firm Anadarko Petroleum Corp.; the two companies merged in August.
4. MARK ZUCKERBERG $69.6 BILLION SELF-MADE SCORE: * SOURCE: FACEBOOK AGE: 35 RESIDENCE: PALO ALTO, CA PHILANTHROPY SCORE:
Facebook was fined $5 billion in July by the Federal Trade Commission for violating consumers’ privacy. While the penalty was the largest in the FTC’s history, it didn’t dent the $55.8 billion (2018 sales) social network, whose stock is up 15% in the past year, or the fortune of its CEO, who is $8.6 billion richer than a year ago. Concerns linger that Facebook has become too powerful and has control of too much data. His cofounder Chris Hughes, who left the company years ago, wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times in May calling for Facebook to be broken up. Zuckerberg started the business at age 19 while attending Harvard; he later dropped out. Earlier this year, he reportedly paid $59 million for a sprawling estate in Lake Tahoe, about a four-hour drive from Facebook headquarters.
5. LARRY ELLISON $65 BILLION SELF-MADE SCORE: ( SOURCE: ORACLE AGE: 75 RESIDENCE: WOODSIDE, CA PHILANTHROPY SCORE:
The Oracle chairman and chief technology officer lost a top lieutenant in September when co-CEO Mark Hurd took an indefinite leave of absence, citing health reasons. Co-CEO Safra Catz, a 20-year company veteran, is now alone atop Oracle, whose revenues grew less than 1% in the past fiscal year as it faced strong competition. In August, Ellison reportedly rescued his daughter Megan’s film and TV production company, Annapurna Pictures (Zero Dark Thirty, Vice), from the brink of bankruptcy. His son David’s Skydance Media is behind the upcoming Top Gun: Maverick. Ellison joined Tesla’s board in December and revealed he owned $950 million in shares. The stock has since dropped by 28%. Ellison, who worked summers as a lifeguard, founded Oracle in 1977; he gave up the CEO job five years ago.
6. LARRY PAGE $55.5 BILLION SELF-MADE SCORE: * SOURCE: GOOGLE AGE: 46 RESIDENCE: PALO ALTO, CA PHILANTHROPY SCORE:
In a year when Alphabet dealt with employee protests, security bugs and fines from the European Union and the FTC, CEO Page was called out for avoiding public appearances. In September 2018 he declined to show up at a Senate intelligence committee hearing; in June he skipped Alphabet’s annual shareholders’ meeting. Outside the company, he’s reportedly funding two “flying car” startups, Kitty Hawk and Opener. Named after his late father, his Carl Victor Page Memorial Foundation, which last reported $2 billion in assets, funded flu vaccines for students.
7. SERGEY BRIN $53.5 BILLION SELF-MADE SCORE: ( SOURCE: GOOGLE AGE: 46 RESIDENCE: LOS ALTOS, CA PHILANTHROPY SCORE:
Amid Google’s difficult year, Alphabet president Brin—like his Google cofounder Page—has stayed out of public view and reportedly even stopped regularly attending the weekly internal “TGIF” staff meetings, where he used to be a mainstay. He focuses much of his time on the Alphabet subsidiaries he’s most interested in, like “moonshot” research lab X, and is reportedly funding a high-tech airship. Most of the giving from his family foundation, which last disclosed nearly $1.4 billion in assets, goes to donor-advised funds, but he has also made donations repaign lated to Parkinson’s research, social justice and immigrant rights.
8. MICHAEL BLOOMBERG $53.4 BILLION SELF-MADE SCORE: * SOURCE: BLOOMBERG LP AGE: 77 RESIDENCE: NEW YORK CITY PHILANTHROPY SCORE:
The former New York City mayor announced in March that he would not run for president in 2020, instead launching Beyond Carbon, “the largest coordinated camto tackle climate change ever undertaken in the United States.” Long before he was developing geopolitical policy, Bloomberg got his start working at an electronics company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during high school. His first foray into finance was unglamorous: After earning his M.B.A. from Harvard, he got a job in “The Cage” at Salomon Brothers, where he counted out securities by hand. “We [toiled] in our underwear ... in an unair-conditioned bank vault, with an occasional sixpack of beer to make it more bearable,” he wrote in his autobiography. He worked his way up to general partner before getting fired in 1981. Bloomberg then cofounded a firm of his own, which turned into financial information and media giant Bloomberg LP.
9. STEVE BALLMER $51.7 BILLION SELF-MADE SCORE: ^ SOURCE: MICROSOFT AGE: 63 RESIDENCE: HUNTS POINT, WA PHILANTHROPY SCORE:
Ballmer Group, which he and his wife, Connie, set up in 2014 to improve economic mobility in the U.S., is teaming with Mike Bloomberg’s and Bill Gates’ foundations to pilot community programs in ten cities that will address income inequality. The groups announced in June that they are investing $12 million in such cities as Newark, New Jersey, and Detroit over 18 months. Ballmer may have gotten an early glimpse of such inequities: His first job was as a golf caddie at Franklin Hills Country Club in Michigan. The Harvard classmate of Gates and former long-term CEO of Microsoft retired in 2014 and bought the NBA’s L.A. Clippers for $2 billion that same year.
10. JIM WALTON $51.6 BILLION SELF-MADE SCORE: @ SOURCE: WALMART AGE: 71 RESIDENCE: BENTONVILLE, AR PHILANTHROPY SCORE:
Despite giving away $1.2 billion in Walmart stock this summer in the largest donation he has ever publicly made, Jim remains the richest member of the Walton family. That’s mainly due to his estimated 44% stake in Arvest Bank, where he was the longtime CEO. The Fayetteville, Arkansas-based bank has over 275 branches in four states with assets of more than $19 billion. The youngest son of Walmart founder Sam Walton, Jim sat on Walmart’s board for over a decade before yielding his seat to his son, Steuart, in 2016.
11. ALICE WALTON
$51.4 BILLION SELF-MADE SCORE: ! SOURCE: WALMART AGE: 70 RESIDENCE: FORT WORTH, TX
PHILANTHROPY SCORE:
12. ROB WALTON
$51.3 BILLION SELF-MADE SCORE: $ SOURCE: WALMART AGE: 75 RESIDENCE: BENTONVILLE, AR
PHILANTHROPY SCORE:
Four weeks after a mass shooting at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, left 22 dead, the nation’s biggest retailer said it would limit ammunition sales, end handgun sales in Alaska and discourage customers from openly carrying guns in its 4,700 U.S. stores, even in states where it’s legal to do so. Rob ran Walmart for nearly 25 years; he stepped down as chairman in 2015 but still sits on the board. Alice briefly worked for Walmart after college as a buyer of children’s clothes.
13. CHARLES KOCH
$41 BILLION SELF-MADE SCORE: % SOURCE: KOCH INDUSTRIES AGE: 83 RESIDENCE: WICHITA, KS
PHILANTHROPY SCORE:
Koch is in his 52nd year of running $110 billion (revenues) industrial conglomerate Koch Industries, which in August invested in Ibotta, a mobile payment and coupon app. Koch was trained as an engineer at MIT but worked as a consultant before returning home to Wichita in 1961 to join the family business. A political heavyweight, last December he helped push for passage of the First Step Act, a criminal justice reform bill. The act allows some federal prisoners to be released early and improves reentry readiness among the imprisoned population.
13. JULIA KOCH & FAMILY
$41 BILLION SELF-MADE SCORE: ! SOURCE: KOCH INDUSTRIES AGE: 57 RESIDENCE: NEW YORK CITY
PHILANTHROPY SCORE:
Koch and her three children inherited a 42% stake in Koch Industries from her husband, David, who died in August at age 79. An Iowa native who graduated from the University of Central Arkansas, she moved to New York in the 1980s and worked as an assistant to designer Adolfo. In 1991, friends set up Julia and David on a blind date, which did not go well. They ran into each other again six months later and dated for five years before marrying in 1996.
15. MACKENZIE BEZOS
$36.1 BILLION SELF-MADE SCORE: # SOURCE: AMAZON AGE: 49 RESIDENCE: SEATTLE
PHILANTHROPY SCORE: N.A.
Weeks before her divorce from Jeff Bezos was finalized, she signed the Giving Pledge, promising to give more than half of her wealth to charity. (Jeff has not signed the pledge.) Bezos, a novelist who says she wrote her first book when she was 6 (a 142-pager called The Book Worm), has worked as a dishwasher, waitress, deli cashier, library monitor and a research assistant to novelist Toni Morrison.
16. PHIL KNIGHT & FAMILY
$35.9 BILLION SELF-MADE SCORE: * SOURCE: NIKE AGE: 81 RESIDENCE: HILLSBORO, OR
PHILANTHROPY SCORE:
Knight is the founder of Nike, which featured former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick in a controversial 2018 ad campaign. “It doesn’t matter how many people hate your brand as long as enough people love it,” he said in February. “You have to take a stand on something.” Knight has said that his decision to feature Kaepernick was shaped by a conversation he had with LeBron James, who worried that his son, who is black, would get shot by a policeman.
17. SHELDON ADELSON
$34.5 BILLION SELF-MADE SCORE: ) SOURCE: CASINOS AGE: 86 RESIDENCE: LAS VEGAS
PHILANTHROPY SCORE:
The casino mogul and Trump supporter is flooding Republican politicians’ coffers ahead of the 2020 election. Adelson and his wife, Miriam, donated over $200,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee in July alone. Adelson, who at age 12 borrowed $200 from his uncle to buy the rights to sell newspapers on a Boston street corner, made a fortune selling computer-trade-show company Comdex to Softbank in 1995. He bought casino operator Las Vegas Sands in 1989 and is still CEO and majority owner. He’s battling non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
18. MICHAEL DELL
$32.3 BILLION SELF-MADE SCORE: * SOURCE: DELL COMPUTERS AGE: 54 RESIDENCE: AUSTIN, TX
PHILANTHROPY SCORE:
Dell again proved his financial engineering wizardry in December, when he took public his namesake hardware and storage giant. The deal raised the hackles of Carl Icahn (No. 30), who said the offering served as an “economic windfall mostly attributable to Michael Dell” and his partners. The company had gone private in 2013 following a nasty battle with, yes, Icahn. Dell founded the business out of his University of Texas dorm room in 1984.
19. JACQUELINE MARS
$29.7 BILLION SELF-MADE SCORE: @ SOURCE: CANDY, PET FOOD AGE: 80 RESIDENCE: THE PLAINS, VA
PHILANTHROPY SCORE:
19. JOHN MARS
$29.7 BILLION SELF-MADE SCORE: @ SOURCE: CANDY, PET FOOD AGE: 84 RESIDENCE: JACKSON, WY
PHILANTHROPY SCORE:
The siblings’ candy company has been innovating. This spring Mars launched its Seeds of Change accelerator, providing $50,000 grants to food-focused startups. In September, it acquired a majority stake in Berlin-based protein and snack company Food spring.
The brother-and-sister duo each own an estimated one third of the $35 billion (est. sales) company, which was founded by their grandfather. While both have retired from the board, Jacqueline’s son is chairman of the board.