Forbes Unveils Its Annual World Billionaires List

Ah, the Billionaires List – full of familiar, if slightly stressed, faces.

While top of the list will come as no surprise, even after he recently took up a 9% stake in Twitter, there are a lot of newcomers too.

None other than Tesla CEO Elon Musk, with an estimated net worth of $219 billion.

In second place was Jeff Bezos, worth $171 billion, who dropped on the list this year after spending four years as the richest person in the world.

Bernard Arnault of LVMH, the company that own luxury brands including Louis Vuitton and Dior, took third spot with a net worth of $158 billion.

He was followed by Bill Gates, at number four with $135 billion, and Warren Buffett in fifth with $125 billion.

And that concludes the list of possibly the worst five-aside team imaginable.

This year's total cites an overwhelming 2,668 billionaires, with 236 of these names being new to the list – because the world could always use more billionaires.

The newbies included Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, social media and e-commerce tycoon Miranda Qu and Rihanna.

Splitting up the list into categories, Forbes reports that 1,891 of the total are self-made billionaires, and 327 are women.

The region of billionaires is split between three main regions: Asia-Pacific has 1,088; the US 735; and Europe 592.

While these numbers seem pretty staggering, they actually fall a little short of last year's collation, which including 2,755 billionaires in total, 493 of those being individuals not previously named on the annual list.

That means there was a decrease of 329, which is the largest fall since the 2009 list was published, just after the 2008 financial crash.

So, why are billionaires falling short this year?

Well, Kerry A. Dolan, the assistant managing editor of Wealth, Forbes, weighing in on the drop.

"The tumultuous stock market contributed to sharp declines in the fortunes of many of the world’s richest.

"Still, more than 1,000 billionaires got wealthier over the past year. The top 20 richest alone are worth a combined $2 trillion, up from $1.8 trillion in 2021," Dolan added.

Still, the publication continued to share details of their rich list, with five consecutive covers of the list that include Igor Bukhman, Ken Griffin, Tope Awotona, Ryan Breslow and Falguni Nayar.