What would you say about 58, 60 or 62 BILLION US dollar?

yeahh pretty good! that is what the richest guys on the planet own! So who are the guys in this top three? Sure Bill Gates is a familiar name but he went from the first to the third place of the list. The richest man in the world now is said to be the American Warren Buffet followed by Mexican Carlos Slim Helú.

These guys make so much money that in case they would drop a 500 euro bill they would already have made it back in the 2 seconds before touching the floor.

So how did they get that much money? Sure they might have been born a little rich or something but what made them so extremely rich? I researched them a little and underneath I put together a small story about the history of all three billionaires! Lot’s of stuff is a bit boring but hey they are the richest of the planet and since you are studying business you might want to know the essential info of these money magnets!

Bill Gates (age 54) US$ 58 Billion

I will start with Bill Gates who made his first contact with a computer at the age of 8 and soon started to program his first program was a tic-tac-toe game against the computer. Later at the age of 17 he designed a program for his school to schedule students in classes and therewith he made sure he was one of the few guys with lots of girls! Yeah those are the good things of being a supernerd!

“it was hard to tear myself away from a machine at which I could so unambiguously demonstrate success”

Bill Gates and his Microsoft team in 1978, All the other left Microsoft. (Perhaps because of this picture......)

Bill gates scored 1590 for SAT test which means a IQ of about 170, damn. He told his teachers in University he would be a millionaire by the age of 30, it turned out he became a billionaire by the age of 31. Before graduation from Harvard Gates started his company micro-soft together with Paul Allen in 1974. To get a deal with IBM they produced MS DOS where Microsoft kept the copyright on and it made them a major player in the market. Being the head of his company he often interrupted presentations with comments rude comments to trigger the speaker to convince him with more details.

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard!”, “Why don’t you just give up your options and join the peace Corps?”

Carlos Slim Helú (age 69) US$ 60 Billion

This guy comes from a five child Lebanon immigrants family in Mexico. His father owned a dry goods store and bought some real estate. There is not much known from his career path except for the fact that he started as a taxi driver, later he has been on the board of directors of many big name companies. He has been vice-president of the Mexican Stock Exchange and President of the Latin-American committee of the New-York stock exchange administration council. Other than that, with Telcel this guy operates over 80% of mexico’s cell phones and is responsible for getting investors for Telmax which today operates 90% of mexican telephone lines. He also used to be the largest sharholder of MCI America’s largest telecommunication company. Furthermore, he owns stocks of over 200 companies. So basically this guy does all sorts of stuff but is a major person in telecommunication!

Warren Buffet (age 78) US$62 billion

Again his history is not that well known and hard to find I guess his childhood was pretty boring than. He studied at the Colombia Business School to study directly under his influential mentor Benjamin Graham.

“The basic ideas of investing are to look at stocks as business, use the market’s fluctuations to your advantage, and seek a margin of safety. That’s what Ben Graham taught us. A hundred years from now they will still be the cornerstones of investing.”

He is the largest shareholder and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway holding company. So this guy is a major investor the richest of them all. He supported Obama’s presidential campaign who already mentioned Buffet to be the economic advisor of the United States of America. Previously he has been the financial advisor for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger during his 2003 election campaign.

What to do with so much money? it simply is too much…

Well they have got one thing in common they all do lots of charity stuff! Most famous is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation the fourth-largest transparently operated private foundation in the world. And guess what, it is also heavily sponsored by Warren Buffet ($10 million) who also plans to leave 83% of his capital to the foundation. Carlos Slim Helú also started some charity organisations supporting Mexican youth to be able to go to school and health programs just like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation who supports similar projects.

Sure they own super cool houses like Bill Gates his mansion where you weir a computer-chip to make the house adapt to your preferences. The house Warren Buffet bought for US$31,500 in 1958 is now valued at US$700.000 and he still lives in it. He also bought a private yet in 1989 from Berkshire shares after he criticised others CEO’s for doing the same. Carlos Slim is considering to overtake the Honda Formula One Team. By doing so he would overtake the owner of Force India, Vijay Mallaya and become the richest sports team owner in the world.

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