Covid has been good for the rich, with fortunes soaring – a fact confirmed by the latest Bloomberg Billionaires Index which this week confirmed Jeff Bezos as the world’s wealthiest person.

Bezos’ net worth now stands at a staggering $197.9 billion after frantic online shopping through his company Amazon during the Covid 19 lockdowns saw his fortune by $48 billion.

The Amazon mogul’s ever-expanding wealth perhaps comes as no surprise. What is notable, however, is that Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have joined him in the fabled ranks of the uber-uber-(uber)-rich.

The pair are now worth $103.6 billion and $100.2 billion respectively, thanks to a surge in tech stocks.

This makes Page and Brin the newest member of an exclusive club with only eight members in the world: The Centibillionaires.

Already sitting comfortably in the club are: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gate, LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault, and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett.

Notably, it’s a list heavy in American tech investors, with only Arnault and Buffett having made their money in more traditional ways (luxury goods and property). In a blow to equality, it is also notable that the richest people in the world are all men, and all white.

But, how much do we really know about these men and how they amassed such massive fortunes? From dorm-room innovations to nepotism, let’s take a look.

The Google co-founder has seen his worth increase by $21.1 billion over the previous financial year, taking his total bank balance to $103.6 billion. Not bad for someone who described his childhood home as “was usually a mess, with computers, science, and technology magazines and Popular Science magazines all over the place”.

Page’s father held a PHD in computer science, perhaps foreshadowing Larry’s future path. Born in Michigan in 1973, Larry did indeed go on to study computer engineering at the University of Michigan before continuing his studies at Stanford.

The spark of what would become Google was born when Page decided to chart the link structure of the World Wide Web, with a focus on finding out which pages linked to other pages for his dissertation at Stanford.

That would be teaming up with a fellow undergraduate named Sergey Brin on the project (more on him below). Together they developed the idea to eventually found Google in 1998. Twenty three years later, the company (owned by Alphabet Inc, which Brin and Page served as executives of until December 2019) boasts total assets worth $319,616,000,000 and is the world’s preeminent way of finding out information on any topic, any time, any where.

Page married Lucinda Southworth, a research scientist in 2007. As befits a centibillionaire, in 2011, he splashed out on the $45-million 193-foot superyacht Senses. His other purchases include property. Lots of property…

In 2009, Page began purchasing properties and tearing down homes adjacent to his home in Palo Alto to make room for a large ecohouse. Rather than a controversy, the project actually saw Page work with an arborist to save some trees as well as install eco-concious features such as zinc cladding, low volatile organic compound paint, and a pervious pathway winding among the trees on the property.

Page remains an Alphabet board member, employee, and controlling shareholder.

The Google co-founder added a further $20.4 billion to his net worth in the financial year ending April 2021, making him the 8th richest person in the world.

Born in 1973, Brin emigrated to the US from the Soviet Union at the age of six before going on to earn a bachelor’s degree at the University of Maryland where he studied mathematics and computer science.

Meeting Larry Page at Stanford sparked the idea for what would eventually become Google, and build both men’s fortunes. Not bad as golden tickets go.

Brin and Page’s first project was dubbed BackRub. They used it to determine how important a given webpage was to potential customers, then developed an algorithm to rank pages in that way. It’s very much the basis of how Google still works today. They then set about salvaging spare parts from computers to build a machine laboratory in Page’s dorm-room. Which is very much not how Google Campus works today.

Though divorced, Brin and his ex-wife Anne Wojcicki, jointly run The Brin Wojcicki Foundation and have donated to causes including The Michael J. Fox Foundation the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

Brin married biotech analyst Anne Wojcicki in 2007 but divorced in 2015 after Brin had an affair with Google Glass’s marketing director Amanda Rosenberg.

Brin and Page have stepped away from the day-to-day at Google but continue to explore alternative and renewable energy technologies with Google’s philanthropic arm, google.org. It’s aim is “to solve really big problems using technology.”

The man who founded Amazon is the richest man the world has ever seen. Rumours that he runs the company from a secret volcano lair are unsubstantiated.

Unsurprisingly, Bezos, born in New Mexico in 1964, wasn’t born uber rich. In fact, at the time of his birth, his mother was a 17-year-old high school student and his father was just 19. Bezos got his start at Princeton University, graduating in 1986 with a degree in electrical engineering and computer science.

Amazon lore is much established, but as a quick reminder: Bezos had the idea for an online bookstore in 1993 and wrote out its business plan on a cross-country drive from New York City to Seattle. He founded the company in July 1994. A $300,000 loan from his parents help him get the ball rolling.

Bezos took Amazon public in 1997. At the same time, he was taking fire from traditional bookstores, but maintained that the internet would eventually overtake competition from large, traditional book retailers. He was right, and Amazon has a total equity of $93.404 billion and 1,298,000 employees worldwide.

Bezos played a Starfleet official in the movie Star Trek Beyond (2016), before joining the cast at San Diego Comic-Con screening after lobbying Paramount Studios for the role. Bezos has said that his goal in creating Amazon home hub Alexa was to re-create “the Star Trek computer.”

Bezos considered building Amazon’s headquarters on a Native American reservation in order to avoid paying taxes before deciding against it. The biggest controversies have been around Amazon’s detrimental impact on traditional retailers, and its “gruelling” warehouse conditions (including, in some cases a reported 15 minute walk to a bathroom for workers), long hours and low pay.

On February 2, 2021, Bezos announced that he will step down as the CEO of Amazon in Q3 this year, moving over to the role of executive chairman.

The Grimes-dating, star-reaching CEO has pocketed a personal net worth of $175 billion through his work with SpaceX and Tesla.

Born in South Africa in 1971, Musk grew up in Pretoria and developed his interest in computing at the age of 10. He arrived in Canada in 1989 before studying at the Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1997 with degrees in economics and physics.

Musk and his brother Kimbal, plus friend Greg Kouri, founded software company Zip2 in 1995. The software was designed to offer a city guide for the newspaper industry, complete with maps and directions. The group could only stretch to a single computer, and, according to Musk, “The website was up during the day and I was coding it at night, seven days a week, all the time.” The company was sold for $307 million in February 1999.

In 1999, Musk co-founded online bank X.com. In 2000, the company merged with another online bank, Confinity to eliminate unnecessary competition. Founded by Max Levchin and Peter Thiel, the company’s money-transfer service, PayPal, proved more popular. In the following years power struggles ensued, but long story short, Musk left the company with over $100 million when it was sold to eBay in 2002. Musk began the company that would become Space X in 2001, and went on to found Tesla in 2003.

Among Musk’s many eccentricities, he founded The Boring Company in 2016 to construct tunnels, releasing 2,000 novelty flame-throwers as a merchandising and publicity stunt in 2018. In 2019 he released a rap track “RIP Harambe”, on SoundCloud, as well as an EDM track in 2020.

Musk has recently been widely criticised for spreading misinformation about the corona virus, including promoting chloroquine and claiming that death statistics were manipulated

Space, basically. Musk’s mission to Mars looks set to be the rest of his life’s work and he has promised that Space X’s Starship SN15 will fly this month.

One of the older names on the centibillinaires membership list, at 65 Gates has a net worth of $13.5 billion, largely due to co-founding Microsoft in 1975.

Born in Seattle in 1955, Gates co-founded Microsoft with his childhood friend Paul Allen aged just 20 years old, leading the company as CEO before stepping down in 2000.

Gates dropped out of Harvard in 1975 to start a computer software company with Allen. They named the company ‘Micro-Soft’, a combination of ‘microcomputer’ and ‘software’. Thankfully, they dropped the hyphen.

The company received a huge boost when it partnered with IBM in 1980, providing software for the IBM personal computer. The launch of the Windows operating system in 1985. The OS was so successful, it helped make the company’s name, and is now on its 10th iteration with Microsoft reporting revenue of $143 billion for the 2019-20 financial year.

Gates has been known for abrasive and sarcastic comments during team meetings, including

“that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard” and, if a subordinate appeared to be procrastinating remarking “I’ll do it over the weekend.”

In the 1998 Microsoft was involved in antitrust litigation over its business practices. In the United States v. Microsoft case, Gates testimony famously included so many uses of the phrase “I don’t recall” that the presiding judge was seen to be laughing and shaking his head in apparent disbelief.

Gates left his Microsoft board position in March 2020 to focus on philanthropic endeavours including climate change and global health and development.

Notable as the only non-American citizen on the list, Frenchman Bernard Arnault is the chairman and chief executive of luxury goods company LVMH Moët Hennessy – Louis Vuitton SE – a position that has seen him amass a $131.6 billion and no doubt pop more than a few bottles of best quality champagne.

Arnault was born in Roubaix in 1949 to a manufacturer. His mother, meanwhile was a lover of fashion. In 1971, Arnault graduated from France’s leading engineering school, the École Polytechnique, and went to work for his father’s company Ferret-Savinel, becoming president between 1978 and 1984.

Joining his father’s company and advancing to such a senior position no-doubt provided Arnault with a golden ticket early on. But the purchase of luxury goods company Financière Agache in 1984 – which in turn owned Dior – no doubt helped establish his name further.

In 1988 Arnault provided $1.5 billion to form a holding company with drinks manufacturer Guinness. The company held 24% of LVMH’s shares. Arnault went on to invest a further $600 million in response tremors that the Louis Vuitton group was trying to form a blocking minority. This made Arnault’s LVMH’s largest shareholder, then, in 1989 he invested more money to control 43% of the company’s shares, with 35% of its voting rights. The same year he was elected as chairman of the board. Over the following years acquisitions including Céline, Kenzo and Guerlain helped the company amass a total equity of €33.957 billion ($40.65 billion).

Arnault is an avid art collector, with works by Picasso and Andy Warhol, amongst others. In 2014 he unveiled the Louis Vuitton Foundation, dedicated to contemporary art.

In April 2013, Arnault claimed he had been misquoted when the press reported his earlier plans to apply for Belgian citizenship and leave France. The press had interpreted his application for Belgian citizenship as a move to avoid paying taxes in France.

Arnault clarified his stance in a statement: “I repeatedly said that I would stay as a resident in France and that I would continue to pay my taxes…. Today, I decided to remove any ambiguity. I withdraw my request of Belgian nationality. Requesting Belgian nationality was to better protect the foundation that I created with the sole purpose of ensuring the continuity and integrity of the LVMH group if I were to disappear.”

In December of 2019 Arnault briefly surpassed Jeff Bezos to become the richest person in the world, a position he held again for a short period in January 2020. The race continues…

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