Harare, Zimbabwe (News of the South)-Bloomberg has released the 2016 list of the world’s billionaires with perennial figures such as Microsoft owner Bill Gates and investment mogul Warren Buffet among those in the top five despite the latter suffering enormous losses in the passing year.
#1
Bill Gates
Worth $91billion
Gates co-founded Microsoft, the world’s biggest software maker, and owns a 2.5 percent stake in the Redmond, Washington-based company. The rest of his fortune is managed through closely held Cascade Investment, which controls stakes in dozens of publicly traded companies, including Canadian National Railway, Deere and Ecolab.
The majority of Gates’s fortune is derived from Cascade Investment, a holding company that was created with the proceeds of Microsoft stock sales and dividends. Since the software maker’s initial public offering in 1986, the billionaire has sold about $40 billion in stock and collected more than $10 billion in dividends, including a $3.3 billion payout in 2004, which he donated to his philanthropic foundation.
#2 Warren Buffet
Worth $73.3 billion
The majority of Buffett’s fortune is derived from an 18 percent economic interest in Berkshire Hathaway, a publicly traded investment company that returned 19.7 percent annually between 1966 and 2015, according to a January 2016 Zacks Report. Buffett owns 295,161 Class A shares and 144,906 Class B shares, according to a July 13, 2016 13G filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as 2 million shares of Seritage Growth Properties directly, according to Seritage’s March 28, 2016 proxy statement.
In his 2011 annual shareholder’s letter, he said Berkshire represents “more than 98 percent” of his net worth. Based on the value of his Berkshire shares on Feb. 25, 2012 — the date of the letter — the value of his non-Berkshire investments at the time was calculated to be between $500 million and $900 million.
The billionaire donates about 5 percent of his Berkshire stock to charity each summer, much of it to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and has donated more than $21 billion since 2006. His last gift (to the Gates Foundation and four others) was announced on July 14, 2016 and valued at $2.87 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
#3 Amancio Ortega
Worth $71.6 billion
The majority of Ortega’s fortune is derived from his 59.3 percent stake in Inditex, the world’s largest clothing retailer. He controls his stake through Arteixo, Spain-based holding companies Gartler and Partler 2006, according to Inditex’s 2015 annual report.
Since the company’s 2001 initial public offering, Ortega has received more than 4 billion euros ($4.5 billion) in dividends. Much of that cash has been spent on commercial properties in Europe and the U.S. using two closely held investment vehicles based in A Coruna, Spain: Pontegadea Inversiones and Partler.
Ortega has bought properties valued at $1.4 billion since that date which are valued separately at their purchase prices, because they aren’t included in the 2014 accounts.
He also controls a 21.6 percent stake in A Coruna, Spain-based Grilse, which owns the Casas Novas equestrian center in Spain and other commercial properties. The rest of the company is owned by his wife, Flora, and daughter Marta. Grilse is valued by the same method as Pontegadea and Partler’s real estate operations.
#4 Jeff Bezos
Worth $66.6 billion.
The majority of Bezos’ fortune is derived from his 17 percent holding in Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer.
His stake is disclosed in an November 2016 SEC filing.Since the company’s initial public offering in 1997, Bezos has sold stock valued at more than $4.5 billion. He’s invested at least $500 million in Blue Origin, his closely held space exploration company, according to comments made by the company’s business development director Brett Alexander at a 2014 space conference in Washington.
Bezos has also spent $250 million to buy the Washington Post newspaper in August 2013. Both assets are carried at cost in the analysis. His 3 percent stake in Business Insider is derived from the price Axel Springer paid to acquire 88 percent of the news site in September 2015.
#5 Mark Zuckerberg
Worth $50.6 billion
The majority of Zuckerberg’s fortune is derived from his 14 percent stake in Facebook, according to a December 2016 SEC filing. The world’s largest social network sold shares in an initial public offering on May 17, 2012. It was the biggest technology IPO in history at the time. He owns the shares through a series of trusts, according to the company’s 2016 proxy statement.
Zuckerberg plans to give away 99 percent of his Facebook shares over his lifetime, according to a December 2015 SEC filing.
He started selling shares in August 2016 to fund this philanthropy and in Bloomberg’s calculation he isn’t credited with the value of any sales proceeds that fund charitable work. He’s still credited with those shares he plans to give away because he still owns them.
He also owns several houses in Palo Alto, a townhouse in San Francisco and 700 acres of land in Hawaii. The properties and land are valued at about $175 million, according to local tax assessor records.
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