The 300 richest people on the planet are US$524 billion better off than this time last year, with the world’s richest man, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, increasing his fortune by US$15.8 billion to US$78.5 billion.
Research by Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index showed that the world’s 300 richest are now collectively worth US$3.7 trillion — more than one-and-a-half times Britain’s GDP.
Gates, who regained the title in May last year from Mexican telecoms magnate Carlos Slim, made most of his gains from the 40 percent increase in the price of Microsoft shares.
He owns about 4.5 percent of the company he founded in 1975 and is still the largest individual shareholder.
He also benefited from rallies in other stocks in his portfolio, including Canadian National Railway company (up 34 percent) and hand sanitizer company Ecolab (up 45 percent).
The US’ S&P 500 index last year made its biggest gains since 1997.
Gates holds stakes in about 35 public-listed companies and many private firms, including Four Season Hotels, via investment company Cascade Investments.
Less than a quarter of his wealth is held in Microsoft shares. He has donated US$28 billion to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is trying to eradicate polio, malaria and measles.
The second-biggest gainer last year was Sheldon Adelson, the founder of Las Vegas Sands, the world’s largest casino company.
His fortune grew by US$14.4 billion following a 71 percent rise in the company’s share price.
Despite its name, most of the company’s growth came from the tiny Chinese city of Macau, where casinos collected US$45 billion in gambling revenues last year — about seven times as much as Las Vegas.
Only 70 of the 300 on the list made a loss last year.
The biggest was Eike Batista, who has plummeted from being ranked the world’s eighth richest man in March last year to having a “negative net worth,” according to Bloomberg.
Eike, a Brazilian who had made US$30 billion from oil and gas exploration, lost it all when his company, Oleo e Gas Participacoes, filed for bankruptcy protection in October last year.
More than 100 billionaires were created last year, including the youngest female billionaire, Lynsi Torres, the 31-year-old owner and president of US burger chain In-N-Out.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
VERTICAL INTEGRATION: The US fabless company’s acquisition of the data center manufacturer would not affect market competition, the Fair Trade Commission said The Fair Trade Commission has approved Advanced Micro Devices Inc’s (AMD) bid to fully acquire ZT International Group Inc for US$4.9 billion, saying it would not hamper market competition. As AMD is a fabless company that designs central processing units (CPUs) used in consumer electronics and servers, while ZT is a data center manufacturer, the vertical integration would not affect market competition, the commission said in a statement yesterday. ZT counts hyperscalers such as Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com Inc and Google among its major clients and plays a minor role in deciding the specifications of data centers, given the strong bargaining power of
TARIFF SURGE: The strong performance could be attributed to the growing artificial intelligence device market and mass orders ahead of potential US tariffs, analysts said The combined revenue of companies listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange and the Taipei Exchange for the whole of last year totaled NT$44.66 trillion (US$1.35 trillion), up 12.8 percent year-on-year and hit a record high, data compiled by investment consulting firm CMoney showed on Saturday. The result came after listed firms reported a 23.92 percent annual increase in combined revenue for last month at NT$4.1 trillion, the second-highest for the month of December on record, and posted a 15.63 percent rise in combined revenue for the December quarter at NT$12.25 billion, the highest quarterly figure ever, the data showed. Analysts attributed the
RSS