2008 World's Richest Persons

After 13 years of being the World's Richest Person on Earth, Bill Gates was now overtaken by the World's Greatest Investor Warren Buffett.

His company, Berkshire Hathaway, is the world's most expensive stock reaching an all-time high of $150,000 per share.

Despite the costly share prices, a lot of investors still mimic the investing strategy of Warren. They say that they can make at least 25% per annum using Buffett's strategy.


His company now owns several investments including the following industries: Insurance (GEICO, General Re), Jewelry (Borsheim's), Utilities (MidAmerican Energy Holdings), Food (Dairy Queen, See's Candies, Kraft Foods), Beverage (Coca-Cola) and Bank (Wells Fargo).

Moreover, Gate's previous throne was now third. This is because of the fact that share prices of Microsoft, Bill Gate's company, fell 15% between January 31 and February 11 (the day when Forbes locked its stock prices for the tally) when the company announced its bid to takeover Yahoo!

I made a statistical study on this list even compiling an excel sheet. The result of the study were as follows:

• There were 1,125 persons in the world with at least US$1 Billion Networth.
  
  
• Out of all the countries in the world, these billionaires reside in 61 countries with 56 nationalities. Luckily, even our country Philippines was a Third World Country, we were able to include 2 billionaires in the list.
  
  
• The youngest billionaire is Mark Zuckerberg, the owner of the social networking site FACEBOOK at the age of 23 with $1.5 billion networth.
  
  
• The oldest billionaire is John Simplot at the age of 99 with $3.8 billion networth.
  
  
• Most billionaires reside in United States with 460 billionaires. Second is Russia with 82 billionaires. And third is India with 50 billionaires.
  
  
• In terms of networth, United States' billionaires have a total networth of almost $1.6 trillion. This was followed by Russia's with $456 billion and India's with $284 billion.
  
  
• Most billionaires are Americans with the count tallying 469. This was followed by Russians with 87 and German nationals with 59.
  
  
• The richest family in the world is defintely the Walton Family, the owner of the largest retail mall Wal-Mart. When combined, their total networth is $81.8 billion, surpassing Warren Buffett in the top position.
  
  
• Here in our country Philippines, the richest person is no other than the retail tycoon Henry Sy.