Facebook CEO Racks Up Rich Title At Age 23 | Youngest self-made billionaire makes it on Forbes mega-rich list
Billionaires are getting younger. Forbes magazine released its list of the world’s mega-rich last week and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, 23, became the youngest ever self-made billionaire.
Zuckerberg, born during the Ronald Reagan presidency, is worth $1.5 billion four years after launching the social-networking site and the third-youngest to crack the billionaire list since Forbes began tracking ages a decade ago.
The other two inherited their money. Facebook did not respond to requests for comment.
The Forbes list often reflects the times. Bill Gates was once himself like Zuckerberg and dropped out of Harvard to launch a technology upstart. Gates is now 52 and slipped from first place in the rankings after being the richest person in the world for 13 straight years.
Gates is worth $58 billion, $2 billion more than last year, but he is now third on the list. He was dislodged by Warren Buffett ($62 billion) and Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim Helu ($60 billion).
Buffett is 77 and Helu is 68, but there are now 50 billionaires younger than 40, and 34 of them are self-made. The average age of all billionaires has dropped to 61 from 64 in 2004, partly because of the growth of young, self-made Russian and Chinese billionaires. Mainland China’s richest person is 26-year-old real estate heiress Yang Huiyan (No. 125), worth $7.4 billion.
Forbes says that billionaires sometimes slip beneath its radar, but it now counts 1,125 worldwide, worth $4.4 trillion. Two-thirds of the 1,125 are self-made.
Of the 1,125 billionaires, 469 (42 percent) are from the United States. But the average U.S. billionaire is worth $3.4 billion versus $4.3 billion for the average foreign billionaire.
There have been two billionaires who made the Forbes list at a younger age than Zuckerberg.
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