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New York: After a 13 year reign, Microsoft founder Bill Gates is no longer the richest man in the world, being surpassed by famed US investor, Warren Buffett, Forbes magazine said on Wednesday.
Forbes estimates Buffett is worth $62 billion which puts the head of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. on top of the annual ranking of the world's wealthiest people.
In second place is Mexican telecoms tycoon Carlos Slim with an estimated worth of $60 billion, which leaves Gates third place with a mere $58 billion.
Buffett's climb to the zenith is particularly significant, since it comes at a time of great financial turmoil as well as significant donations to charity, Forbes said.
In the last calendar year itself, Buffett’s fortune rose by $10 billion.
In 2006, he pledged to give away 85% of his fortune to the charity foundation run by his friends, Bill and Melinda Gates.
Since 1995, Gates held the top spot, when he dethroned Japanese real estate tycoon, Yoshiaki Tsutsumi, who has since fallen off the billionaire's list.
Slim, a former stock market trader, is known for buying up struggling, cheap firms and turning them into profitable cash cows.
He built his fortune by privatizing former Mexican state telephone monopoly Telmex and now runs America Movil, the biggest mobile phone company in Latin America.
The collective net worth of the world's 1,125 billionaires soared to $4.4 trillion, the magazine said, while the number of billionaires has almost doubled in the past four years, Forbes said.
The world's youngest billionaire is 23-year-old Facebook pioneer Mark Zuckerberg, whose worth is an estimated $1.5 billion.
He is also the youngest self-made billionaire to ever appear in the Forbes billionaire rankings.
The ten richest:
- Warren Buffett (Investments) Dh228bn
- Carlos Slim Helu (Telecoms) Dh220bn
- Bill Gates (Software) Dh213bn
- Lakshmi Mittal (Steel) Dh165bn
- Mukesh Ambani (Petrochemicals) Dh158bn
- Anil Ambani (Telecoms and others) Dh154.5bn
- Ingvar Kamprad (Ikea stores) Dh113bn
- KP Singh (Property) Dh110bn
- Oleg Deripaska (Aluminium) Dh103bn
- Karl Albrecht (Aldi stores) Dh99bn
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