Bill Gates : a billionaire dethroned

In the latest Forbes ranking, Bill Gates is no longer the richest man in the world. He has been bumped to second position, while the young president of Facebook is also back.

Forbes magazine has published their 2010 ranking of billionaires. With a fortune estimated at 53 billion dollars (revenue obtained in 2009), the co-founder and president of Microsoft has fallen when compared to 2008 seeing his personal fortune reduced by 40 billion dollars. During the Global Financial Crisis, even this didn’t prevent him from losing first place, although this is no longer the case.

By just a "small" half a billion dollars, Bill Gates has now been passed by the Mexican telecommunications magnate, Carlos Slim. The top three is rounded out by American investor Warren Buffet with 47 billion dollars. These three are now perennial leaders, putting a fair amount of space between them and the rest of the world’s billionaires.

This isn’t the first time that Bill Gates has lost his "throne". After thirteen years as leader, he lost his place as leader in 2008, only to recover it once more in 2009’s rankings.


The return of Facebook’s founder
With 793 members, Forbes 2009 ranking lost a few billionaires off its list due to the financial crisis. In the 2010 ranking, a number of these people are back with a total of 937 members making it into the rankings this year. Besides new comers, among the 150 to once again make it into the select club is the founder and president of social networking site Facebook.

At 25 years old, Mark Zuckerberg takes the prize as being the youngest billionaire on the planet with 4 billion dollars, coming in at 212th place. The young billionaire has once again showed his face after previously having had accusations made against him.

According to an investigation published by Business Insider, Mark Zuckerberg stabbed the University ConnectU network in the back during his time at Harvard; launching Facebook based on others ideas. This affair ended with a friendly settlement in 2008, with accusations that ideas had been stolen along with source code being made, to which we can now also add allegations of computer hacking.