The good people at cost information website HowMuch.net want to make understanding money easy for everyone. They do this by creating visualizations about the world of money, using in-depth cost guides and tools. Recently they turned to data provided by Forbes to create maps of the richest people on each continent and in each country, and the results are surprising.
Mapping the richest people on each continent.
CNBC reports that in 2016 the number of billionaires in the world rose by 10 percent, to a total of 1,542 members of the billionaires club. These are extremely wealthy people.
There is surprisingly some diversity among the richest billionaires on each continent.
While clearly there is a gender imbalance (Gina Rinehart, the richest person in Oceania, as the only woman out of six), there is ethnic diversity - corresponding to their respective continents of course. There is also industrial diversity: from oil & gas and food & beverage, to real estate and technology.
And you'll notice that the wealthiest man in North America is not who many would have expected.
Bill Gates is no longer the richest person of North America.
Gates has been surpassed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index has a total net worth of $101 billion as of November 28, 2017, which is $12 billion more than Bill Gates.
One thing to keep in mind is that these are not the six wealthiest people in the world - each person is the richest on his or her own continent.
Of the top 15 billionaires in the world, ten are from the United States. Bezos, Gates, Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Larry Ellison, Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google) all found their wealth from technology industries, and have considerable more net worth than conservatives Rob Walton (Walmart) and the Koch Brothers.
Mapping the richest people in each country.
HowMuch.net wanted to go a bit deeper with their analysis:
We thought we would take this one step further to show you the richest person in each country according to Forbes. To further refine our analysis, we required that each person amass a personal fortune of at least $1 billion. We created the maps to have a dark shade representing a country with a billionaire on our list. We included a photo of the individual in question as well as their estimated net worth.
Here is how the countries in the other continents stacked up.
Europe has a more diverse group of billionaires from a wide range of industries.
The Middle East and Asia reflect the industries dominating their local economies.
Africa has the furthest to go in developing its economies.
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