In their annual ‘Richest People in Tech’ ranking for 2016, Forbes has declared Azim Premji as the richest tech billionaire in India with total assets worth $16.1 billion. He has been ranked #13 in the list.
The only other Indian in this coveted list of 100 richest tech entrepreneurs is HCL founder Shiv Nadar with total assets of $11.7 billion, and placed at #17.
Interestingly, Azim Premji is also India’s biggest philanthropist, as he donated 25% of his wealth for charity work and has pledged to donate 25% more in the next 5 years. It is indeed ironical that besides being India’s richest tech billionaire, he is also India’s most generous philanthropist.
Shiv Nadar along with Azim Premji has managed to secure ranking in the top 20 positions, overtaking Google’s Eric Schmidt and Uber CEO Travis Kalanick.
Overall, Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft has once again topped the chart by becoming world’s richest tech entrepreneur with total assets of $78 billion. Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos is placed #2 with assets worth $66.2 billion while Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg is ranked #3 with assets of $54 billion.
At 32 years of age, Mark Zuckerberg is also the youngest tech billionaire in the top 10 list. At #19 is another 32 year old billionaire Dustin Moskovitz who helped Zuckerberg to launch Facebook after dropping out of college. He is worth $10.8 billion as he owns 2.34% of Facebook.
Larry Ellison from Oracle has managed to beat Google’s co-founders as he has been ranked #4 with $51.7 billion assets, while Larry Page from Google is ranked #5 and Sergey Brin from Google is ranked #6.
If we talk about Asia, then Alibaba founder Jack Ma is the richest Asian in the list with total assets of $25.8 billion, as he has been ranked #8, ahead of Michael Dell who is at #10 with assets of $20 billion.
The only other Chinese in the top 10 rank is Ma Huateng, founder of Tencent Holdings which owns WeChat.
Besides Premji and Nadar, there are two Indo-Americans in the top 100 list as well: Romesh Wadhwani, who is the CEO of Symphony Technology Group and Bharat Desai and his wife Neerja Sethi who are the founders of Syntel, which is a IT consulting and outsourcing firm.
Romesh Wadhwani has assets worth $3 billion and ranked #67, and was awarded 2013 Forbes India Non-Resident Philanthropist Award. He has pledged investment of $1 billion for Indian startup eco-system.
Bharat & Neerja Sethi Desai has combined assets of $2.6 billion, and have been placed #85.
Some other interesting facts from the Forbes ranking of tech billionaires:
- The combined worth of all top 100 tech billionaires is now $892 billion, which is an increase of 6% compared to last year
- 37 tech billionaires from this list reside in California, where Silicon Valley is situated. Overall, USA has 51 tech founders and investors in this list
- China has 19 tech billionaires with combined assets of $132.7 billion.
- Last year, the minimum worth of a tech billionaire in this list was $2 billion, which has now increased to $2.2 billion
- Compared to last year, 53 tech billionaires added more money to their fortune, while 27 of them lost wealth
- The biggest gainer of wealth in this list is Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who added $18.4 billion to this assets compared to last year.
- 12 new tech billionaires joined the list, and majority of them are from China
Here is the top 100 list of the richest tech billionaires on this Earth.