He’s still in rarefied air, but Bill Gates is no longer the world’s second-richest person.
For the first time in the seven-year history of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the Microsoft co-founder dropped to the No. 3 slot – giving way to France’s Bernard Arnault on Tuesday, Bloomberg News reports.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos still occupies the top spot in the exclusive club.
Arnault, the CEO of luxury goods maker LVMH, has a net worth of about $107.6 billion, having added $39 billion to his fortune in the past year — the largest individual gain by far among the 500 people in Bloomberg’s ranking.
Gates is now worth $107 billion, but there’s a caveat – were it not for his philanthropic giving, he’d still be No. 1. He has donated more than $35 billion to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Meanwhile, Bezos’ net worth is up a bit this year, to $125 billion, even after he reached a divorce settlement with MacKenzie Bezos that made her the world’s fourth-richest woman.
Arnault, 70, made headlines earlier this year when he committed $224 million to the rebuilding of fire-ravaged Notre Dame cathedral in Paris.
He controls about half of Paris-based LVMH and also owns a 97 percent share in Christian Dior, the fashion house founded three years before his birth in 1949.
The three titasns’ collective wealth exceeds the individual market values of almost every company in the S&P 500 Index, including Walmart, ExxonMobil and Walt Disney.
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