Economic uncertainty didn’t hurt some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names in the past year, as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and other stars of the tech world shot up the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans.
For the 18th consecutive year, Microsoft founder Bill Gates leads the list with a net worth that checked in at $59 billion this year. At No. 2 is the last man to lead the list other than Gates, Berkshire Hathaway founder Warren Buffett, who is sitting on $39 billion. Silicon Valley’s richest man rounds out the top three — Oracle (ORCL) CEO Larry Ellison has $33 billion in the bank.
The big stories this year, however, are the up-and-comers, the young entrepreneurs who are rapidly climbing the list, led by Zuckerberg. The Facebook CEO made the biggest leap since the 2010 list, adding $10.6 billion to his net worth, which Forbes says now totals $17.5 billion. That makes him the second richest Californian after Ellison and puts him at No. 14, just ahead of Google (GOOG) founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page (tied with $16.7 billion apiece).
Facebook was a major factor in this year’s rankings, as an August valuation of the company at $66.5 billion, brought on by a sale of Facebook shares by Interpublic, helped Sean Parker and venture capitalist Jim Breyer make the list for the first time. Zuckerberg’s college roommate, Dustin Moskovitz, also showed up on the Forbes 400 for the first time and is the world’s youngest billionaire — eight days younger than Zuckerberg.
Just being a billionaire wasn’t enough to make the Forbes 400 list this year, though, as the cutoff reached $1.05 billion. Some Silicon Valley stalwarts had no problem beating that, however, including former Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs (No. 39, $7 billion); eBay (EBAY) founder Pierre Omidyar and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt (tied at No. 50 with $6.2 billion apiece); and LucasFilms founder George Lucas (No. 107, $3.2 billion).
Social networking helped several non-Facebook employees enter the list for the first time in 2011, with Zynga founder Mark Pincus (No. 212, $2 billion) and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman (No. 293, $1.5 billion) making their debuts.
There are a host of young, rich valley entrepreneurs hoping to make their first appearance on the list in 2012, Forbes reported, including Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk ($680 million), Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey ($650 million) and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen ($600 million).
Contact Jeremy C. Owens at 408-920-5876; follow him at Twitter.com/mercbizbreak.
