MUMBAI: Pierre Omidyar founded eBay on Labour Day (May 1) in 1995. Three years later he became the man who made the fastest billion. Now, his net worth is a cool US$10.2 billion.
According to Forbes, the last two decades have seen fortunes spiral with people becoming billionaires in a much shorter time than it took ever before, even if no one has yet made it overnight.
The ones who made it quickly to the top rode the information technology wave, coming up with products that captured the imagination of millions and became part of the lives of ten times as many.
Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web started as a hobby from a campus trailer in February 1994. In 1996, when they went public, calling the site Yahoo!, they quickly made it big on the stock market. By the end of four years, David Filo and Jerry Yang each had a billion to
his name.
Ditto for Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. He founded the website in 1994, went public three years later, and within 13 months had become a permanent member of the billionaire club. His current net worth is a comfortable $4.8 billion.
According to Forbes, today’s billionaires earn their nine zeros much faster than a hundred years ago, when John D Rockefeller took a quarter of a century to become America’s first billionaire (as calculated with inflated dollars based on the Consumer Price Index).
Automobile pioneer Henry Ford took 23 years and Warren Buffett, Forbes estimates, took 19. Even Bill Gates, one of the first persons to have made his fortune in the IT revolution, took 12 years to get there. But with his current worth of $51 billion he is the world’s richest man.
Breaking into the ranks of the world’s billionaires is quite an achievement, but doing it in record time is truly worthy of celebration.
