By Jeph Ajobaju, Chief Copy Editor
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have become centinary billionaires, bringing to eight the number of people with fortunes worth more than $100 billion worldwide.
The eight richest people in the world together hold fortunes of more than $1 trillion and have added $110 billion combined this year, many boosted by a rally in tech that has shifted business online since the Covid-19 outbreak in March 2019.
Page, 48, and Brin, 47, have added more than $20 billion each to their wealth this year alone, some of the biggest gains.
Page, now worth $104 billion, earned $21.2 billion in 100 days; Brin, worth $100 billion, earned $20.4 billion in the same period.
Both men have earned $41.6 billion, which eclipses Africa’s largest economy, Nigeria, whose foreign reserves currently stand at $35 billion.
Many of the over 100 global moneybags are into tech, such as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and March Zuckerberg, which underscores the role of tech in money making.
Last month, Dave Girouard, a former Google employee, became the latest tech billionaire with a net worth of $1.3 billion, according to Forbes.
He was a former president of Google Enterprise Services where he built Google’s cloud app business worldwide.
Girouard founded Upstart, a marketplace lender that offers personal loans using non-traditional variables such as education and employment, to predict creditworthiness.
Forbes reports that Upstart received $160 million from Google Ventures, Third Point, Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, and others as funding.
On March 18, Upstart witnessed its share skyrocket to a staggering 89 per cent on a single trading day. The fortunes of Girouard, who owns over 14 per cent of the shares, jumped to $1.3 billion.
Impact of US economic growth
The majority of Page’s wealth comes from his stake in Alphabet, the parent company of Google. He currently holds $12.6 billion in cash.
Brin’s wealth valuation is also derived from his stake in the world’s most popular search engine and currently has cash holding valued at $12.7 billion.
Impressive growth from the world’s most powerful economy boosted buying pressure on Google shares and its founders saw their wealth valuation surge.
Global investors are increasingly holding on the shares of Google as amazing economic data from US service industries coupled with an advance in the tech sector fueled the hike in Google shares seen in recent months.
Investors are piling huge funds into Alphabet with reports saying it won its most recent Supreme Court case against Oracle, which lasted about three years.
Google stock currently trades at $2,285.88 nearing its 52-week high of $2,289.04 with a yearly return on investment pegged at 89 per cent.
Stock pundits are surprised by such record gains in Google shares despite a swift move seen lately by some institutional investors into utility, energy-based stocks and of late US Treasury bonds.
The company currently has a market value of about $1.54 trillion.
Americans dominate global wealth list
Bloomberg reports that the billionaires’ club is dominated by US tech entrepreneurs, noting that Bezos (Amazon founder) became in 2017 the first to hit the $100 billion milestone since Gates (Microsoft) back in 1999.
Gates’s wealth then slumped with the dot-com bubble burst, and he regained the title of centibillionaire only in 2019.
Musk (Tesla) and Zuckerberg (Facebook) joined the club last year as the tech industry led a boost in wealth creation with the coronavirus pandemic accelerating a switch to online.
Billionaires with wealth of at least $100 billion are mostly based in the US.
Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren and other progressive lawmakers recently revived plans to introduce a wealth tax, though the proposal is unlikely to go anywhere in a narrowly divided Congress.
“The U.S. economy is the world’s most powerful engine of wealth creation and prosperity,” John Lettieri, president and chief executive officer of Washington D.C.-based think tank Economic Innovation Group, told US lawmakers on March 17.
“In spite of this, the lack of wealth at the bottom remains a troubling and persistent fact of life in this country.”
US shares climbed to a fresh record last Friday on optimism over the economic recovery. The tech-focused Nasdaq 100 Index has risen more than 7 per cent this year, with Alphabet rallying for the past two weeks as it won a copyright ruling.
Warren Buffett briefly reached the $100 billion mark in March before hitting it again last week, while Bernard Arnault of France’s luxury group LVMH has been part of the elite group on and off since 2019, per Bloomberg.
