March 6, 2008
Getting rich outside the US
The cover line on the Forbes list of the world’s billionaires is: The 1,125 richest people on Earth, and why less of them are American.
Actually, I think that should be “fewer” not “less”, but the underlying point stands. It is indeed remarkable that, of the top 20 richest people in the world at the moment, only four are American. As Forbes notes, half of the top 20 were American two years ago.
The biggest reason for that shift is clearly the commodities boom - the rising prices of oil, petrochemicals, nickel, aluminium etc have propelled figures such as Mukesh Ambani, Oleg Deripaska, Roman Abramovich, and Vladimir Potanin into the top 25. At some point, although who knows when, the cycle will turn.
This also raises the ratio of people who got rich by owning assets rather than through enterprise. Those such as Lakshmi Mittal, the Indian steel magnate, built global businesses but Russian oligarchs are not the same as Larry Ellison of Oracle or Igvar Kamprad of Ikea
But even when you take all this into account, there is a noticeable shift away from the past era when only the US was a big enough market to mint billionaires. It is now almost as likely that billionaires will come from Asia or Europe, even if they have US operations.
That is why Karl Albrecht of Aldi, Liliane Bettencourt of L’Oreal, and Bernard Arnault of LVMH are all on the list. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, who still top it, have been there a long time. It feels as if the action is elsewhere than the US at the moment.
