When commodities trading firm Glencore released its 1,600-page prospectus this May, it also revealed who its biggest shareholders were. Five of these individuals turned out to be new billionaires. This included CEO Ivan Glasenberg with a huge fortune of $9.5 billion. However, Glencore is not alone in churning out billionaires. Far from it! Of course, this should not include those members of the superrich classes who have become billionaires through inheritance. So, family-held companies like Wal-Mart, Cargill, S.C. Johnson, Brazil’s Itau Unibanco and Turkey’s Koc, may have produced several billionaires – but wealthy genes take part (if not much) of the credit here.
If we move on to non-family firms that have been on a billionaire-producing spree, Google tops the list with 7 billionaires. Among the fortunate seven on the rolls of the search engine giant are founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, executive chairman Eric Schmidt and Stanford University professor and investor David Cheriton.
Making the cut also is social networking giant Facebook with 6 billionaires. Predictably, Mark Zuckerberg features prominently on the list with a $13.5 billion fortune. Also making the list are co-founders Dustin Moskovitz and Eduardo Saverin. The $50 billion company is scheduled to go public in 2012, which could add more individuals to the billionaires’ club.
TNK-BP, the joint venture between a Russian oil firm and BP, may not paint a rosy picture of tranquility, but it has still produced 6 new billionaires. In fact, all the original investors of TNK appear to have made their fortunes by now.
Finally, there is the Indian outsourcing firm Infosys with 5 billionaires in its ranks. Trading is in store for this company, which could end up adding a few more billionaires to the list.
Here is the list of the top billionaire-producing companies in the world:
Google (7 billionaires)
Sergey Brin, $19.8 billion
Larry Page, $19.8 billion
Eric Schmidt, $7 billion
Andreas von Bechtolsheim, $2.3 billion
Michael Moritz, $1.8 billion
David Cheriton, $1.8 billion
Kavitark Ram Shriram, $1.6 billion
Facebook, (6 billionaires)
Mark Zuckerberg, $13.5 billion
Dustin Moskovitz, $2.7 billion
Eduardo Saverin, $1.6 billion
Sean Parker, $1.6 billion
Peter Thiel, $1.5 billion
Yuri Milner, $1 billion
TNK-BP (6 billionaires)
Viktor Vekselberg, $13 billion
Leonard Blavatnik, $10.1 billion
Mikhail Fridman, $15.1 billion
German Khan, $9.6 billion
Alexei Kuzmichev, $7.5 billion
Pyotr Aven, $4.5 billion
Glencore, (5 billionaires)
Ivan Glasenberg, $9.5 billion
Daniel Francisco Mate Badenes, $3.6 billion
Aristotelis Mistakidis, $3.6 billion
Tor Peterson: $3.2 billion
Alex Beard: $2.8 billion
Infosys (5 billionaires)
N.R. Narayana Murthy, $2 billion
Nandan Nilekani, $1.8 billion
Senapathy Gopalakrishnan, $1.6 billion
K. Dinesh 1.2 billion
S.D. Shibulal, $1.1 billion
Via: Forbes
