2008 Top 20 Billionaires: What do they do with so much money?

Warren Buffett overtook Bill Gates and that Mexican fellow to become the world’s richest person. His net worth is at $62 billion USD.

Pop quiz: Do you know how many zeroes are there in a billion??

I realized I didn’t know the answer only when I was reading this in Forbes. I couldn’t do that mentally (I blame Google for making me dumb X-( ), so I took a paper/pen and wrote down $62 billion in all its glory.

$62,000,000,000

Thats 9 zeroes! Whew…Since we, in India, follow a different system, I was curious to see how much that converts to INR. According to XE.com the amount is:

2,517,355,000,000 Indian Rupees!! Thats 2 lakhs, 51 thousand, 735 crores *AND* 50 lakhs!

If he even gives away just 0.0000001% of this, *to me*, I’d still be getting around 2 lakhs and 50 thousand rupees. Makes me feel so miniscule! Who knows? Probably this huge a wealth has already produced lots of salami slicing (See Office Space) billionaires in Warren’s kingdom

Another amazing thing is there are 4 Indians in the top 10. FOUR Indians…can you believe that? You would have expected more charitable deeds from these guys…hmm, one can only hope! At least, Gates has his Bill & Melinda foundation, through which he has given out close to $31B USD so far, and #1 Warren has committed to giving close to $30B more to this foundation. One can only wonder what Mukesh/Anil or K.P.Singh has done!

Another morsel for your thoughts: If a big share of world’s oil needs are met by Middle-east, and a barrel of crude oil is selling around USD 100, why are the sheiks not in the top 10 list?? They must be soooo…oo rich they know how to stay off these kinda lists. If I were them, I wouldn’t want my wealth publicly published as well - very understandable. So, this list feels more like our childhood game of how many labels/stickers or tops we collect/own, while we *now* know the label or top maker obviously was the richest all along!

If I don’t point out 2 more things, I can’t sleep peacefully tonight. So, here we go:

• Do watch how fast Larry / Sergi (of Google fame) climb in this list. They have already reached 32/33 positions.
• Where are the Rothschilds and Rockfellers hiding? I am pretty sure there dynasty worth should be in trillians (yes, with a "T"!).

If I had $1 billion USD, I’ll not be sitting here, making use of Intel’s computer, posting this! If I ask my wife this, she’d say something like "Invest in Mutual Funds. I know of this HDFC..blah blah blah". :rolling eyes:

What will you do if you get USD 1 billion?