Richest to 13th: Ortega’s Fortunes Unfold

Richest to 13th: Ortega’s Fortunes Unfold – In 2017, Amancio Ortega made history by surpassing Bill Gates as the richest man in the world. He did it on several occasions, with a fortune then estimated at $85 billion. Today, between the value of its shares in Inditex (which in the hands of Marta Ortega and Óscar García Maceiras , has reached the highest stock market value in its history, and predictions suggest that it has not yet reached its ceiling) and the good results of Pontegadea, Ortega has a superior fortune, estimated at nearly 95,000 million dollars, the largest that the founder of Inditex has achieved.

However, Amancio Ortega today occupies 13th place on the list of the richest men in the world, while Bill Gates remains in the top 10, although in seventh place, despite having “retired” from Microsoft in 2008 (and retired from board of directors in 2020). What’s going on?

Ortega left the club of the 10 richest people on the planet in 2021, the year in which the fortunes of billionaires, especially technological ones, skyrocketed. Turning access to the top positions into an even more restricted club, in which access requires at least 100,000 million dollars.

A figure that years ago was unthinkable (only two people had reached it until 2018: Gates in 1999, at the peak of his career, and Jeff Bezos at the end of 2017, with the help of Amazon), and that today does not even guarantee the position. Sergey Brin , the co-founder of Google, is now in tenth position, with $110 billion, a figure equivalent to the GDP of Slovakia.

In just five years, the historical milestone of 100 billion has become commonplace, while three people ( Elon Musk , Bernard Arnault and again Bezos) have crossed the border of 200 billion of personal fortune. A figure in which Musk – who today leads the list with an estimated fortune of 242,000 million – and Arnault, who throughout 2023 has been breaking records parallel to the CEO of Tesla, usually coexist.

With the exception of Arnault (driven by the rise of luxury around the world, and the acquisition of firms that LVMH has carried out relentlessly) and the indefatigable Warren Buffett (who at 95 years old still maintains an unrivaled investment portfolio) , the other eight members of the list have one thing in common, apart from sporting nine figures on their personal balance sheet: they are all founders of large technology companies.

The advances of the digital society are so great that the “classic” billionaires have been displaced in favor of the giants of yesterday and today in the sector. Larry Ellison , the former president of Microsoft Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates himself are representatives of the first computer boom, revalued today.

While Brin and his former partner at Google Larry Page , Mark Zuckerberg , Bezos and Musk (who has made a fortune by converting an activity as old as selling cars into a technological phenomenon) represent the world after the Internet. In that club, billionaires like Ortega have – at the moment – difficult access.

Inditex’s projections and investments in renewables and real estate could still earn Amancio Ortega a place in that select club: in the range in which the creator of Zara is right now there are four other billionaires (another former number 1, Carlos Slim ; the L’Oreal heiress Françoise Bettencourt , the former mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg and the Indian businessman and engineer Mukesh Ambani ), practically tied, and who point out another division that is difficult to access.

Right now there is twice the separation (30,000 million dollars) between number 16 on the list ( Michael Dell , founder of the computer firm that bears his last name) and the second group between Ortega and Sergey Brin. Being a billionaire since the pandemic is relatively easier than ever – there have been as many new billionaires as in the last four years – but even the richest of the richest have learned that the distinction between the 0.1% who have the most and the rest of the people also applies to them.