The annual list of the richest people on the planet has been published by Forbes, revealing that almost half of those who made it in are poorer due to a decline in stocks and rising interest rates.
Elon Musk, has dropped from No.1 to No.2 after his expensive Twitter takeover helped drop Tesla’s shares.
In total, the world’s billionaires are now worth $12.2 trillion, a $500 billion drop from $12.7 trillion the list combined amounted to back in March 2022.
The world’s richest man is now France’s Bernard Arnaud, head of luxury goods giant LVMH, the first French citizen to top the list.
No one seems to have lost more than Jeff Bezos who fell from second place to No.3 , however, as Amazon shares fell a whopping 38 per cent which translates into a on paper loss of $57 billion.
The six wealthiest Greeks
First on the list of the richest Greeks sitting at No.455 in the overall ranking is a newcomer to the Forbes tables; Maria Angelikoussis. The 41-year-old shipowner’s fortune is estimated at 5.6 billion dollars.
In second place among Greeks and ranking No.905 on the overall list is Aristotle (Telis) Mystakidis, with a fortune of 3.2 billion dollars.
The 61-year-old businessman left his position as a director of Glencore in 2018 and in 2021 he made an investment in Piraeus Bank, together with the American billionaire John Paulson.
In third place (1,067 on the overall list) is Philip Niarchos, heir of the shipowner Stavros Niarchos, with a fortune of $2.8 billion.
Fourth on the list of Greeks (and at position 1,575 on the Forbes list) comes Vardis Vardinoyannis and his family with a fortune of $1.9 billion, with investments in a range of industries from Motor Oil to media.
The fifth Greek entry is Marianna Latsis and her brothers, Yannis and Margarita, with a $1.6 billion fortune, which puts her at No.1,804 on the Forbes billionaires list.
In sixth place among Greeks is Spyros Latsis and his sisters, Marianna and Margarita, with a fortune of $1.5 billion, bringing them to No.1,905 on the magazine’s list.
Both Maria Angelikousis and Marianna Latsis have made it into the magazine’s list of billionaires for the first time.
The total fortune of the Greek billionaires listed among the world’s richest people reaches $16.6 billion.
Meanwhile, in Forbes’ list of the 400 richest people in America, Greek-born New Balance mogul Jim Davis is no longer the richest Greek on the other side of the Atlantic.
The businessman, who was born in the US to Greek parents, has seen his fortune fall to $4 billion, down from $6.9 billion last year, which now places him 271st among America’s tycoons for the year.
Supermarket tycoon John Katsimatidis on the other hand increased his fortune from $3.7 billion to $4.1 billion, ranking 261st on the Forbes list. Katsimatidis is currently the richest among Greek-born US billionaires.
The world’s richest Cypriots
The first on Forbes’ 2023 list of Cypriot billionaires is John Fredriksen, a Norwegian-born Cypriot citizen.
Fredriksen’s empire includes oil tankers, dry bulk carriers, LNG carriers and deep-sea drilling rigs. His company started trading oil in the 1960s in Beirut, bought its first tankers in the 1970s and handled crude oil for Iran in the 1980s.
His offshore drilling rig company Seadrill emerged from bankruptcy in 2018, with Fredriksen helping to raise about $1 billion in new debt and equity.
The other Cypriots that have amassed the most wealth in the world, according to Forbes, are, Stelios, Polis and Celia Hadjiyannou, Yakir Gabay, Vinod Adani, Sergey Dmitriev and Valentin Kipyatkov.
The golden-eight are either Cypriots by descent, they obtained Cypriot citizenship, and some have gotten themselves an EU citizenship by investing in Cyprus, an EU member state.
