The World's 10 Richest Men

1. Carlos Slim Helu (& family) - Mexico

Education: BA/BS, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico.
Fortune: $ 74 billion (up $20.5 billion)
Recent Headlines: Merged his fixed-line telecom company into America Movil, Latin America's largest wireless carrier; Opened a new museum which houses his vast art collection, named after his wife Soumaya.

2. William (Bill Gates) – United States

Education: Dropout from Harvard University.
Fortune: $ 56 billion (up $3 billion)
Recent Headlines: Donated $30 billion of his wealth to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation which is working tirelessly towards eradication of tuberculosis and polio and poverty/hunger; Campaigning for "a higher sense of urgency" in AIDS vaccine development and also pushing for improved technology tools to rate teacher performance.

3. Warren Buffett – United States

Education: MS, Columbia University; BA/BS, University of Nebraska Lincoln.
Fortune: $50 billion (up $3 billion)
Recent Headlines: Investment in Chinese electric car startup BYD Co.; proposed investments in India; Partnered with Bill Gates to convince America's richest to pledge half their fortunes to charity.

4. Bernard Arnault – France

Education: BA/BS, Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne.
Fortune: $41 billion (up $13.5 billion)
Recent Headlines: Spectacular performance of his luxury goods group LVMH; Acquisition by the Luis Vuitton group of stake in Hermes and Bulgari; Firing of Christian Dior designer John Galliano over his anti-Semitic remarks.

5. Larry Ellison – United States

Education: Dropout, University of Chicago and University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.
Fortune: $39.5 billion (up 11.5 billion)
Recent Headlines: Win in the copyright infringement court battle against German software rival SAP worth $1.3 billion; Role in San Francisco’s successful bid to host the America's Cup regatta in 2013 (where Ellison is currently the defending champion); Intends to donate 95% of his wealth to charity.

6. Lakshmi Mittal - India

Education: BA/BS, St Xavier's College Calcutta, India.
Fortune: $31.1 billion (up $2.4 billion)
Recent Headlines: Spectacular rise in net profits at his steel conglomeration Arcelor Mittal; Spin off of its stainless steel unit; acquisition of Canadian miner Baffinland Iron Mines Corporation; Funding of a 377-foot sculpture called ArcelorMittal Orbit in London's Olympic Park for the 2012 Olympics; Plans to build a 30 million pound eco-mansion on the outskirts of London which designers claim will have zero carbon footprint.

7. Amancio Ortega - Spain

Education: Not Known; son of a railway worker, he is said to have started his career as a gofer in a shirt store.
Fortune: $31 billion (up $6 billion)
Recent Headlines: Announced his retirement as chairman of Inditex, the $15.8 billion (sales) fashion firm in January; Controversy over Inditex copying bloggers’ fashion designs from the Internet.

8. Eike Batista - Brazil

Education: Dropout, RWTH Aachen University.
Fortune: $30 billion (up $3 billion)
Recent Headlines: Opened office in New York and expressed plans of listing some of his companies in the London Stock exchange; Acquisition of Canadian gold outfit Ventana; Rare setback through the not-so-great reception to the IPO of his ship-building venture.

9. Mukesh Ambani - India

Education: Dropout, Stanford University; BA/BS, University of Bombay.
Fortune: $27 billion (down $2 billion)
Recent Headlines: Recent partnership with BP worth $7.2 billion, which is being touted as the biggest foreign investment in India and will see a marketing joint venture; $3.3-billion investment in three American energy firms; much-hyped inauguration of a 27-story personal mansion in the heart of Mumbai.

10. Christy Walton (& family) – United State

Education: Not Known; widow of the son of Walmart founder Sam Walton, most of her wealth is from inherited stakes in the retail giant.
Fortune: $26.5 billion (up $4 billion)
Recent Headlines: Engagement with various charities and donations, placing her among the world’s biggest woman philanthropists.

Father of the Internet Tim Berners-Lee:

Tim Berners-Lee was the man leading the development of the World Wide Web (with help of course), the defining of HTML (hypertext markup language) used to create web pages, HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) and URLs (Universal Resource Locators). All of those developments took place between 1989 and 1991. Tim Berners-Lee is considered the primary author of HTML, assisted by his colleagues at CERN, an international scientific organization based in Geneva, Switzerland
Born in 1955 in London, England, Tim Berners-Lee's parents were both mathematicians. They both worked on the Ferranti Mark I computer. Tim Berners-Lee loved electronics from an early age. He graduated as a Physics major from Oxford University in 1976. At Oxford he built his first computer using: a soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor and an old television

Early jobs included: working on bar code technology; writing typesetting software; writing a generic macro language; working on FASTBUS system software and designing a heterogeneous remote procedure call system. In 1980, while a freelancer ar CERN, he wrote but never published his first program for storing information called "Enquire" thar forshadowed his later work on the World Wide Web.

Steve Jobs

Name: Steven Paul Jobs
Position: Co-Founder & CEO, Apple Computer | Co-Founder & CEO, Pixar
Born: February 1955
Parents: Steve was adopted as an infant by Paul and Clara Jobs. Paul Jobs was a machinist for a company that manufactured lasers and Clara Jobs was an accountant; both are deceased.
Siblings: Steve has a biological, younger sister Mona Simpson, whom he tracked down and now has a close relationship with.
Education: Graduated from Homestead High School, Los Altos, Calif. in 1972. Attended Reed College in Portland, Ore.; dropped out of the baccalaureate program after one semester.
Family: Wife: Laurene Powell. They met at Stanford University while he was speaking at a class. They married in 1991. Both are vegetarians. Daughter Lisa was born when Jobs was 23 (Jobs didn't marry her mother). Lisa lived with Jobs as a teen. He has three children with wife Laurene.
Residence: English style red-brick home in Palo Alto, Calif. built in 1930s. Valued between $3 million to $5 million. Sparsely decorated.
Appearance: Slender; wears jeans, usually with a black turtleneck and running shoes.
What's he like: People say he is a high-strung workaholic, motivates others with his enthusiasm, has a "reality distortion field," passionate about technology, a micromanager, arrogant and intolerant; can exude a Zen-like calm.
Heroes: Dave Packard, Bob Noyce, late co-founder of Intel, and Andy Grove and singer Bob Dylan.
Friends: Jerry Brown, former governor of California. Lawrence J. Ellison, billionaire software entrepreneur and chairman of Oracle. Sister and novelist Mona Simpson.
Net Worth: More than $1.2 Billion.
Honors & Awards: National Technology Medal from President Reagan in 1985, before founding NeXT. Jefferson Award for Public Service in 1987. Entrepreneur of the Decade by Inc. magazine in 1989.

Sabeer Bhatia

Pioneer of web-based e-mail

Sabeer Bhatia has done the unconventional ever since he decided to study abroad at the age of 19; two years into undergraduate education at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, he qualified for a transfer scholarship at Caltech, considered to be the world's most competitive scholarship. After graduating from Caltech in 1989, he pursued an MS in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University.

At the age of 27, Bhatia was no longer interested in working for others, and together with Smith, began chasing what many people in Silicon Valley deemed a “crazy idea” – a free e-mail service. They raised about $300,000 for their venture - Hotmail. Within a year, Hotmail had one million subscribers. So revolutionary was it that Microsoft bought it for $400 million after 18 months.

Did you know?

* He was rejected by 20 venture capitalists before Draper Fisher Juvetson bought his idea.

* The original spelling was HoTMaiL

Award

TR100 by the MIT, given to 100 young innovators who are expected to have the greatest impact on technology.

Qualifications

BTech, BITS Pilani

BSc(Honours) California Institute of Technology, US

MS Electrical Engineering (Stanford)

Arun Sarin

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Former CEO, Vodafone

Born on October 21, 1954 at Panchmari, Madhya Pradesh, Sarin was an academically bright student. He was equally good at sports like field hockey, boxing and various extracurricular activities. He wanted to follow his father's footsteps into the military by pursuing a career as a pilot, but when his mom protested, he applied and was accepted at IIT, Kharagpur.

He graduated from the IIT in 1975 with a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering in the top 10 percent of his class and received the BC Roy gold medal for academic excellence. He received a full scholarship to the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate College of Engineering.

In the year 2003, Sarin became the Chief Executive Officer of Vodafone. When he resigned in 2008 from his post Vodafone was the world's largest mobile phone company by revenue. It was the firm’s large market presence in India that catapulted Sarin into the limelight. Currently he serves on the boards of Cisco and Safeway, Inc.

Academics

BTech (IIT)

MBA (Haas UC,Berkeley)

Awards

University of California at Berkeley, Haas School Business Leader of Year- 2002

University of California Trust (UK) Award- 2003

Born in Nagpur, Pandit was the Citigroup’s youngest CEO when he took over in 2007. The first Indian to achieve this feat, the job was touted as the toughest in the world due to the company’s poor performance.

A brilliant boy in school, he moved to US when he was 16. After finishing his Master’s in electrical engineering and MBA from Columbia University, he was determined to get a PhD in a different subject. In those days, students preferred to either study medicine or engineering. And that was the time when his guide advised him to take up finance, as it was a good field. He followed the advice, and switched to finance.

For a brief span, he taught at Indiana University Bloomington, Columbia’s Business School. He stepped into the corporate world in 1994, as a head of Morgan Stanley. His administrative and technical skills, plus an ability to make himself indispensable to bosses like John J. Mack and Phillip J. Purcell, fuelled his career at Morgan Stanley, where he became the president. He dealt with the Institutional Securities Division, Worldwide Institutional Equities Division. For him, this was an interesting area to work on

“To do well you have to put a lot of yourself into it.”

BS, Electrical Engineering, Columbia University (1976)

MS, Columbia University (1977)

MBA, Columbia Business School, Columbia University (1980)

PhD, Columbia Business School, Columbia University (1986)

Indra Nooyi

Chairman & CEO, PepsiCo

Chairman of PepsiCo's Board of Directors, Indra is the highest-ranking Indian-born woman in corporate America, and she attributes much of her success to her upbringing in India. "Being a woman and being foreign-born, you've got to be smarter than anyone else," says Nooyi, who often dons a sari at PepsiCo events.

Education

She completed schooling at Holy Angels AIHSS, Chennai, has a BSc (Chemistry) from Madras Christian College in 1974 and a PGDM from IIM Calcutta. In 1978, Nooyi earned a Master's degree in Public and Private Management from Yale School of Management. At Yale, she worked as a receptionist from midnight to 5 a.m. to earn some money.

Career graph

Starting her career in India, Nooyi held different positions at Johnson & Johnson and textile firm Mettur Beardsell. In the US, Nooyi worked with BCG, Motorola and ABB. Nooyi joined PepsiCo in 1994, and became chairperson in 2007.

Childhood memories

As a child, Indra’s grandfather insisted on academic excellence from his grandchildren. According to Indra, when she did not figure in the top three ranks in class, she preferred to throw herself under a bus than face her grandfather.

Awards

2007, Padma Bhushan

2008 Elected as Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences

NARAYAN MURTHY

As a boy, Nagavara Ramarao Narayana Murthy was someone who could easily go unnoticed in a crowd. He was short, but sharp. Often, his seniors in school came to him for solving Science problems. Murthy came from a lower middle class, Brahmin family from Mysore. His father, a school teacher, was fond of English literature. And like all the boys of his class, he too had dreams of going to IIT. So he worked hard, studied in the shade of boulders close to Chamundi hills, and helped many in his class to prepare for the entrance exam. Murthy wasn’t surprised when he got through. When he broke the news of his success to his father, it is said his words were: ‘Anna, I have passed the exam…I want to join IIT.” Proud he was of his son’s achievement but he couldn’t afford the fees and so Murthy had to relinquish his IIT dreams. Murthy stayed back in Mysore. When asked about his decision to stay back, he said to his friends, "It is not the institution but you alone who can change your life with hard work". He lived up to his own words. Several years afterwards, Narayana Murthy revolutionised India’s software industry by founding Infosys. And this has made him the icon of middle class dreams. He redefined India in the eyes world. India was no longer a third world country, but a fast developing nation. In the process, he promoted thousands of young, creative Indian minds to the world and made Infosys and India a hub of talent.It is known to the world that he founded Infosys along with six others with just a few thousand rupees which his wife, Sudha Murthy gave. It was an incredible risk to take, but Murthy knew it was going to work, just as he knew he would get through IIT. Which he did, eventually. After Murthy graduated from the National Institute of Engineering, Mysore, he joined IIT, Kanpur.

Thanks to IT and its development, the little known romance of Murthy and Sudha Kulkarni is talked about everywhere. It is hard to believe reading from Sudha’s account of an introvert, quiet Murthy, that he is the same person to have revolutionised the IT industry, When Murthy was asked by Sudha’s father about his ambitions, he said he wanted to become a politician in the communist party and wanted to open an orphanage.

While he has opened several orphanages since, his dream of becoming a politician still remains unfulfilled. After retiring from Infosys, Murthy was hoping to become President of India after the term of Dr. Abdul Kalam. Even though he denied having political ambitions, his supporters would like to see him on the throne.

Our Mysore Murthy is, no doubt, a visionary who has ignited millions of young minds.

Education

B E (1967)

MTech (1969)

Honours and Awards

Padma Vibushan- 2008

Officer of the Legion of Honor- 2008

World Entrepreneur of the Year- 2003

Business India’s “Businessman of the Year- 1999

JRD Tata Corporate Leadership Award- 1996-97

Barack Obama The President of United State of America

Presides over world’s largest, most innovative, most dynamic economy; commander-in-chief of planet’s richest, deadliest military; finger on button of nuclear arsenal containing more than 5,000 warheads; head-of-state of world’s sole superpower; his Democrats have majorities in both U.S. House and Senate; recently awarded Nobel Peace Prize, apparently for general awesomeness.

Bill Gates, Who makes a strong foundation of IT

Bill Gates came from a family of entrepreneurship and high-spirited liveliness. William Henry Gates III was born in Seattle, Washington on October 28th, 1955. His father, William H. Gates II, is a Seattle attorney. His late mother, Mary Gates, was a schoolteacher, University of Washington regent, and chairwoman of United Way International.

Bill Gates - Early Life

He had an early interest in software and began programming computers at the age of thirteen. In 1973, Bill Gates became a student at Harvard University, where he meet Steve Ballmer (now Microsoft's chief executive officer). While still a Harvard undergraduate, Bill Gates wrote a version of the programming language BASIC for the MITS Altair microcomputer.
Did you know that as young teenagers Bill Gates and Paul Allen ran a small company called Traf-O-Data and sold a computer to the city of Seattle that could count city traffic?

Bill Gates & Microsoft

In 1975, before graduation Gates left Harvard to form Microsoft with his childhood friend Paul Allen. The pair planned to develop software for the newly emerging personal computer market.
Bill Gate's company Microsoft became famous for their computer operating systems and killer business deals. For example, Bill Gates talked IBM into letting Microsoft retain the licensing rights to MS-DOS an operating system, that IBM needed for their new personal computer. Gates proceeded to make a fortune from the licensing of MS-DOS.
On November 10, 1983, at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, Microsoft Corporation formally announced Microsoft Windows, a next-generation operating system.

On January 1, 1994, Bill Gates married Melinda French Gates. They have three children