Most people are familiar with Bloomberg, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, Larey Page, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, the Kochs brothers, and the Waltons. One thing they all have in common is how super wealthy they are. Yet they are not the only ones.
Indeed, the most well-known figures in the world’s elite aren’t the only billionaires; in fact, they’re not often the most fascinating ones.
Nearly 3,000 people in the world, according to Forbes, are so wealthy that they require three commas to express their fortune. The aggregate personal wealth of America’s 735 billionaires is $4.7 trillion.
Even though the majority of them are unknown a lot of people, they have the same amount of worldwide sway as the well-known tech billionaires.
A portion of them are self-made individuals. Some were born with silver by birth. But they’re all among the richest and most influential people on the planet.
Rich doesn’t always equate to famous, as seen by the list of underappreciated billionaires that follows. Discover the wealthiest people you’ve never heard of by continuing to read.
Francoise Bettencourt Meyers
Net worth: $100 billion
You may know Queen Bey, Dolly, Oprah, and at least three Kardashians, but Francoise Bettencourt Meyers’ couch cushions might make any number of them lose their money. The French heiress is the richest woman in the world, but her grandfather’s business would surely be familiar to you. She is supposedly a reserved individual who avoids the limelight.
The L’Oreal business was inherited by Bettencourt Meyers and her family, who currently have a 33 percent stake in the company.
In addition to chairing the company’s family holding company and serving as a board member since 1997, she is a gifted pianist, a published scholar with over six books on Greek and Biblical mythology, and a generous donor who helped rebuild Notre Dame Cathedral after a fire.
Gianluigi Aponte
Net worth: $30 billion
Gianluigi Aponte was a Neopolitan sea captain by training, thus it was only fitting that he entered the shipping business in 1970. Even though he and his spouse began their business with just one ship to transport goods between Europe and Africa, it’s likely that Gianluigi Aponte was involved in the delivery of some of your possessions to your home today.
With the exception of Maersk, he turned the Mediterranean shipping Company (MSC) into the world’s second-biggest shipping company. Gianluigi Aponte is not a stranger to the business world; he is the creator of three companies: a port operations firm, an inland logistics company, and a cruise line.
Amancio Ortega
Net worth: $99.2 billion
You’ve heard of Coco Chanel, Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, and Calvin Klein, but when it comes to purchasing power, they’re all moguls of secondhand stores compared to Amancio Ortega.
You are discussing a man who, after all, makes $400 million a year only from dividends.
You should be grateful to Ortega if you shop at GAP, Forever 21, or H&M because he was a key figure in the fast-fashion movement’s inception. The Spaniard established Inditex, a clothing firm that is today a mega-corporation with 7,500 stores worldwide and eight brands. Inditex is headquartered in Madrid.
He has invested in real estate in New York, Madrid, London, Chicago, Miami, and Barcelona using his dividend money along the way.
Gina Rinehart
Net worth: $30.2 billion
Many of the wealthiest individuals on the planet received their wealth through inheritance, the traditional method. However, Gina Rinehart inherited a disaster, which she so skillfully cleaned up to become Australia’s richest person today.
Her late father, the contentious and powerful iron-ore tycoon Lang Hancock, left Rinehart with a bankrupt corporation. Still, she reconstructed Hancock Prospecting and became its executive chair in 1992. Her largest asset now is the Roy Hill mining project, which she started in 2015 and has subsequently paid back the $7.2 billion loaned to finance it. She also happens to be Australia’s second-largest cattle producer as a side gig.
Susan Klatten
Net worth: $23.4 billion
Susanne Klatten first appears to have all the characteristics of a traditional heiress who did nothing more than inherit her position in society. After all, her mother was the third wife of an industrialist who founded the luxury car industry, therefore she owns 19% of BMW.
However, a deeper look exposes a lot of Gina Rinehart’s moxie.
With an MBA in economics, Klatten’s real claim to fame comes from her father’s side grandparents, who worked on the development of the chemical corporation Altana AG.
With Klatten at the helm, the family business was developed into an international pharmaceutical and specialty chemical conglomerate with $2.5 billion in sales annually.
Qin Yinglin
Net worth: $14.3 billion
Unless you’re a pig, Qin Yinglin is an easy person to admire. Yinglin, a self-made man who was raised in the most populous province in China, attended Henan Agricultural University to study animal husbandry. 1992 saw him graduate and enter the business world with his wife, Qian Ying. With 22 pigs at the beginning, the pair built their firm into Muyuan Foodstuff, the largest pig-breeding operation in the largest pork market in the world today.
Even in his own China, few people are aware of him, according to the Financial Times, and he owes a large portion of his wealth to a sickness that ought to be his archenemy. After half of China’s pig population perished from swine flu, Yinglin’s net worth quickly doubled.
