Jeff Bezos studied electrical engineering and computer science at Princeton University. He is the founder of the online mail order company Amazon, where he serves as Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors. In 2024, his estimated fortune – according to the American business magazine Forbes – amounted to around 194 billion US dollars. Only Elon Musk and Bernard Arnault’s family are richer.
Zhang Yiming studied microelectronics before switching to software engineering. As a Chinese IT entrepreneur, he founded ByteDance and developed the video platform TikTok. This year, Forbes estimates his fortune at 43.4 billion US dollars (27th richest person in the world).
Shiv Nadar studied electrical engineering and went on to found Hindustan Computers Limited (HCL), which is now a global IT services company. According to the Forbes list, his fortune amounts to 36.9 billion US dollars. This makes him one of the richest people not only in India, but also in the world (39th place on the list).
William Ding graduated from the Chengdu Institute of Radio Engineering (now the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China). As the founder and CEO of NetEase, one of China’s leading Internet technology companies, he was the richest Chinese person at one point. Even today, though, with a fortune of 33.5 billion US dollars (46th place on the Forbes list), he is not exactly poor.
Eric Emerson Schmidt studied electrical engineering at Princeton University in the US. He first worked at Sun, later at Google, most recently as Executive Chairman of Alphabet. With an estimated fortune of 20.6 billion US dollars, he is ranked 94th on the Forbes billionaires list.
Andreas von Bechtolsheim studied electrical engineering in Munich (although he didn’t graduate) and later computer science in the USA. He became rich as one of the founders of Sun Microsystems and one of the first investors in Google. With an estimated fortune of 14.8 billion US dollars, he is currently ranked 129th on the Forbes list.
David Duffield studied electrical engineering at Cornell University, New York, before founding software companies such as PeopleSoft, Workday and (most recently) Ridgeline. With a fortune of 14.1 US dollars, the 84-year-old is currently ranked 132nd on the Forbes list.
Henry Samueli studied at the University of California (UCLA), where he earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate (Ph. D.) degrees, all in the field of electrical engineering. While still at university, he founded the Broadcom Corporation, a provider of integrated circuits for network applications. His fortune is also estimated at 14.1 billion US dollars, which puts him in joint 132nd place on the Forbes list with Duffield.
Hasso Plattner studied communications engineering at the University of Karlsruhe. In the early 1970s, he and others founded the company SAP, where he has held the roles of Chief Executive Officer and, until the middle of last year, Chairman of the Supervisory Board. Forbes currently lists him and his family, with an estimated fortune of 12.1 billion US dollars, in place 164 among the richest people in the world and in place 10 among the richest people in Germany.
Wang Laichun studied automation in Beijing. She later co-founded (and chaired) the electronics manufacturer Luxshare-ICT. She is considered to be the second richest woman in China. On the Forbes list of the richest people in the world, she is ranked 417th with a fortune of 6.6 billion US dollars.
The figures are taken from the World’s Billionaire list published by Forbes Magazine in 2024. The daily updated net worth of all the 2,781 billionaires in the world can be found in Forbes’ “Real-Time” ranking: https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires
