Elon Musk is no longer the world’s richest man, but who are Britain’s biggest billionaires?
Elon Musk is no longer the world’s richest person according to the Forbes World’s Billionaires List 2023.
The declining value of Tesla shares and his expensive acquisition of Twitter have let Bernard Arnault, head of luxury conglomerate LVMH, take his place.
Arnault is the first ever Frenchman to be the world’s richest person.
It was a bad year for billionaires globally, with falling stocks and rising interest rates hitting the world’s wealthiest. There are 2,640 billionaires worldwide, down from 2,668 last year.
51 Britons appear in Forbes’ annual World’s Billionaires this year compared to 85 in 2022. Together, Britain’s billionaires are $206.3bn this year compared to $385.1bn last year, a difference of $178bn.
It is likely that the fall in the pound against the dollar, down around 4.6 per cent compared to this time last year, squeezed some Brits off the list.
The richest Briton is James Ratcliffe, founder and owner of chemicals firm Ineos Group, worth $22.9bn, ranking him 67th globally.
Andrew Currie and John Reece, both directors at Ineos who joined shortly after Ratcliffe, are Britain’s fourth and fifth richest people respectively with fortunes of $7.6bn each, placing them 290th globally.
Britain’s second richest person, worth $16bn and ranked 106th globally, is Michael Platt co-founder and CEO of the hedge fund BlueCrest Capital Management.
James Dyson, inventor of the Dyson vacuum cleaner, is Britain’s third richest person, ranked 206th globally and worth $9.3bn.
Forbes calculated its list on the basis of publicly available information on stocks and assets, using exchange rates current on March 10 2023.