Billionaires may be different from the rest of us. But they are also different from each other in how they become rich. Generally, they divide into two classes: innovators and inheritors.
What is striking about the 10 richest US billionaires is that they are mostly innovators. Several of them, including Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Bill Gates of Microsoft, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, founded their own tech businesses.
These founder billionaires have amassed their fortunes from the astonishing rise in their companies’ stock market valuations. Microsoft and Amazon are both individually worth more today than all of Germany’s 30 biggest companies listed on the Dax. This is the triumph of Big Tech and new money.