Tadashi Yanai is living out his dream. Of all the many art books lining his wood-panelled office in Tokyo, the most “sacred text” turns out to be a Next catalogue from 1987, shot by the now famous Vogue and Vanity Fair photographer Koto Bolofo. “This inspired me most, back in the Eighties,” says Yanai, who at 77 is Japan's richest man with a fortune put at around $69bn. “Ordinary people looking cool and casual… I wanted to deliver this kind of clothing for current times. Clothes to make people happy.”

You know when a brand has conquered the zeitgeist when the vocabulary around it goes mainstream. For Uniqlo – the fast-fashion phenomenon with a mission to dress the world in its anonymously chic “wardrobe building blocks” – that moment came when the word “unibare” entered the lexicon, says The Times. It expresses the moment you realise that someone is wearing Uniqlo, “rather than anything more expensive”.

In April, shares in Fast Retailing – Uniqlo's parent company – hit a record high on the back of roaring overseas growth in the US and Europe, says Bloomberg. They've now gained 45% year-to-date. Fast Retailing is the third biggest apparel company in the world after Zara's Inditex and the H&M stable, and its humble brown paper bags have become a fixture from Oxford Street to Fifth Avenue.

In a business culture “famed for grey conformity”, Tadashi Yanai “can't help but swim against the tide”, says Time – happily flaunting his success despite local taboos against ostentatious wealth. He owns two golf courses on the Hawaiian island of Maui alone. Yet when you walk with him through Uniqlo he reveals some “quintessentially Japanese traits”, says Bloomberg Businessweek: “attention to detail, supply-chain prowess, minimalist aesthetics” – and frugality.

Tadashi Yanai was born into the rag trade

Tadashi Yanai grew up in the trade – his parents ran a menswear shop in Ube on the main Japanese island of Honshu. The event that changed his life was the Vietnam war, which interrupted his studies in political economy at Tokyo's Waseda University because of a student walk-out. The break enabled him to travel to the US and UK, where the proliferation of mid-market clothing shops planted a seed. In 1972, after a brief stint selling men's clothes for a supermarket chain, Tadashi Yanai was handed the keys to his father's now expanded business.

In 1984 he opened the first branch of the Unique Clothing Warehouse in Hiroshima to pursue a more casual style. The firm's big breakthrough came in 1998 – as Japan was reeling from its burst economic bubble – when Yanai opened Uniqlo's first Tokyo outlet and sold a lightweight fleece for just £15. “Every fourth Japanese consumer bought one.”

When Tadashi Yanai published his autobiography, One Win and Nine Losses, he had a cathartic time describing his many mistakes down the years – not least overhasty expansion efforts, which necessitated a humiliating retreat. These days, Uniqlo's expansion is more measured, but has a relentless quality, says The Times. Having targeted national capitals, it's going for the regions – in the past year, opening new British stores in Liverpool, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Bristol. A series of designer collaborations – with minimalist Jil Sander and, latterly, Dior maestro Jonathan Anderson – has boosted the brand's appeal.

Tadashi Yanai, who is building sponsorship programmes with art galleries globally, has strong ideas about being “a force for good” and giving back to society. Yet he runs his own fiefdom like “a dictator”, says Time. With two sons now working in the business, questions about the succession abound. But he's giving nothing away. “When I get older my dream is to take a walk every day on the streets of London” – a continuing source of inspiration, he told The Telegraph in 2015. No sign of that happening any time soon.

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Elon Musk is an abrasive and frequently infuriating presence and is the focal point of loathing for the establishment. In the UK, members of the Labour cabinet view him as a threat to the administrative order. Yet he is a living example of the Great Man theory of history; “great” meaning a person of consequence, rather than good. The theory is that a single, determined will can move humanity more than the masses. The modern world would rather fiddle and legislate while Elon Musk seeks to act and solve civilisational challenges.

No number of committee meetings could conjure a Starship booster returning from the edge of orbit. This skyscraper-sized rocket fell through the sky only to be plucked to safety by mechanical chopsticks. A decade ago, this would have appeared only in science fiction, but today it is a reality. This is just one example of the way Musk's maniacal focus pushes the boundaries of the possible. Musk has many detractors, particularly in political circles. But politicians curate their personas to seek approval; people like Musk actually drive progress. History will record the man who caught the skyscraper-sized rocket long after his critics are forgotten.

Elon Musk is dedicated to human progress

Musk was already very rich by the age of 27 after netting $22 million from the sale of his first business, Zip2. The sale of PayPal a few years later made him another $180 million. He was barely 30 and possessed enough wealth to purchase a private island and vanish from public view. Instead, he chose to dedicate himself to “the mission” of human progress. He views wealth as fuel for missions rather than a reward for success.

He founded SpaceX and funded Tesla as attempts to solve humanity's challenges. He viewed the stagnation of aerospace and the slow development of electric cars as problems that required a focused, engineering-based response. By committing $100 million to rockets and $70 million to electric vehicles, he bet most of his wealth that he could solve the problems. He couldn't do this alone, but his willingness to bet big acted as a radical sorting mechanism for recruitment. Elite engineers joined because they recognised a founder willing to risk bankruptcy in the pursuit of a better future.

In 2008 the dream almost ended as both firms spiralled toward collapse. SpaceX had endured three launch failures and could afford one more failure before bankruptcy. Tesla was weeks away from exhausting its cash. Musk was borrowing money for rent while sleeping on factory floors to supervise production. Many would sacrifice one company to save the other, but he refused. Only a contract win from US space agency Nasa prevented liquidation. This helped create a culture in his companies that treats adversity as a mere stepping stone towards achieving the objective.

“Idiot Index”: the key to Elon Musk's success

The key to his success is to focus on what is possible, not what has been done before. Musk operates on the principle that “the only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation”. His method is to strip a problem down to fundamental parts and then reason towards the goal. Most managers make incremental changes to existing models; Musk rejects precedent, believing the way things have always been done is irrelevant to the way they should be. He applies a metric known as the “Idiot Index” to maintain this discipline. This measures the ratio of a finished product's cost to the costs of its raw materials. A high ratio, such as is typical for space rockets, indicates an inefficient process. Musk expects his engineers to identify the best and worst parts of their systems through this lens at all times. This approach allowed Tesla to cut battery costs and manufacturing time by focusing on the component elements, not simply the price of the finished product.

He puts these principles into practice through five steps. First, question every step in the process and seek out flaws. Second, cut out any unnecessary part or process. Third, simplify or optimise, but only after part two is exhausted so as to avoid optimising a process that should not be there. Fourth, accelerate. Fifth and finally, automate. This sequence ensures engineers never waste effort on perfecting an irrelevance.

The Tesla Giga Press is an example. Traditionally, car manufacturers built underbodies by welding 70 or more separate parts together. Most accepted this complexity because they followed tradition. Musk looked at the simplicity of toy car manufacturing and wondered why full-sized vehicles were not cast as single pieces. He commissioned the creation of the largest casting machines in the world to produce a car underbody in one operation. This eliminated hundreds of robots from the production line and drastically improved structural rigidity. By scaling up the logic of a toy, he proved that a better, cheaper and stronger vehicle could be built more quickly and with fewer potential areas for failure.

Twitter layoffs illustrated Price's Law

The acquisition of Twitter (now called X) and the changes brought about there was an experiment in Price's Law. This states that in any productive domain, the square root of the total number of people involved produces 50% of the results. So in a firm of 10,000 people, 100 individuals would account for 50% of the total value. This suggests that most people in a large workforce are redundant. When Musk reduced the headcount at Twitter by 80%, critics predicted a collapse. They assume that productivity is a function of the number of hours worked by the average employee. Price's Law reveals that productivity is concentrated in a tiny elite.

Price's Law is a counter to Marxian economics, which assumes that the worth of a product derives from the labour time required to produce it, seeing progress as a collective process. Musk works on the idea that you should only employ the real talent. Even then, once an employee is no longer driving the mission forward, they are replaced by someone who will. In X, he maintained the output of the platform while shedding the bureaucratic weight that had stifled innovation. The results were a faster and more feature-rich platform.

The modern Western world is choked by layers of managers managing managers who contribute nothing useful. These individuals thrive on the belief that committees lead to better outcomes. In high-stakes engineering and innovation, however, the many are a burden on the few who actually build. This “special forces” model of management prioritises individual brilliance over collective averages. By identifying and motivating this core, Musk forces a level of productivity that bureaucracies can't replicate.

Elon Musk has achieved orbital hegemony

Musk is perhaps best known for his relationship with Donald Trump or his management of Tesla, but his most impressive achievement is SpaceX. SpaceX has achieved a global monopoly through sheer competence. By 2025, SpaceX was responsible for delivering about 90% of the total weight of usable cargo moved into space. Most of the rest was handled by China. Musk achieved this by refusing to accept the “aerospace welfare state” that had defined the industry. Since the 1960s, firms such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin operated under cost-plus contracts, a system that essentially rewarded inefficiency where the government reimburses all costs and adds a guaranteed fee for profit, ensuring that the longer a project overran, the more the contractor was paid.

Musk set SpaceX's engineers to build rockets that were not just functional, but also economically superior. The result was to go back to first principles on every conceivable part of a space rocket, from materials used, to complexity of design and, most notably, reusability. Before SpaceX, throwing away a multi-million-dollar rocket after a single flight was normal. Musk viewed this as an absurdity, akin to discarding a Boeing 747 after a one-way trip across the Atlantic. SpaceX pioneered the landing and reuse of boosters and has reduced the cost of access to space by an order of magnitude. The Pentagon estimates that this shift has already saved the US taxpayer more than $40 billion in procurement costs.

The difference between SpaceX's “special forces” engineering culture and Boeing's bureaucracy is clear when you compare their passenger spacecraft. Despite receiving billions more in funding, Boeing's programme was plagued by years of delays and emergency technical failures, while SpaceX's leaner team delivered a reliable service for 60% less cost per seat. This performance gap continues to widen. The introduction of the SpaceX Starship V3 is intended to enable full reusability. Each engine generates more thrust than a jumbo jet, while the system is designed to be flown, landed and relaunched with high frequency. Soon SpaceX might render traditional expendable rockets obsolete.

Elon Musk's superpower

Ten years ago, Elon Musk was influential but relatively uncontroversial; his alignment with Trump has since made him a more polarising figure. But this political foray too reflects an engineering mindset rather than a thirst for office. Musk views the US state as a legacy system suffering from bloat. He applied his management process to the federal bureaucracy with characteristic ruthlessness. An initial audit uncovered “zombie payments” worth hundreds of billions of dollars. These funds were being sent to individuals who were either deceased, or, according to government records, not born yet. This foray into public service was only ever temporary and he completed a 100-day contract. His reason for doing it was that he believed it was the right thing to do. He didn't care that alignment with Trump would draw fury.

Musk believes that one of his greatest powers is simply not caring what people think of him. This insulation stems from his neuro-atypicality. Musk, who has said he has Asperger syndrome, tends to prioritise data over social cues; ignoring consensus and focusing on physical constraints, often treating social norms as secondary to progress. In the UK, energy secretary Ed Miliband has branded Musk a “dangerous person” and told him to keep out of this country and its politics. The irony is that Miliband, a man who has spent his entire professional life in non-jobs and a zealous proponent of net-zero, is criticising the man who has done more for sustainable energy through Tesla and SolarCity (yet another of Musk's firms) than any person alive. British ministers talk about some better future, but it's people like Musk who are building it. Politicians can only legislate, they can't magic into existence space-based clean energy (another of Musk's missions).

Let history be the judge of Elon Musk

Musk is a difficult man. We should not expect him to be easy or agreeable, as such traits are rarely found in those who actually change the world. If it were not for people like him dreaming about what is over the next hill, humanity would still be a small group of cavemen huddled together in fear. History will judge Musk by the 250-tonne rocket he caught and the progress he forced, not by the social approval he never sought.

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Ryan Cohen, the “rebel CEO” behind GameStop, didn't mince his words when eBay rejected his audacious $56 billion hostile bid earlier this month – slamming the global e-commerce player as a “literally obese” organisation “run by losers”. Indeed, for Ryan Cohen, the rejection is just the preliminary salvo of what might turn out to be a protracted war, says the Financial Times.

Despite multiple unanswered questions about how GameStop, which is valued at roughly $11 billion, could realistically finance the takeover of a company worth about $47 billion, he remains unabashed. “The more [eBay] fight me, the more… I'm not going to take no for an answer.”

It's that kind of fighting talk that has made the 40-year-old Canadian entrepreneur turned activist investor a “cult-like figure” among followers, who dub him the “Meme King”. Cohen's schtick has always been betting on ideas that many institutional investors thought absurd. First, it was online pet supplies (Chewy); then a dying strip mall video-game retailer (GameStop). Cohen has “cultivated this mystique – often communicating cryptically on social media with deliberately vague messages that retail traders try to dissect”.

Indeed, his pursuit of eBay has been a textbook case in how to rally the modern crowd, says Time. As well as issuing and selling new shares to GameStop's enthusiastic investors and putting the proceeds towards his war chest, he has “doubled down on his theatrics, announcing in an X post that he was selling stuff on eBay to pay for eBay”. Fans buying up collectables and GameStop merchandise on the site raised about $169,000, says Business Insider. That's “a drop in the bucket” of what Cohen needs to finance his bid. But the value of the publicity was priceless. It's a measure of his “market-moving power” that traders on betting platforms Kalshi and Polymarket are still willing to place real-money wagers on GameStop's success, says Time.

Ryan Cohen didn't go to college, but as a teenager taught himself coding and cut his business teeth designing websites for his father's business and other family friends, says The New York Times. In 2011, Cohen founded an online pet-goods retailer, Chewy, convinced he could fill a gap in the market because of “the substandard service” provided by big pet retailers, says Fortune. One hundred investors rejected the idea, convinced he could never compete with Amazon and citing the demise of Pets.com in the early 2000s as a cautionary tale. But his determination and outstanding customer service paid off. Chewy became such a thorn in the side of PetSmart that it acquired it for $3.3 billion in 2017.

What Ryan Cohen plans to do next

In 2019, Ryan Cohen founded RC Ventures to take advantage of the burgeoning “meme stock frenzy”. He made about $56 n/m after taking a 10% stake in ailing retailer Bed Bath & Beyond and flipping it the same year, cementing a 56% gain. Then in 2021 he bought a stake in GameStop and became CEO in 2023. Cohen has big plans, says The Wall Street Journal. His chutzpah attracted Michael Burry, the investor made famous by the film The Big Short, who bought into his vision of using GameStop's giant cash holdings to make transformative acquisitions.

Perhaps the biggest blow to Cohen's pursuit of eBay is that Burry has dropped out, nervous about the debt needed to make it happen. Cohen's plan is to drive up eBay's operating margins to 40% and double down on high-value markets such as collectables and luxury goods, leveraging GameStop stores as fulfilment hubs. “Analysts remain unconvinced,” says the FT. But if successful in his “boldest gamble yet”, Cohen will lead “the first major meme-stock-driven deal”. For the moment, he's enjoying the ride. “It's fun. It makes me feel alive.”

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Ted Turner, who has died aged 87, will be remembered primarily as “one of the great innovators of television”. And if Orson Welles' 1941 film Citizen Kane had been made 60 years later, there's a chance that the inspiration for Kane – newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst – would have been updated to Turner, the flamboyant, maverick founder of CNN who had an emotional hinterland every bit as complicated as Hearst's, says The Guardian.

In life, Ted Turner was arguably luckier than Hearst was. He was a master yachtsman who successfully defended the America's Cup in 1977 with an amateur crew and a second-hand boat – and, in later life, he was a pioneering champion of “global understanding” and environmentalism. Not the least of his achievements, says the FT, was helping to save the American bison from extinction.

A man of “restless reach”, who oversaw a vast empire of news, sports and entertainment channels, Ted Turner “cut a brash and vivid figure”, says The New York Times. To his chagrin, he was nicknamed “The Mouth of the South” and, in the early days at least, was often underestimated. When he launched CNN (Cable News Network) in Atlanta in 1980 as the world's first round-the-clock news service, the venture met with predictions it would “crash in flames”, says the FT.

But Ted Turner was convinced there was an opening in the market, partly because he was fed up with returning from work at 7pm and finding he had missed the evening bulletin, notes his CNN obituary. CNN proved a ground-breaker, says Porter Bibb, Turner's biographer. It redefined news and served as the benchmark for all who followed.

Ted Turner was born Robert Edward Turner III, in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1938. His father, Ed, was “a man of violent mood swings and ruinously heavy drinking habits” who shot himself in the family home when Ted was 24. Already by this time a playboy, Ted Turner might have blown his inheritance. Instead, he set about building an empire.

A key move came in 1970, when he took over the heavily loss-making Atlanta TV station WJRJ and slowly built it up with cartoons, old movies and extensive coverage of the Atlanta Braves baseball team.

Ted Turner was “the first media mogul to buy into sports as programme fodder for his network”, notes The Guardian, buying the team in 1976 to protect his TV franchise.

Eventually, the combination of sport and movies drove the ratings of his “super-station” through the roof – paving the way for CNN. From the start, CNN was deliberately international. Its impact soared during the Gulf War of 1990-1991 when it was the only Western TV station allowed to stay in Baghdad, says the FT. The channel set new standards for its coverage of breaking conflicts and crises – and was cited by some as a key factor in the collapse of the Iron Curtain.

Ted Turner the philanthropist

In 1996, Turner sold CNN to Time Warner, remaining an active member of the board. It left him more time to spend with actress Jane Fonda – the love of his life, third wife and fellow campaigner – on their Montana ranch. But within a few years disaster struck after Time Warner was acquired by AOL in 2001 in what came to be regarded as “one of the most value-destroying takeovers of all time”, says The Telegraph. Turner “lost upwards of $8 billion”. The same year, Fonda divorced him.

Still, he had “a billion or two left”, as he put it, and threw himself into ranching and ecology – in 2011, he was estimated to be the largest landowner in America – and in 2015 made good on an earlier pledge to donate $1 billion to the UN. He was diagnosed with dementia in 2018 and withdrew from public life: his five children serve on the board of the Turner Foundation. “Given his childhood,” Fonda told CNN, “he should've become a dictator… The miracle is that he became what he is. A man who will go to heaven.”

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It's unknown who first nicknamed Mark Mobius, the legendary US stock-picker who has died aged 89, the “Indiana Jones of emerging-market investment”. But he certainly enjoyed playing up to the moniker. “The places I like to be are the places where nobody else wants to be” was a typical pitch, says The Telegraph. “I want to be there when there's blood on the streets,” he said. “Problems, crashes, people jumping out of windows… Fantastic.”

Mark Mobius, who ran the Templeton Emerging Markets Fund for nearly three decades until 2018 – growing it from $100 million to more than $40 billion under his leadership – certainly made many winning bets during crises, says Forbes India. He cleaned up buying quality stocks at rock-bottom prices during the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the Russian panic a year later, continuing the theme through the dotcom bust, the 2008 global financial meltdown and all subsequent dips. “If you see light at the end of the tunnel, it's too late to buy” was a favourite maxim.

At his peak, Mark Mobius was famous for criss-crossing the world in his Gulfstream jet (he travelled for 250-300 days a year), swooping down on bashed-up bargains. But his gung-ho rhetoric concealed more nuanced thinking, and his many books “offered an unusually human view of global finance”, says CNBC. “If you want to understand a market, start with its people,” Mobius wrote. The line distilled his belief that on-the-ground observation mattered more than abstract theory.

Mark Mobius observed in his biography that he had “toured rubber plantations in Thailand and road-tested bikes over the pothole-ridden roads of rural China”, says the Financial Times. He elaborated how he'd “choked on roast camel's meat, sheep's eyeball, guinea pig and dined (surprisingly well) on scorpions on toast”. He was a great storyteller whose calm manner and encyclopaedic knowledge reassured Western investors uneasy about political risk, currency volatility and opaque governance. “People say emerging markets are dangerous places to invest,” he once remarked. “But Bernie Madoff operated in the US for years.”

Mobius is quite rightly acclaimed for opening up a massive new investment class. But the nattily dressed “godfather of emerging markets” was held in equal affection in many of the territories he targeted, says Business Today (India). “He came to India during the economic liberalisation phase of 1991-1992 and fell in love with an expanding economy and its booming stockmarkets,” as well as its people and culture – and remained “a perma Indian bull” all his life. It was a similar story in China and Hong Kong, says the South China Morning Post.

Mark Mobius was a master at finding value

Mark Mobius' family background had nothing to do with finance – but it did open him up to different cultures. His German-born father, Paul, was a ship's cook and baker; his mother Maria was from Puerto Rico. Brought up on Long Island, he studied communications at Boston University, completed a doctorate in economics at MIT in 1964, and worked as a teacher before turning to investment, says The Telegraph. He moved to Hong Kong in 1967 and established his own research and investment business, later working for the British stockbroking firm of Vickers da Costa before the veteran investor John Templeton – himself a past master of spotting hidden value and a pioneer of global investment – invited him to create an emerging-markets fund. The rest is history.

Mobius's lean features and shaved head – a look he adopted in the 1960s after a fire in his apartment damaged his hair – made him a ringer for the Russian-American actor Yul Brynner. But he had his own unique magnetism, says Business Today. There was nothing of the US economic imperialist about him. He was a bridge-builder – and will be sorely missed.

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The true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto – the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin – is perhaps "the biggest unsolved mystery of the technology world", says Satyen Bordoloi on Sify.com. For 18 years, Nakamoto has been searched for, speculated about and occasionally wrongly outed. But could he/she/they have been hiding in plain sight all along?

That is the contention of New York Times journalist John Carreyrou, who believes he has finally established the true identity of the inventor of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. He points the finger at Adam Back – a mild-mannered 55-year-old British developer, with the air of “a dishevelled mathematician”, who was active in the cryptocurrency from its inception in 2008 and has since “built a mini empire of Bitcoin-related companies and become one of the community's most influential members”.

Back, who is based in Malta, has been named before and he denies the charge. What triggered Carreyrou's two-year investigation was an appearance he made as an expert witness on a 2024 HBO documentary Money Electric. Carreyrou found the film's contention that Satoshi Nakamoto was the Canadian crypto expert Peter Todd unconvincing. But a scene showing Back “fidgeting” nervously when asked if he was Satoshi Nakamoto was a light-bulb moment. He now claims that forensic linguistic analysis shows “striking similarities” between Back's emails and posts and Satoshi's known output – and also in their shared enthusiasms, bugbears, coding preferences and esoteric knowledge. Back dismisses Carreyrou's evidence.

“Whatever the truth” about Adam Back's contribution, he certainly “helped shape the ideas behind the cryptocurrency”, says The Sunday Times. The melting pot from which bitcoin eventually emerged was a 1990s libertarian movement that called itself Cypherpunk – an international group of mathematicians, cryptographers, coders and anarchists who met online and debated on early internet forums. At the time, Back was a PhD student in computer science at the University of Exeter.

Is Adam Back Satoshi Nakamoto?

It was a fellow student who alerted Adam Back to a free encryption program called PGP (“Pretty Good Privacy”), which people used to avoid surveillance. Money was in the Cypherpunks' sights from the beginning. “To me, crypto anarchy is a means to achieve a more libertarian government,” Back wrote in 1996 – a decentralising message echoed in the white paper Satoshi Nakamoto wrote when he introduced his “Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” more than a decade later. Satoshi Nakamoto also used Hashcash – “a statistical, puzzle-solving system” invented by Adam Back – to mine the first bitcoins. An early clue to Satoshi Nakamoto's nationality – seized upon by some – was his use of a British expletive.

Despite regular appearances at industry events, Adam Back remains guarded about his personal life and privacy, says The Sunday Times. The Carreyrou thesis has cast an unwelcome spotlight. Like The Economist, Back believes that if Satoshi Nakamoto was exposed as a real person, “the world of bitcoin would lose much of its magic”.

Carreyrou remains convinced he's found “the right man”, but we've been here before. Ultimately, the only means of proving Satoshi Nakamoto's identity is “cryptographic”, says Sify. Without evidence of a “private key signature”, or “verified movement of Satoshi's wallets”, even the most forensic investigation is nothing more than a “hypothesis”. The identity of the inventor of Bitcoin remains a mystery.

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A few years back, Aliko Dangote, Africa's richest man and an ardent Arsenal FC fan, reluctantly abandoned his dream of buying the London club – saying he had no “excess liquidity” because he was channelling everything he had into his biggest project yet: the continent's largest oil refinery.

That act of self-discipline is now richly rewarding Dangote, says The Economist. Since the start of the war with Iran, his phone hasn't stopped ringing with offers for his gasoline, diesel and aviation fuel.

“People are ready to pay anything now,” he says. Aliko Dangote's $20 billion refinery complex, which spans “an area nearly half the size of Manhattan” outside Lagos in Nigeria, can process 650,000 barrels a day. It is by far the largest scheme owned by the Dangote Group, the cement-to-sugar conglomerate behind his estimated $28.5 billion fortune. But Dangote, 68, suggests it symbolises something more: seeing the plant as a clarion call for the continent to become more self-reliant. “If we Africans don't lead in the industrialisation of Africa, Africa will never industrialise.”

“No one should confuse the tycoon with an altruist” – Dangote's many critics argue he milks state-backed monopolies in several essential sectors, now including oil. Still, the refinery is “a macroeconomic feat as well as an industrial one”. Last year the International Monetary Fund estimated that, if run at full capacity, it would boost Nigeria's non-oil GDP by 1.5% between 2025 and 2026, and boost official dollar reserves by $5.5 billion annually. Double that, says Business Day Nigeria: Dangote has just announced plans to expand capacity to 1.4 million barrels per day and is also scaling up the group's fertiliser and polypropylene plants. The refinery has blown apart a bad trade for Nigeria, says Business Insider. For decades, it was forced to export its crude – and then spend billions importing refined fuel.

How Aliko Dangote built his billions

Trading runs in the family. Aliko Dangote's great-grandfather, as he told Time in 2014, was “a kola nut trader, and the richest man in West Africa at the time of his death”. His own father was a businessman and politician, though he was raised by his grandfather. “It's traditional in my culture for the grandparents to take the first grandchild and raise it. I had a lot of love, and it gave me a lot of confidence.” After studying business at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, he started trading himself in the 1970s – eventually gaining “exclusive import rights” for cement, sugar and salt, says The Economist. Generations of influence helped. At the turn of the century he started making cement, and Dangote Cement “became the concrete foundation of his fortune”. The move into oil refining promises to be just as transformative.

Aliko Dangote is still the only African among the world's 100 richest people, according to Forbes. He has appointed his three daughters – Fatima, Mariya and Halima – to head key operations across his group, while honing his contacts at events such as Davos – Cherie Blair is an independent director of the group's board. Mild-mannered and courteous in person, Aliko Dangote has a tendency to lecture other wealthy Nigerians on their responsibilities, says Business Insider, especially those seduced by luxury consumption.

“If you have money for a Rolls-Royce, you should go and put up an industry in your locality… or wherever you feel there is a need.” No wonder he puts backs up.

But Aliko Dangote has done Nigerians a real service, says Feyi Fawehinmi in the FT. Since coming online in 2024, his refinery has saved the country “dollars and dignity”. Fuel shortages have long been an “obsession” in Nigeria. But “when supply is reliable “both the economy and the national mood shift”. Dangote's great contribution has been “the quiet revolution of availability”.

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Is Market Financial Solutions (MFS) a canary or a cockroach? Possibly both. The niche Mayfair-based mortgage company founded by Paresh Raja and specialising in bridging loans, which was put into administration in February, has become the leitmotif of increasing unease in the private-credit market, which some claim is a $2 trillion time-bomb.

Creditors – including Barclays, Jefferies, Wells Fargo and Apollo's structured credit arm, Atlas SP Partners – are facing an “alleged shortfall” of £1.3 billion and are “scrambling to figure out what their collateral is actually worth amid allegations of double-pledging”, says the Financial Times. The fear is that MFS might be the harbinger of more blow-ups to come.

Paresh Raja, who is now in Dubai, denies any wrongdoing. “Mistakes have been made but there has been no intention to defraud whatsoever and Mr Raja has not been the beneficiary of any shortfall (if any) there may be,” his lawyers told The Telegraph. However, he has been hit with a worldwide freezing order while accusations of fraud are investigated, says the Financial Times; he has been “barred from spending more than £5,000 a week without administrators' consent” and must provide details of all his assets worth more than £10,000.

“Once again, some of Wall Street's most sophisticated players” – already scarred by the collapse of First Brands and Tricolor in the US last year – “missed the warning signs”, says The Wall Street Journal. Even a preliminary delve into MFS's business might have raised concerns.

The firm backed dozens of property deals linked to Saifuzzaman Chowdhury, a former land minister in Bangladesh who, along with family members, built a sprawling $295 million property portfolio from 1992 until August 2024, when the government of Sheikh Hasina collapsed amid student protests. In June 2025, the UK's National Crime Agency froze 342 properties linked to Chowdhury, worth about £185 million, as part of “an ongoing civil investigation”.

Creditor allegations against Paresh Raja – who created a complicated web of entities, many registered under the names of Greek and Roman gods, to house the loans he had secured using MFS's loan book as collateral – paint “a damning picture” of his self-described “re-financing merry-go-round”, says the FT. There are allegations that eight companies that were supposedly “genuine borrowers” from MFS were actually “closely connected” to the owner. It has emerged that some listed directors and shareholders of corporate borrowers also held positions at MFS's accountants.

Who is Paresh Raja?

The details of Paresh Raja's biography are thin. He worked in consultancy before launching MFS in 2006 to fill a gap in the market by offering “bespoke loans” and financing – covering everything from buy-to-let mortgages, to refurbishments and conversions. Two years in, the global credit crunch hit, but that proved a catalyst for growth. “It suddenly became very difficult to get finance from mainstream lenders” and property investors “appreciated the utility of the specialist market”, recalled Raja. He embraced clients rejected by high-street banks. “We look for reasons to issue a loan, rather than finding excuses not to.”

For all Paresh Raja's efforts to raise its profile, the firm remained “barely known outside its corner of finance”, says Bloomberg. In December, employees descended on the five-star Peninsula Hotel for a lavish black-tie Christmas event. It turned out to be a last hurrah. Alarmed by events in the US, MFS's creditors instigated extra checks on their loan books. In January, Barclays froze MFS's accounts, triggering the unravelling that prompted the firm's collapse. In 2025, Paresh Raja was named “Disruptor of the Year” by one media group. That now sounds distinctly ironic.

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Matthew Partridge: James Caan – you founded Alexander Mann and co-founded Humana International, two successful recruitment companies. Would you say that today there's a risk that many university graduates heading into entry-level roles today are being replaced by AI?

James Caan: While I feel much depends on what type of degree the student gains and what they want to do, I do think we're heading for a car crash. I talk to a lot of the big corporate employers, such as Goldman Sachs or KPMG, and if you look at the graduate intake this year, it's going to be less than 50% of the previous year's level.

Up until now, the basic entry-level graduate would have done a research-oriented job. But research is now available at the click of a button, removing the need for someone sitting there for hours trawling through documents and information. Even law firms have significantly reduced their intake, with many of these jobs set to be phased out altogether.

Matthew Partridge: Won't eliminating these entry-level jobs make it harder to find tomorrow's managers and executives?

James Caan: It might, but I think the whole concept of management will change. After all, so much of it is about managing businesses through information, and now access to information, whether financial or operational, is going to be on steroids, both in terms of increased quantity but also accessibility. This, in turn, will drastically reduce the need for managers. What's more, the managers who remain will be much more analytical and data-orientated than today's people-orientated managers.

If you take the three largest recruitment companies in the world, Adecco, Randstad and Manpower, you can see that their share prices have crashed over the last two years. This suggests that the market doesn't believe that the number of jobs they will fill, as well as the fees that they generate, will be anywhere near where they used to be, so my outlook for the job market is very bearish.

Matthew Partridge: So what sort of degrees should students looking to get a job after university do?

James Caan: Unless they want to follow a specific path, such as medicine, I don't think it is possible to generalise. However, I would say that degrees involving learning to work with data, whether through physics, maths or science, are going to be much more valuable. It is also important to realise that education is about more than just getting a degree; it's about capability, confidence and critical thinking. I left school at 16 because I wanted to get on with building something. Later, I went to Harvard because I wanted to sharpen what I had learned through experience. Both experiences were “education”. At the very least, the career departments of universities and schools need to reflect the careers of today with the advice they give students.

Matthew Partridge: You've been vocal about the need for change in the education system through your work with the Foundation for Education Development (FED). What sort of reforms would you like to see?

James Caan: Education is a very sensitive subject for me because I feel passionately that the UK's education system has not kept up with the times, with students that are coming out of schools ill-equipped for the jobs that exist today. The key problem is that the education system dates back to the 1950s idea of GCSEs and A-levels leading on to university, even though the economy has changed dramatically over that period. The problem is made even worse by the fact that many teachers working today were trained 25 years ago, which means key aspects of their skill sets can't meet the needs of today's students.

When I talked to various people about incorporating technologies such as AI or animation into classrooms, they all say “It's a great idea, James, but we don't have the resources within the education system to deliver those courses because the teachers are just not equipped”. What is particularly worrying is that the [Persian] Gulf and China are way ahead of us in terms of using AI and technology to provide advanced education at schools and universities, and their offerings are starting to overtake what's available in our institutions. Even Oxford, Cambridge and the LSE are falling behind, which means that they, and the country, could lose their income from overseas students.

Matthew Partridge: Is the solution to bring more money into education, or change the way in which education is delivered?

James Caan: The discussion has shifted towards skills, apprenticeships and employability, not just academic routes. The decision to refocus public funding away from master's-level apprenticeships is a clear signal of intent: prioritise earlier-stage, broader access to training. We also need to deliver lessons better. Thanks to AI, even when the teacher isn't qualified to deliver a topic, you can now design bespoke courses, using content culled from world-class institutions, which can then be delivered by virtual avatars.

So, for instance, I've always been a big fan of teaching students the basics of personal finance, such as owning a credit card and opening a bank account, right through to the mechanics of setting up a company and issues such as limited liability. Yet when I've raised the issue, the big objection has always been that many of those teaching in schools today don't know that much about those topics either.

The good news, though, is that thanks to the explosion in information, there's so much content available that it should be relatively easy to design a course and program an avatar to deliver a lesson for 30 minutes, with the teacher dealing with any further questions that the pupils might have. While this might seem futuristic, I'm already seeing schools in the Gulf and China using such technology in this way.

Matthew Partridge: You were a presenter on Dragons' Den, a TV programme credited with promoting entrepreneurship. Do you think that we're becoming more entrepreneurial as a society?

James Caan: Dragons' Den did something very powerful. It normalised entrepreneurship. It showed people from all backgrounds that starting a business was not reserved for a particular class, education or network. It made business conversations part of mainstream culture. That visibility matters enormously because you cannot aspire to what you cannot see.

Historically, we have had a cautious culture. We are more comfortable with security than risk. To fail in business still carries a stigma here that it does not in the US or the Middle East. But this is changing. Younger generations are far more comfortable with enterprise, side businesses, and alternative career paths. The cultural shift is happening, but the system has not yet caught up with the ambition.

Matthew Partridge: A big criticism of British entrepreneurship is that those who do set up companies still focus more on selling themselves to larger groups than growing into global champions. Is this true, and if so, what are the reasons for it?

James Caan: There is a lot of truth in that. Access to sufficient capital to achieve scale in the UK is still more limited than in the US. Founders receive acquisition offers earlier than they should, and without the right support, selling can feel like the rational decision. But I also think Britain can change this if it gets serious about confidence and long-term growth. When sentiment improves, companies invest more, and founders hold their nerve. The January business readings show we are not there yet, but the direction matters.

We need patient capital, better advisory systems, and a culture that celebrates building enduring companies, not just quick exits. A great example of the sort of thinking required is Amazon. At present many listed firms think in quarterly cycles because they have to report every three months and therefore the time horizon for investment is very short. However, Amazon held fast to its view that they needed to invest in order to build a world-class platform that would make them and their investors' a lot of money. While this meant that Amazon received a ton of negative press until the platform was built, it quickly became one of the most successful firms in the world, showing the benefits of thinking a bit more longer term.

Matthew Partridge: The government has recently talked about trying to reduce the amount of red tape around business. Do you think that will work?

James Caan: Yes, we definitely need to reduce red tape. I mean, try opening a bank account tomorrow or getting a VAT or PAYE number. One of the companies I set up recently took five months to get a VAT number. It's just ridiculous. And the awful thing is that, with all today's technology, we should be able to do this online. How is it that I go to Barclays and it can take me four months to open an account, but I can open one with a fintech such as Revolut in ten minutes?

Some of the decisions that the government has taken haven't helped. The decision to hike national insurance was particularly ill-thought through; it looks as though the Treasury may end up losing money because of the reduced number of hires. Similarly, the tax hikes on some of the wealthy have resulted in people leaving the country. I don't think that the government understands how to implement policies to boost business and entrepreneurship.

Of course, I'm not against all tax rises, especially if they are used to fund retraining for workers displaced by AI. It might make sense to target the huge technology companies that are causing all the problems. However, by hiking employers' national insurance contributions to 15%, the only thing that you are going to do is to kill all the small companies.

James Caan CBE is the founder and CEO of private-equity firm Hamilton Bradshaw as well as chairman of both Recruitment Entrepreneur and Ingenia Global Partners. Between 2007 and 2012, he was on the panel of Dragons' Den. He has written four books on business.

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Zohran Mamdani: A socialist takes New York

“We cannot have a socialist” running “the greatest capitalist city in the world”, observed one Wall Street financier just before November’s mayoral election. Get used to it, said The New Yorker. On New Year’s Day, Zohran Mamdani will become the first avowedly socialist mayor of New York, and its first Muslim leader to boot, following a meteoric rise. A year ago, most had never heard of the youthful Assembly member from Queens. But Mamdani’s rising star – on a platform of soaking the rich to fund rent freezes, free bus travel and universal child care – has proved unstoppable.

Donald Trump, who once called Mamdani a “100% Communist lunatic” and threatened to deport him, changed his tune when he met him, staging a surreally chummy press conference with his charismatic fellow populist. “As well as coming from nowhere” to win New York, Mamdani has “succeeded in setting” America’s domestic economic agenda in 2025, making the issue of “affordability” the watchword of his slick TikTok campaign. Born in Uganda, Mamdani, 34, arrived in New York aged seven. His unremarkable CV since might suggest he’ll struggle to run a city with “the economy of a medium-sized nation”, says The Economist. And his hands are tied: the state legislature seems unlikely to pass his full $9 billion package of tax hikes. But the city’s fate ultimately depends on whether Mamdani shows “a pragmatic streak”, says The Wall Street Journal – or views “his mission” as “creating a socialist lab experiment”.

Javier Milei: El Loco stands at a crossroads

Argentina’s chainsaw-waving “libertarian firebrand” Javier Milei narrowly escaped financial meltdown this year – helped by a $20 billion lifeline from the Trump administration to avert a currency crisis and “Make Argentina Great Again” – before pulling off a surprising landslide in the country’s midterm elections, says Bloomberg.

Nicknamed “El Loco” (The Madman) as a teenage goalkeeper, Milei has often seemed determined “to perpetuate this reputation with his egotistical boasts and brutal attacks on critics”, notes The Washington Post – not to mention “his crazy hair, cloned dogs and claims of expertise at tantric sex”. Yet since coming to power in 2023, the results of his far-reaching free-market reforms have been impressive, says The Economist. Inflation is down from 211% to around 30%, the poverty rate has fallen and “the budget has been wrestled under control”. Milei is now moving towards a floating peso and removing most capital controls. The process has been painful, but voters have kept faith with his vow “to jolt” Argentina “out of more than a century of statism and stagnation”. Markets, in turn, have celebrated, judging the prospect of Milei’s re-election next year now more likely. “Rev up the chainsaw!”

Much could yet go wrong. Milei is now at a crossroads, Carlos Malamud, a Latin America specialist at Madrid’s Real Instituto Elcano, told the Financial Times. “He has everything he needs, if he gets it right… to lead a deep transformation of Argentina.” But if “arrogance gets the better of him again”, all bets are off.

Sanae Takaichi: Japan’s Iron Lady

The new Japanese premier, who made history in October when she became the country’s first female PM, has proved a gift for headline writers. Known for her love of hard rock and motorbikes – and citing Margaret Thatcher as an inspiration – Sanae Takaichi has gone “from Iron Maiden to the Iron Lady”, says Sky News. But she has taken a battering at the hands of bond markets. Since taking power, and shocking investors with a “low quality” fiscal expansion of $135 billion – “including such gems as rice vouchers and subsidies for fossil fuels” – yields on Japanese debt have “spiked wildly across the maturity curve”, says The Telegraph. The risk that this could escalate into a major crisis in Japan’s historically sedate $12 trillion bond market “has sent tremors” through the markets.

When it comes to dealing with Donald Trump, she appears to have learned from her mentor, the late Shinzo Abe, that “flattery, deference” and golf-related “gold-plated gifts” were the way to go. “Takaichi’s smorgasbord of giveaways” may make a “mockery of Thatcherism”, but she does share some traits with her heroine. “Like the late Iron Lady, she has little patience for other career women,” says The Telegraph. She belongs to Nippon Kaigi, “a nationalist nostalgia movement that fights feminism and harks back to the Samurai ideal of women as the anchor of home and family”. Still, unless she is careful with bond-market vigilantes, Takaichi runs the risk of comparison with another UK Conservative prime minister – Liz Truss.

Liang Wenfeng: The hedgie who shook the world

The entrepreneur behind DeepSeek began 2025 with a shot that rang around the world, says Fortune. Billions of dollars were wiped off the value of Silicon Valley’s AI titans in January when the unknown Chinese start-up revealed its prowess at developing cutting-edge AI at a fraction of the cost – raising doubts, that have lingered all year, about the gargantuan sums being spent in the West. “Whether by chance or design”, the launch of DeepSeek’s R1 coincided with Donald Trump’s inauguration, says Time, creating “a powerful narrative” that China had “matched America’s best with just a fraction of the computing power”. It was hardly the best start in Washington to a year of tight trade negotiations.

Liang Wenfeng, 40, who hails from a village in southern China, isn’t a computer whizz so much as a financier. After graduating from Zhejiang University, he co-founded the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer in 2016 – originally using AI as a trading strategy to predict market trends and help make investment decisions. In 2021, says the Financial Times, Liang began buying thousands of Nvidia chips as “an AI side project”. At the time, local business partners viewed this as “a quirky hobby”. But when he started DeepSeek in 2023 – and began challenging local rivals ByteDance and Alibaba – they sat up. DeepSeek has spent its short corporate life having to work around successive US bans on the export of vital chips to China. The upshot, says the South China Morning Post, is that Liang has become one of the most forceful drivers of China’s push for technological self-sufficiency.

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The boom in prediction markets this year has made it, alongside AI, one of the few industries where “young founders can become paper billionaires practically overnight”, says Bloomberg. Leading the pack are the 29-year-old duo behind Kalshi – Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara – who met as undergraduates at MIT. Both have interesting backgrounds. While Mansour grew up in Lebanon and had early dreams of becoming a competitive skier, Lopes Lara trained at the Bolshoi and became a ballerina in her native Brazil before moving to the US. This year, she became one of the youngest female self-made billionaires.

Kalshi has certainly performed un grand jeté. For six years the start-up – which offers wagers on everything from elections to pop-culture happenings – grew slowly, raising about $100 million in small funding rounds. Yet since June, its valuation has exploded by around 450% as outside investors have piled in and now stands at $11 billion.

The attraction isn’t hard to gauge. Once of primary interest to “quantitative political scientists”, prediction markets have evolved rapidly from their “quirky origins” to become “marketplaces for almost anything”, says the Financial Times: helped by some timely approvals from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and close connections with the new administration. In January, Donald Trump Jr joined Kalshi’s board as a strategic adviser. In August, he also joined the board (and invested in) its arch-rival Polymarket. Together, these companies dominate this hottest of sectors.

The event that put Kalshi on the map was the 2024 presidential election race when – having fought a lawsuit to become the first company to offer legal election contracts – it trounced traditional pollsters by correctly giving Donald Trump higher odds of victory.

But what has really greased its wheels this year has been a major move into sports betting: a gigantic, but still evolving US market where Kalshi is proving just as disruptive to established players. Investors are betting it will become “a sports-gambling behemoth”. But almost any event has profit potential, according to Matt Zhang of Hivemind Capital. “What these prediction markets have realised is that the news is a huge, liquid asset class.”

“There are few better trainings for being told ‘no’ and pushing through anyway than being a professional ballerina,” Alex Immerman, a partner at VC giant Andreessen Horowitz, told Forbes. Lopes Lara “learned persistence with grace early on… and she’s carried that same calm confidence into building Kalshi”. After graduating from the Bolshoi, she did a nine-month stint as a professional ballerina in Austria “before hanging up her pointe shoes” and heading for MIT to study computer science.

Lopes Lara spent her summers interning at Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates and Ken Griffin’s Citadel Securities. But it was a blossoming friendship with classmate Tarek Mansour that launched her entrepreneurial career. The pair became close and one evening “the idea of a prediction market business just clicked”, says Forbes.

The duo spent the pandemic years “building the company, fighting for federal regulation approval and getting early backing from significant players, such as Charles Schwab and Sequoia Capital”, says The New York Post. The gamble has paid off. Having each retained a 12% stake in Kalshi, she and Mansour are now worth $1.3 billion apiece.

Great battles lie ahead for Luana Lopes Lara's Kalshi

The biggest battles may lie ahead. As well as contending with growing competition from Polymarket and other contenders, Kalshi faces a big pushback against its sports-betting ambitions, says the FT. The year ended in a “significant” legal setback. But the battle will go on state by state and could end up in the Supreme Court. Lopes Lara will need every bit of her famous stamina.

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In 2008, a light aircraft crash-landed into a garden in Highclere, Hampshire. Both the pilot, Christopher Harborne, and the householders counted themselves lucky to have survived. Two years later, in a strange twist of fate, a plane carrying Nigel Farage plummeted to the ground after getting wrapped in a banner it was flying, says the Financial Times. “Both men suffered injuries, both recovered. And both are now trying to overturn Britain’s political order.”

Reform UK’s new mega-donor – a Thai-based aviation entrepreneur turned crypto tycoon – is rarely seen with Farage in public. He keeps a low profile. But long before he coughed up a record £9 million in a donation revealed this week, he had maintained a discreet presence as a key backer of Farage. Ahead of the 2019 European elections, he installed himself in the then Brexit Party’s campaign HQ – ordering in a coffee machine, a supply of gin, tonic and limes, and some “decent tumblers”, says The New Statesman.

UK public support for a hard Brexit that year saw the party, somewhat ironically, become the largest single national party in the European Parliament. Now Harborne is fully behind Farage’s quest to repeat the trick at Westminster. Farage’s big challenge at the moment is fighting claims in the press that as a schoolboy he was a racist bully. But the “slightly geeky” Cambridge engineering graduate sees political problems more as “a mathematical equation that is producing the wrong answer”, says one associate.

Christopher Harborne's early bet on crypto made him a fortune

Harborne, who is in his early 60s, was born in Britain but for more than two decades has lived and worked in Thailand where he has joint nationality and goes by the Thai name Chakrit Sakunkrit. “There’s a romantic side to him,” says one senior Reform member, who describes him as “a merchant adventurer with a great belief in this country”.

But others have questioned the transparency of an international business empire – which now includes a major shareholding in Tether, the biggest stablecoin, and its sister crypto exchange Bitfinex, as well as a sizeable chunk of the UK defence group QinetiQ. Harborne holds some assets in his English name, and others in that of his Thai alter ego.

Last year, he and his aviation fuel company AML Global won a defamation case against The Wall Street Journal for making “false accusations of fraud, money laundering and financing terrorism” in a 2023 article examining companies connected to Tether, says CoinDesk. The judgment noted that “when he became a naturalised Thai citizen, he was required to adopt a Thai name” for legal purposes.

Harborne worked as a consultant with McKinsey in the late 1980s before taking management positions at firms including Walkers and PepsiCo, notes The New Statesman. In 2003, Harborne registered AML Global in Thailand, later forming the Sherriff Global Group, which, among other things, trades private planes. AML would go on to win substantial contracts with the US government. But it was Harborne’s “early bet on cryptocurrencies” that really sealed his fortune, says the FT. He was in at the start of ethereum when it launched in 2014 at about $0.30 per token; that price has now mushroomed to roughly $3,300.

Harborne has his detractors in the Reform movement. Ben Habib – the breakaway founder of the hard-right Advance UK party – was incensed when Harborne gave the Conservative party £1.5 million in 2022 and donated £1 million to Boris Johnson’s private office after he stood down as Tory leader. “I think it’s rotten, Harborne is on every side of the trade.” Still, thanks to his longtime “silent donor”, Farage now has cash in the bag with which to fight the local elections next April, says The Times. “It’s his teenage self he has to beat.”

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They’d make a great band name. But Chen Zhi and the Prince Group are in fact a global scourge – combining two of the worst malaises of the age: people trafficking and cybercrime. Now Western authorities are getting tough, says The Guardian. In a grand swoop last month – dubbed “the largest action ever in Southeast Asia” – the US and UK sanctioned Chen and 146 other businesses connected to his Prince Group, accusing the company of detaining trafficked workers in “scam compounds” across Cambodia – and compelling them to “engage in a range of fraudulent schemes” that have sucked billions of dollars from victims globally.

The Chinese-born kingpin, Chen Zhi, 38 – also known as “Vincent” – has also been charged with wire-fraud conspiracy and money laundering, but “remains at large”. It could prove hard to pin him down. Chen is thought to have bought citizenship in Cyprus and the South-Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, as well as holding Cambodian nationality. Within Cambodia his power has grown. His rapid ascent to wealth has won him political influence, including reported roles advising the authoritarian former prime minister Hun Sen and his successor and son Hun Manet.

“Chen Zhi isn’t a mob boss as we traditionally conceive of them – he is (or rather was) the polished face of a state-protected criminal economy,” Jacob Sims, of Harvard University’s Asia Centre, told CNN. The “baby-faced tycoon” has risen to “the highest echelons of power in his adopted home” where “he bestows scholarships and runs philanthropy programmes, while overseeing one of the country’s largest and best-connected conglomerates”. At the height of his power, Chen and associates were making $30 million every day from their sprawling transnational criminal organisation, according to US prosecutors.

Who is Chen Zhi?

Born in 1987 in Fujian, a province in southeastern China, the now-removed website of Chen’s Singapore family office described him as a “young business prodigy” who cut his teeth setting up internet cafes and gaming centres in the provincial capital of Fuzhou, says Bloomberg. Chen subsequently renounced his Chinese citizenship, turned up in Cambodia and “began splashing enormous amounts of cash”, says CNN. His first investments from 2011 onwards were in real estate – Cambodia’s cities are dotted with Prince’s skyscrapers. But over the next decade, the group’s interests grew to span entertainment, finance and even an airline.

Assets across the region – including a Singaporean car-loan firm, and two listed companies in Hong Kong – are now on the sanctions list, says Bloomberg. Yet it seems Chen, who is married with three children and reportedly living in Singapore, didn’t see the threat coming. “As recently as the day the US charges went public,” his family office was advertising for a personal assistant for inflated pay of as much as $5,000 a month. The contrast with conditions in a cybercrime empire stretching to at least “10 forced labour camps” couldn’t be greater, says CNN. The US indictment describes “vast dormitories, surrounded by high walls and barbed wire” where incidences of violence and coercion were “frequent”.

These operations have hitherto gone largely unchallenged in Cambodia due to the “complete dismantling” of the country’s civil society and independent media. The question now is whether the US and UK can use their leverage to dismantle the lucrative industry. “This is the first time Washington and London have hit the architecture – the elite ownership, the laundering conduits, and the money itself – at the very top,” says Sims. Time will tell whether they can succeed – and catch Chen Zhi.

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In 2024, Jared Isaacman became the first non-professional astronaut to walk in space. Within months, the daring payments billionaire – a close ally of Elon Musk – leapt closer to another personal goal by becoming Donald Trump’s top pick to head US space agency NASA. He was briefly out of favour when Trump and Musk fell out, but the stars have realigned for Isaacman. Trump has renominated Isaacman, saying he’s the ideal candidate to drive the agency’s “mission of discovery and inspiration”.

Within NASA, there are hopes that the appointment will draw a line under “weeks of drama” over who will lead the agency, says Bloomberg. Isaacman, 42 – who founded his company Shift4 at just 16 – is a political neophyte. But Trump highlighted his business achievements; and there’s no doubting his passion for extraterrestrial travel and derring-do, says Time. A former stunt pilot, he bankrolled last year’s three-day Polaris Dawn space mission, reportedly paying $200 million to Musk for all four seats aboard the SpaceX craft. Isaacman has tied himself closely to SpaceX since 2021, says Bloomberg, spending undisclosed sums on multiple missions and helping fund research and development. “A staunch supporter of the commercial space industry,” he’s expected to increase NASA’s use of private companies if confirmed for the top job. Conflict of interest is a worry.

“Dropping out of high school isn’t usually a good idea, but it sure paid off for one New Jersey kid,” noted a 2011 profile in Business Jet Traveler charting Isaacman’s meteoric rise. His parents, who earned a precarious living, worried when the self-described “horrible student” quit school, but Isaacman already had a business plan. During school holidays, he’d done IT work for Merchant Services Inc – “early e-commerce stuff” – and got a feel for the credit-card industry where he saw “a lot of opportunity for improvement”. In 1999, he founded United Bank Card from his parents’ basement: “Assets were limited to $10,000 in stock certificates that he’d received from his grandfather.”

The young firm flourished. Isaacman’s father, Don, who joined as a salesman, later said “he was within a year of losing his house” when the company (rebranded Shift4 in 2017) started, crediting his offspring with “saving the family”. There was no silver bullet, says Isaacman: no “one technology or patent”. He simply focused on streamlining the then labyrinthine business of processing credit cards, moving quickly into new technologies and often offering customers (typically restaurants and shops) free kit in order to win their accounts. Within a few years, the firm made Inc magazine’s annual list of America’s fastest-growing small businesses and Isaacman was runner-up to Mark Zuckerberg in the list of “30 top entrepreneurs under 30”. By 2011, he was running one of the US’s largest payment processors.

Can Jared Isaacman lead NASA?

Success gave Isaacman free rein to indulge his passion for flying. An avid collector of vintage planes, he became an aerobatics whizz, performing at air-shows. In 2009, says Fortune, he “set a world record for circumnavigating the globe”. Isaacman parlayed his love of aviation into a business, founding Draken International, a defence firm specialising in military aircraft and training pilots. In 2019, he sold a majority stake to Blackstone, launching himself into billionaire status. Isaacman is “a thrill seeker”, says Forbes. But that’s partly “to unwind from the non-stop… 80-plus-hour weeks” he works. NASA's staff can expect an intense regime of slashed meetings, cost-cutting and liberation from “inefficiencies”. Isaacman has said he wants to “foster a culture of urgent execution” in his quest to kick-start America’s new space age. “NASA’s Game of Thrones is finally over,” observed Politico. There’s quite a firebrand in the hotseat.

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Simon Wolfson is widely regarded as the most able CEO of any FTSE-100 company. He joined Next, of which his father was then chairman, in 1991, was appointed to the board in 1997 at the age of 30 and took the top job in 2001. Next had been founded as a mid-market fashion retailer in 1981, but over-expanded and nearly went bust in 1988. Under Wolfson, it has expanded internationally, acquired other brands and gained a market value of £18 billion. He is well worth listening to.

When asked which business book he’d recommend, he replies, “Just one. Bill Slim’s Defeat into Victory”. This is the book, first published in 1956, by Field-Marshal William Slim about how he led the British 14th Army in the retreat through Burma in 1942; in the defence of India against a determined attack in 1944; and in the subsequent rout of the Japanese forces in Burma by June 1945. This was despite extraordinarily difficult terrain; being outnumbered, under-equipped and undersupplied; and the ferocity of Japanese defence. What lessons does this book hold for business managers 80 years later, and how did Wolfson apply them to Next?

Slim’s senior commanders were all people who he had got to know and trust years before, to whom he could delegate tasks with confidence. Similarly, Wolfson promotes internally, rather than recruiting from outside; 28 of his top 30 managers were promoted and have been at Next for a combined 500 years.

Slim displays a determination to get on with, even like, notoriously difficult people on the same side. These included “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, the American in command of Allied forces who served as Chiang Kai-Shek’s chief of staff; Orde Wingate, commander of the Chindits commandos, who did not regard Slim as his commanding officer; and Aung San, the Burmese nationalist leader. He also cultivated strong relations with the Americans, with the RAF and with Louis Mountbatten, the Allied commander in the Far East. The lesson for Wolfson? Learn not just to get on with, but also to respect and like the people you need in order to be successful.

Simon Wolfson's leadership style

Morale was critical to Slim’s success. “I made a point of speaking myself to every combatant unit, or at least to its officers... whether British, Indian, Gurkha or African. My platform was usually the bonnet of my jeep with the men collected around it and I often did three or four of these stump speeches in a day.” Wolfson too makes a point of visiting outlets, distribution warehouses, design centres and offices as often as possible.

Slim had an overarching strategy, but was prepared to be flexible if circumstances and dispositions changed. In fact, he regarded Japanese inflexibility as a key weakness, meaning that they would be thrown into confusion if the 14th Army did not respond as expected. Likewise, Wolfson emphasises his scepticism about an inflexible long-term strategy and the importance of being able to respond to changing circumstances. Hence, the acquisition of other brands such as Joules and Cath Kidston and expansion overseas when technology made it economic to do so.

Slim was very willing to acknowledge failure and recognise mistakes. He regarded it as important to learn lessons and move on; “the lessons from defeat are more than from victory. A defeated general will turn in upon himself and question the very foundations of his leadership, but if he is to command again, he must shake off these regrets as they claw at his will and self-confidence”. Wolfson is never publicly flustered and always willing to admit to setbacks.

He admires Slim for his willingness to retreat, as he did before the Japanese offensive in 1944, rather than stubbornly defend a poor position. The result was a mixture of caution and boldness: “when in doubt about two courses of action, a general should choose the bolder”, he writes. A CEO should too.

Wolfson probably hasn’t had to improvise to overcome shortages in the way Slim did: he had river craft built, roads constructed and even parachutes made out of jute to overcome the lack of silk and special cloth. Supply problems were a challenge to be overcome, not an excuse for inaction. Wolfson can probably supply comparable anecdotes. Like Slim, he sets great store by intelligence; in Burma, it was a question of the location and condition of Japanese troops; for Wolfson it is gauging how the market is developing and changing.

But the most important aspect both leaders share is their regard for the importance of logistics. For Slim, this was the supply of food, fuel and ammunition, maintenance of vehicles and treatment and evacuation of the wounded. Much of the logistics in 1944-1945 was airborne, which meant control of the skies, building forward airfields and the accumulation and distribution of stores. The inadequacy of their logistics was why Japanese casualties were so much higher.

For Wolfson, logistics means managing supply chains, the distributions to stores, handling of returns and integration of service all along the chain. You might think that wars are won on the battlefield and retail success at the point of sale, but without good logistics, generals and retail CEOs fail. Slim focused on the whole army, not just the frontline troops. “Everyone in the army had to be made to see where his task fitted into the whole”. The same applies in any business.

Slim combines intense regard, liking and loyalty towards those on his side with disdainful ruthlessness towards the Japanese. Perhaps Wolfson has a similar attitude to those who cross him in business, but any potential enemies would be well advised not to find out.

After the war, Slim went on to become chief of the Imperial General Staff and governor-general of Australia. He was a highly regarded lecturer on leadership and died in 1970. If Wolfson ever writes a management book, it too will be well worth reading.

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The difference between successful people and very successful people, Warren Buffett once said, is that very successful people say no to almost everything. I suspect he’s right. But I’ve never been good at saying no, and when the idea for MoneyWeek popped into my head, I couldn’t resist it. It came to me in the summer of 1999. I’d founded The Week four years earlier, and it was beginning to take off. Why not apply the same formula to the financial world? Most money magazines were so dry. Why couldn’t there be one along the lines of The Week, less share-obsessed than Investors’ Chronicle, taking a wider view: how to make money, how to keep it, how to spend it.

I’d dreamt up The Week on a long walk in Scotland in January 1994. But having resigned as deputy editor of The Sunday Telegraph, I struggled to raise the money: the venture capitalists I approached seemed neither adventurous nor anxious to part with capital, and I ended up funding the launch myself – with help from family and friends.

Then along came the quixotic publisher Felix Dennis, who wrote to me out of the blue suggesting we “share a beer”. Anyone heard of Felix Dennis, I asked, waving the letter around. No one had, but while our readership was growing our bank account was not. So a week or two later I found myself on a sunny afternoon sitting under an oak tree in Felix’s garden near Stratford-upon-Avon and doing an impetuous, back-of-the-envelope deal which certainly wasn’t prudent but which gave us the money we needed.

They were heady days, those early days at The Week, and perhaps it all went a little to my head. Full of boundless confidence, I sketched out a plan for MoneyWeek and recruited Merryn Somerset Webb, who’d done a stint on our City pages before, sensibly, telling me I was paying her too little and returning to the City. I knew she’d be brilliant. So off we went, in November 2000, with a new office in New Cavendish Street from which I could oversee both The Week and MoneyWeek. This time, raising the money was easier, but once again I underestimated how much we’d need.

The new magazine was aimed primarily at investors, not City professionals, and targeted a similar demographic to The Week: AB readers with disposable income; non-experts (like me) wary of stockbrokers and financial advisers but anxious for guidance on where to put our money and, indeed, how to hang on to it. Some of The Week’s key features, of course, could be replicated: Best Properties on the Market; Good Week, Bad Week; the Briefing; a map for global financial news. My friend Andrew Robson was prevailed on to write a bridge column.

MoneyWeek's early ups and downs

I now had to divide my time between two magazines, and Felix wanted me to sell shares in The Week as the price for doing so. Unwisely, I agreed. You don’t have to do much right in the world so long as you don’t make too many mistakes, says Warren Buffett.

He’s right. I’ve made my fair share of mistakes, too many, and this was one – especially as there were moments when I wondered whether we’d ever make a success of the new venture. I’m a bit “ready, fire, aim”, to use a phrase coined by a clever American friend. I remembered a conversation from the early days of The Week. “I’d give it ten,” said a newspaper circulation manager to a friend of mine. “What – ten out of ten?” replied my friend, rather chuffed. “No, ten issues.”

The worst time was a year or so after launch when our money all but ran out. In the end we were rescued first by a City-based Scottish entrepreneur, Angus Macdonald, and then, a year or so later, by the man who helped propel us to success: Bill Bonner, the quietly spoken founder of Agora, the hugely successful US newsletter company. I was introduced to him by my brother-in-law; we had lunch in Notting Hill, hit it off and did the deal there and then. It was the quickest, most painless transaction I’ve ever been involved in.

After that, things got easier. Bill is a shrewd contrarian who likes a good argument, a perfect match for Merryn. Between them, they gave the magazine a strong personality, aided by John Stepek and a small, clever team including the current editor, Andrew Van Sickle, and Stuart Watkins, who steered production with admirable calmness and good humour. Successful magazines need to have a heart; their readers need to come to know and trust them like a friend. Slowly and steadily, we built the circulation, as I’d done on The Week.

Then, in fairly quick succession, Felix Dennis died; a decision was made by his trust to sell The Week; The Week bought MoneyWeek to bring them both into the same stable; and eventually my two brainchilds were bought by private equity and then, not long afterwards, by the current proprietors, Future Publishing. I left before the second sale – to do two things. One was – indeed is – a weekly email to help CEOs plan for the future called Sunday Briefing; the other a daily newsletter called The Knowledge, a five-minute catch-up on the world which goes out at lunchtime each day.

But I loved every minute of my time at MoneyWeek and am immensely proud of it and the team now running it. It is easily the best and most fun financial magazine in Britain. Nor do I think niche magazines are on their way out. Newspapers may struggle in the longer term, but not specialist publications, which can never quite be replicated online. Long may MoneyWeek survive, as I’m quite sure it will.

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In the late 1990s, a young Stella Li landed in Rotterdam from China with $30,000, a container load of lithium-ion batteries and an order from head office: “sell them to survive”. She clinched a deal with Nokia, then the number one mobile-phone maker. Never one for false modesty, she told the Financial Times: “I opened the door and moved BYD to another level.”

Nearly 30 years on, the company has moved far past its roots as a battery maker to become one of the world’s most powerful manufacturers of electric vehicles. Globe-trotting Li remains so firmly at the heart of its international expansion that colleagues have dubbed it “The Stella Show”. Yet the stakes, while much higher, are just as existential. BYD sales grew by 40% last year, but it is having to grapple with both rising Western protectionism and a darkening domestic outlook in China in the teeth of cut-throat competition. It’s going to be “very difficult for BYD to continue to grow the way it’s been growing”, says analyst Tu Le of Sino Auto Insights.

“A diminutive woman with almost frenetic energy,” Li, 55, “zips across the globe furiously, rarely making it back to her current home in Los Angeles”, says Fortune. In a typical day, BYD’s “crucial ambassador and strategist” might wake up in Istanbul, fly to a meeting in Vienna and then spend the night in Germany. The carmaker now exports to roughly 95 markets, but Europe is particularly crucial to its global push. In markets such as Britain – which this year became BYD’s biggest outside China – the company has become “Elon Musk’s worst nightmare”.

At its heart, BYD – which was founded in Shenzhen in 1995 by Wang Chuanfu – has always been a partnership. While Li led marketing and expansion, Wang, 59, was the engineer behind the group’s rapid technological advancements and manufacturing prowess. He never wavered from his dream of building electric cars, even when it looked like a long shot. The pair met soon after Li had graduated from Shanghai’s prestigious Fudan University and the relationship developed romantically as well as commercially.

BYD stands for “Build Your Dreams”, but back in the early days when Li was pestering mobile-phone executives in Atlanta suburbs with her box of battery samples, she used to joke that it stood for “Bring Your Dollars”, says Bloomberg Businessweek. Her great strength then was persistence. It took her two years to win a contract from Motorola. But by 2002, when BYD went public in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, the company was on a roll. Many investors were furious when Wang bought a majority stake in a failing state-owned carmaker a year later – appalled that BYD “was wading into a market it knew nothing about”. At the time, Wang didn’t even know how to drive, but was convinced that electric cars were “a natural extension” of the battery business.

The first clunky models did nothing to dissuade the critics, but Wang continued to pour cash into product development.

Stella Li's deal with Warren Buffett

The deal that put BYD on the map was Berkshire Hathaway’s landmark $232 million investment in 2008, says the FT. Li was introduced to Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger by her friend Li Lu, a billionaire hedge-fund manager. In the nearly two decades that Berkshire stuck with BYD until completing its exit this year, it reportedly netted a return of about $7 billion. In that time, BYD has achieved what Tesla, Ford and the rest of the car industry haven’t, says Businessweek: “build an affordable electric car for the masses and make money doing it”. Jean-Francois Baril, chair of Nokia’s owner HMD Global, who has known Li for more than two decades, credits her with “bridging the East and the West”, says the FT. She’ll need all that skill to keep BYD on the road in the years ahead.

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It’s been a tough two decades for UK-listed firms. BP, Shell and HSBC have dropped out of the ranks of the world’s largest listed companies. Britain’s current largest firm, AstraZeneca, doesn’t even make the global top 40. At the same time, the reputation of British universities has gone in the opposite direction. “We now have more universities in the global top 10 than we had 20 years ago,” as Robin Bagchi, chairman of the London Technology Club, points out. UK universities “continue to punch well above their weight in terms of producing world-leading research”, which is an important economic asset, says James Witter, head of Sarasin Bread Street. More than 2,000 active start-ups have been spun out of UK universities. Little wonder that a sovereign-wealth investor has said that British academia is “our equivalent of Gulf oil”.

The cutting edge of the 'golden triangle' UK universities

Such economic excellence is built on a foundation of “incredible institutions that are focused on applying science and technology to solve fundamental problems”, says Ed Bussey, CEO of Oxford Science Enterprises. He puts Oxford University at the top of the list of such institutions, pointing to the fact that every year Oxford comes up as one of the leading research universities, with a history of more than 70 Nobel prizes in a wide range of disciplines. “When I go out to lunch, I’ll be standing in a queue and the person behind me will be a world leader in this, and then I’ll be walking back to the office and another will walk past me and they’re the Nobel winner in another area.”

Such a concentration of elite academics can help create an environment that ends up being worth more than the sum of the individual academics involved. Having a “cosmopolitan and multinational” atmosphere “attracts other great minds” – and a lot of investors willing to put money into early stage enterprises stemming from Oxford research. This in turn creates a “virtuous circle” where the quality of research attracts capital, which in turns encourages more talented academics to move to Oxford.

Andrew Williamson, managing partner of Cambridge Innovation Capital, emphasises Cambridge’s reputation and heritage as a major competitive advantage in attracting the best scientific talent. “We’ve existed for nearly 800 years, which means that we’ve been doing this for longer than almost anyone else in the entire world,” he says. It has leveraged its infrastructure and culture of “cutting-edge science” to create links between “the academic world, the start-up world and the biggest global technology companies”.

Oxford and Cambridge are not the only points of excellence in British academia. Commentators increasingly talk about the “golden triangle” of Oxford, Cambridge, and Imperial and UCL, rather than just “Oxbridge”. Indeed, as Bagchi notes, when it comes to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects, “some recent rankings put Imperial College London near the very top of the global table, ahead of Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard”. University College London has also had a lot of success when it comes to creating interesting spin-outs – DeepMind is one example.

UK universities beyond the golden triangle

The golden triangle may be the most visible sign of British scientific excellence, but there is “some really great science coming out of the other UK universities” too, says Doug Quinn, partner at DSW Ventures. As Quinn’s colleague, Mira Androniciuc, notes, there are key specialised laboratories in other UK universities that outperform the general laboratories in the golden triangle institutions. “There are clearly opportunities out there.” But sadly, these are not yet producing a strong pipeline of new firms. There were around 600 early-stage investments in the golden triangle in 2024, but only 250 in other universities. The regions get around a fifth of the total investment that the golden triangle gets, says Quinn. But the gap is mainly due to inexperience and should narrow as the teams outside Oxbridge and London do more deals. Already, there have been more than 100 spin-outs from Manchester University, which now has a well-established technology transfer office.

Indeed, a “Northern arc” is starting to emerge as a serious challenge, led by the four universities of Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield, says Duncan Johnson, CEO of Northern Gritstone. Johnson notes that these four institutions alone employ around 16,500 researchers and have the UK’s largest research budget at around £770 million, which is bigger than those of Oxford, Cambridge and London. Northern Gritstone, which has first refusal on the commercial opportunities from research produced by the Northern arc, has been able to raise £362 million from individuals and institutions.

Henry Lane Fox, CEO of Founders Factory and chairman of the Creator Fund, singles out the University of Southampton as particularly strong when it comes to quantum and high-performance computing; the University of Glasgow as a leader in chemistry; and Edinburgh when it comes to robotics. Overall, around half of the deals that Lane Fox and his team evaluate, and around a third of those that they end up investing in, come from outside the golden triangle, "and both numbers are growing”.

Lane Fox is so enthusiastic about the quality of academic research in the UK as a whole that, in an attempt to grab the most interesting idea at an earlier stage than his competitors, his Creator Fund is now targeting doctoral students at universities across the UK. Similarly, Chris Wiles, Director of Private Equity and Venture Capital at Foresight Group, has set up a network of regional offices, including in Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, Cardiff and Exeter. Another source of world-leading research comes from the various research institutes that are funded by the UK government, but not affiliated with any specific university – the nuclear research facility at Culham Campus, for example, run by the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), as well as the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire.

Rethinking commercialisation in UK universities

As well as producing some of the best research in the world, British universities are generally much better at turning their research into companies and products than they were even a few decades ago. “Every university around the world is on a journey when it comes to commercialisation,” says Williamson. Over the last 20 years, the UK government has made a particular effort to encourage universities to make commercialisation and “knowledge transfer” key to their mission. This began with universities setting up knowledge-transfer offices, principally focused on the licensing of technology. Over the past 10 to 20 years, that model has evolved and is now creating spin-out companies based on the technologies that the academics have created. Academics and students have become more entrepreneurial and “want to set up their own firms to commercialise their tech, rather than stay as academics and simply license it to third parties”.

Arnab Basu, founder and CEO of Kromek, which specialises in radiation-detection technology, agrees that things have changed for the better. When he set up Kromek two decades ago from research he pioneered at Durham University, “spin-outs were not the flavour of the day, and we had to do everything ourselves, from agreeing a licensing agreement with the university, to finding investors and then raising additional funds”. Today, the support system for entrepreneurs, in terms of both money and advice, is much more developed. Many smaller universities have also realised that forming partnerships with similar institutions is a good way to gain experience quickly.

There has been a change in attitude within academia over the past 15 years, says David Grimm, a partner at AlbionVC. Launching start-ups was previously seen as “a bit grubby and commercial”, but now founding a start-up has almost become a precondition for becoming a professor. The latest report into spin-outs, produced in conjunction with analytics firm Beauhurst, reveals that investment in UK spin-outs reached the record level of £3.35 billion in 2024. This compares with £1.16 billion in 2019, as Moray Wright of Parkwalk Advisors points out.

Lowering the “university tax”

But just because UK universities have upped their game doesn’t mean that there isn’t plenty of room for further improvement. MoneyWeek spoke to several venture capitalists, and nearly all of them pointed to universities’ desire to cling on to as much of the company spun out as possible as a big problem. It is, of course, reasonable for institutions to try to get the best return for what is, after all, their intellectual property, says James Paton-Philip, partner in the corporate team at law firm Hill Dickinson, but too often this “university tax” can make investing unattractive for investors and for those founding the company in the first place, especially given that the founders’ stake will end up being diluted further as they raise more cash.

Universities do have a tendency to be too aggressive in negotiations, agrees Grimm, and to take too long to reach an agreement, which can be a major problem in the fast-moving world of technology, where multiple firms are trying to bring similar products to market first. “I’ve known of several major cases where ideas for start-ups have failed on the launch pad because the negotiations got so involved that by the time they were settled the opportunity had passed.”

The good news is that this is becoming much less of an issue thanks to pressure from the government to reduce the share institutions demand and to standardise terms. The 2023 Independent Review of University Spin-outs has helped speed up the process, says Grimm. AlbionVC has, for example, an agreement with UCL where the university agreed to take just a flat 5% stake in any software start-up spun out of it. The first company AlbionVC spun out under the new conditions took much less time to set up. UCL isn’t the only university to do this, says Bagchi. Imperial now takes a flat 10% share from its spin-outs, and Oxford has reduced its share by more than half from 50% to 20%.

The British Microsoft is coming

The UK may be “world class at research, and very good at creating early stage companies, but there is still room for improvement when it comes to scaling up”, says Greg Smith, CEO of IP Group. Northern Gritstone’s Johnson agrees that our tech sector still “struggles” when it comes to raising large sums for expansion. From his own experience, he’s found that raising amounts in the region of £200 million is still a big ask for British tech firms, whereas those in Silicon Valley can raise such sums with a single phone call.

The lack of domestic capital willing to back tech firms means that too often UK start-ups are either forced to rely on overseas investors, or sell themselves to larger US tech companies, says Wright. He emphasises that such investment represents a vote of confidence in the capabilities of the UK research base, but such external investors and larger tech companies also “have their own agendas, which don’t necessarily align with the interests of the UK”. He points to DeepMind, the AI company spun out from UCL that was acquired by Google in 2014 for £400 million, and which “would now be worth more than £10 billion – maybe even more than £100 billion – if it had remained private”.

Google’s purchase of DeepMind may have deprived Britain of its very own OpenAI. Yet the fact that it, and others, such as OrganOx and Oxford Ionics, have fetched “significant sums” will “undoubtedly draw more interest into this area, and encourage more university researchers to launch commercial enterprises”, says Sarasin’s James Witter.

Such successes are also helping to build the necessary environment in the UK “of investors, lawyers and financial services intermediaries”. So, provided pension funds and institutions are willing to invest more, “there’s no reason” why we can’t build a British tech company on the scale of Microsoft, says Paton-Philip. Smith believes “unequivocally” that several large British tech firms will emerge within the next decade. We look at some of the most promising places to put your money below.

Spin-outs from UK universities: where to invest

Companies such as Oxford Capital, Parkwalk Advisors, Foresight Group and AlbionVC all offer investors with deep pockets access to venture-capital trusts. Those of more modest means might like to consider IP Group (LSE: IPO), a listed FTSE 250 company that has been investing in spin-outs from UK universities for the last 25 years. Over this time, it has supported around 500 companies, creating an estimated 10,000 jobs. At the moment, the group has 62 firms in its portfolio, spanning “deep technology”, life sciences and clean-energy technology (cleantech). The stock trades at only seven times estimated 2026 earnings and at a sharp discount to the book value of its assets.

One of IP Group’s most successful clean-technology investments was in fuel-cell and hydrogen-power technology company Ceres Power (LSE: CWR). Originally spun out of Imperial College London, IP Group stepped in to rescue the company after a failed trial, taking an active role in its management before eventually selling its stake for a large profit in 2020. Ceres Power is not currently making any money, but it continues to grow, with sales tripling between 2019 and 2024, and it is expected to be a big winner from the spike in demand for clean energy created by the data-centre boom.

One of Cambridge Innovation Capital’s many success stories is Bicycle Therapeutics (Nasdaq: BCYC). It was founded in 2009 by Cambridge Enterprises (Cambridge’s commercialisation body) and uses technology developed by Greg Winter, winner of the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2018, to develop drugs that can target and treat solid tumours that cannot be reached by conventional drugs. It is not making any money yet, but has several promising drugs in development. The most advanced of these is zelenectide, which is in advanced trials as a treatment for metastatic urothelial cancer (the hope is that it will also prove effective in treating other cancers).

Autolus (Nasdaq: AUTL) was founded by Martin Pule, who leads the “CAR-T” research programme at UCL’s Cancer Institute, with the help of UCLB (UCL’s commercialisation arm). Its products modify white blood cells to help the body’s immune system fight cancer. The company is not making any money, but its therapy Aucatzyl has recently been approved for use in the UK, US and EU for treating acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, with the hope that this can pave the way for similar treatments being approved for a wider range of cancers in the near future.

As noted in the main story above, Kromek Group (Aim: KMK) was originally spun out of Durham University by Arnab Basu. The company specialises in making radiation detectors that use cadmium zinc telluride (CZT) semiconductors for use in medicine and security. The company has already secured contracts with GE, Siemens, Philips and Canon, and with the help of funding from the US and UK governments, it is developing devices to detect biological pathogens. The stock trades at 18 times expected 2026 earnings. With revenue more than doubling between 2020 and 2025, that looks like good value.

Investors with an extremely high tolerance for risk might want to consider micro-cap Quantum Base Holdings (Aim: QUBE). It was founded by Robert Young of Lancaster University and uses quantum technology to produce product codes that are virtually impossible to counterfeit. With counterfeiting being a significant problem for global brands, the commercial potential seems huge, although the company is currently losing money.

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Rob Granieri is “the last founder standing” at Jane Street – “the black-box money machine” currently “minting Wall Street records”, says Bloomberg. But he’s almost impossible to pin down – guarding his “low-key stature” so tightly that he often goes unrecognised, even in his own company, where he officially has no title. His profile in the employee directory stands out for its missing headshot.

If you want a sighting of the “schlubby” billionaire recluse, you’re better off looking beyond Wall Street. The “soft-spoken libertarian” is most at home at alternative gatherings: notably that “mecca of counterculture”, the Burning Man festival. Another favoured haunt is the Scarlet Pearl casino in Mississippi’s Biloxi Bay – a family affair he helped build and finance.

Still, “invisibility has grown harder to maintain” as Jane Street’s profits have exploded, says the New York Post. The firm, which some have dubbed the world’s most lucrative trading house, has enjoyed such breakneck growth over the past five years – at the vanguard of the exchange-traded fund boom – that it accounted “for nearly a quarter of all US-listed ETF trading volume last year”. “The amount of money they make is almost obscene,” one former analyst told the Financial Times, which describes the “quirky and opaque” outfit, renowned for spotting arbitrage opportunities, as one of the “new titans of Wall Street” – frequently trouncing establishment rivals. Jane Street’s $21.9 billion trading revenues in 2023 were “equivalent to roughly one-seventh of the combined equity, bond, currency and commodity trading revenues of all the dozen major global investment banks”. The arrival of bitcoin ETFs the following year put another rocket under revenues. As of June this year, it had already pulled in $17 billion.

Granieri, now 53, always “harboured ambitions to make a lot of money”, says Bloomberg. After graduation in 1992, he printed a stack of CVs and dropped them off on each floor of Philadelphia’s tallest buildings. The strategy worked. He scored a job at Jeff Yass’s Susquehanna International Group, “the quant-trading firm that was quietly becoming a market behemoth,” and was soon pulling in $700,000 a year. But, itching for change, he teamed up with two other traders to form the firm that became Jane Street in 1999.

Rob Granieri: into the limelight

Being dragged into the limelight by success is one thing. Sadly for Granieri, Jane Street is increasingly under scrutiny for other reasons, too. Most serious, says Bloomberg, is an accusation by the Indian regulator of “rigging the world’s largest options market”, which the firm has vowed to fight. The collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX crypto exchange, and subsequent high-profile fraud trial, also shone unwelcome light on the firm’s culture – “SBF” spent his early career there, personally recruited by Granieri. “Having Jane Street on the CV was a crucial bit of Bankman-Fried’s sales pitch,” notes the FT. Yet the lax office vibe at FTX was a partial mirror of Jane Street’s, where Granieri “has inculcated a culture that mirrors his quirks”, says the New York Post.

The wider worry, says the FT, is that Jane Street’s “tight-knit” corporate culture no longer fits its size and global clout. The firm is run by roughly 40 equity partners with no traditional management structure: a recipe for a lack of accountability, say critics. Much depends on the outcome of the Indian investigation. The worse-case scenario for the firm is that “the temporary block on activities” imposed there could spread to other jurisdictions as regulators dig deeper. One of Granieri’s few personal indulgences is fine dining. Why cook, he jokes, when you can “eat at Le Bernardin every night”? Given his woes, he could be forgiven a spot of comfort eating.

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Paramount’s new boss is adamant he intends to keep “politics at arm’s length”. Good luck with that, says Vanity Fair. After this summer’s $8 billion takeover by Skydance, David Ellison, 42, is in “the hot seat” of an impassioned national debate about the future of the media juggernaut and whether it has been captured by Donald Trump.

As CEO of the newly formed Paramount Skydance Corporation, Ellison’s first big appointment has fanned the flames. In a controversial acqui-hire, he is paying $150 million to buy Bari Weiss’s news site, The Free Press, and installing the journalist entrepreneur as editor-in-chief of CBS News. Her pro-Israel and anti-woke views have fuelled speculation that she’ll act as an “ideological commissar” at CBS, helping to “enforce compliance” with the White House line.

This is certainly an “almost existential” moment for the near 100-year-old network, whose new owners have been accused of “kowtowing” to the president after settling a vexatious $16 million lawsuit to get the deal over the line, and cancelling comedian Stephen Colbert when he described it as a “big, fat bribe”.

Ellison is hardly the patsy “nepo baby” of a Maga-leaning patriarch he’s sometimes portrayed as. Described as modest, well-mannered and popular, he’s the opposite in temperament to his volatile, irascible father, Larry – who bankrolled Skydance’s takeover, and last month briefly became the world’s richest man thanks to the soaring share price of his company, Oracle. But he has inherited the latter’s drive – credited in Hollywood for building Skydance, which he founded in 2010, into one of the industry’s strongest independents. “I don’t know his plan, but I would bet on that kid any day of the week,” former Paramount Pictures president Adam Goodman told The Los Angeles Times. He has “an institutional knowledge and appreciation for the studio’s history, and a real love of movies”.

Born in 1983, to Larry Ellison and his third wife Barbara Boothe, David grew up on a horse farm in the San Francisco Bay area and was an intern at Oracle during high school. He eventually enrolled at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, dropping out to act in a $60 million movie about World War I pilots, Flyboys, part-financed by his father, which spectacularly flopped.

There’s no question Ellison “was gifted a head start”, says Bloomberg. Not many young Hollywood wannabes get to raise $350 million from JPMorgan for a production company. But it’s what he did with the cash that counts. He got a taste of success right at the start with the release of the Coen brothers’ True Grit, which grossed more than $252 million globally, following that up with several other blockbusters.

Still, the huge Paramount deal takes things to a new level. To secure it, Ellison had to wrestle with the Redstone family and their shareholders – while trying to prevent Trump from derailing the deal. “The reward for his patience is a company in decade-long decline,” stuffed with ancient networks and a “withered” film studio.

David Ellison is gunning for Warner Bros

Less than two months after swallowing one ailing media giant, Ellison is now looking to take down a much bigger one. Nothing captures his ambition better than his interest in Warner Bros. If he wins the $50 billion giant, the combined behemoth would boast the largest share of the national TV advertising market, the biggest movie studio output and a pair of streaming services (Paramount+ and HBO Max) that together sell more US subscriptions than even Netflix, says The Economist. Add CNN to CBS – and throw in Larry Ellison’s interest in the US operations of TikTok – and the family will become a mighty force in both old and new media. The question is what they do with that power.

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When conservative billionaire Pierre-Édouard Stérin caught the eye of Le Monde last year, the newspaper noted how stealthily he was “advancing his pawns” in the chess game of hard-right French politics. A tax exile based in Belgium, Stérin had just been outed as the financial force and guiding spirit behind Pericles, “a secret, wide-ranging project aimed at boosting right-wing forces” and restoring “France’s grandeur”, to quote Politico. The timely leaking of internal documents – in which the shady group vowed to achieve “the successful exercise of power at the earliest opportunity” – caused a sensation in France, unleashing a potent mix of conspiracy theory and patriotic debate. The country’s current political chaos provides ample opportunity for a re-run.

Stérin is leaving no stone unturned in his quest to revive France with his bespoke prescription of retro Catholic morality, dry economics and a hardline “re-migration” message that even Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party dubs “toxic”, says The Times. He has spent hundreds of millions of euros at the grassroots, with education a key target. In addition to ridding France of “the woke insanity imported from American universities”, he’s planning “a network of Christian private schools”. He’s also an investor in Studio 496, whose mission is to conserve the heritage of “La France profonde” by sponsoring activities such as village fetes. More overtly political projects include a Parisian think tank and a training college for would-be candidates.

Some call “the billionaire who wants to make France great again” the country’s Elon Musk. In truth, he’s more “eminence grise” – happiest pulling strings from the shadows, says Politico. A self-described introvert, with “a tendency for extreme rationalism”, Stérin famously ranks new acquaintances on a scale of one to ten on a dedicated Excel spreadsheet. His wife Amandine wasn’t exempt. He scored her on a strict set of marriageability criteria before popping the question. Fortunately, she delivered – quite literally: bearing her “pronatalist” husband a fine family of five. He’s raising them on tough love, telling the French financial weekly Challenges that they won’t inherit anything. “It’s a real freedom to start with nothing in life.”

Stérin, 51, grew up in a middle-class family in Evreux, a town in Normandy, where he began his career as an entrepreneur at the age of 13, selling RAM sticks for video games, says The Times. He launched 20 failed businesses before striking gold. Smartbox, a gift-box provider specialising in short breaks, proved hugely popular and established his financial clout. These days his investment firm, Otium Capital, has assets ranging from tech to health.

Stérin has donated generously to Le Pen’s party, but says he is keeping his options open – viewing the popularist Rally party as too wedded to the state in its “dirigiste” economic thinking and too liberal on social matters such as abortion. Nonetheless, the links run deep, says Politico. The CEO of Stérin’s Otium fund, François Durvye, is also “a member of Marine Le Pen’s inner circle and one of her most trusted advisers”.

Pierre-Édouard Stérin is reaching for heaven

By US standards, Stérin’s wealth – he is said to be worth €1.6 billion – and political largesse look trivial. But the rules on political donations in France are much tighter, and he has been in the crosshairs of prosecutors. Stérin is now in the frustrating position of being a wealthy backer in search of a candidate. But for the moment, he is attending to his soul. “By giving away my fortune… I am optimising my chances of eternal life,” he told Catholic daily La Croix. Typically, he’s researched the process thoroughly. “I typed on Google: how to become a saint.” It is “an ultra-motivating stimulus to get up in the morning”.

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“Life,” Giorgio Armani once observed, “is a movie. And my clothes are the costumes.” It was an attitude that served him well, says Vogue. The legendary “Il Signor”, who has died aged 91, was “unarguably the most successful Italian designer in history” – credited with designing “the uniform of aspiration that both defined the 1980s and shaped the course of fashion beyond it”.

The business he began from scratch in 1975, “funded with the sale of his Volkswagen Beetle”, eventually came to employ 8,000 worldwide and earned him a $12 billion personal fortune. By the time of his death, notes the Financial Times, the fastidiously independent Armani – who called the shots at his company until the very end – had built “the world’s largest private luxury brand”.

Armani “almost single-handedly established Milan as a serious rival to Paris as the world’s fashion capital”, says The Telegraph. A great populariser, he shrugged off the snobberies of haute couture, saying he only wished “to make men and women look better”. Credited with considerable commercial nous, he didn’t object when a profitable industry sprang up in counterfeit Giorgio Armani products. “Actually,” he once said, “I am very glad that people can buy Armani – even if it’s a fake. I like the fact that I’m so popular around the world.”

Born in Piacenza, south of Milan, in 1934, Armani was the second of three children. He later cited growing up under the fascist Mussolini regime for his dislike of structured uniforms. Accordingly, “when he began to design, he turned his attention first to that emblem of male hierarchy, the suit”. He took a few detours getting there. Armani’s initial ambition was to become a doctor and he studied medicine at the University of Milan for three years before a stint at an army hospital “scotched” the inclination. Turning to photography, he approached Milan’s leading department store, La Rinascente, and “soon found himself working on its window displays”.

A formative stint working on Nino Cerruti’s Hitman label followed. Here, Armani “learned the economics of fashion” and earned the enduring respect of his boss. Cerruti later denied any suggestion that he had “discovered” Armani; he said Armani had “discovered himself”. Nonetheless it was Armani’s boyfriend, Sergio Galeotti, an architectural draughtsman, who persuaded him to form his own company and set up the early deals.

Who will carry Giorgio Armani's legacy forward?

Armani’s fluid tailoring – in his trademark subdued palette – turned heads from the start as the antithesis of both of Savile Row orthodoxy and the hippy philosophy of the 1970s. But his breakthrough came in 1980 when he dressed Richard Gere in the film American Gigolo. Almost overnight, he told The Economist, the label became “a sensation”. In 1983, Armani became the first designer to open an office in LA. Where Hollywood led, suave businessmen followed, and Armani swiftly followed up with a line for working women. When Galeotti died in 1985, Armani became introspective, says The Telegraph, but continued expanding the business – establishing “a pyramid of brands targeting different price levels”. The 1990s were marked by diversification into sunglasses, sportswear and restaurants.

For all his success, he retained “a sense of melancholy” and “a shyness”, says The Telegraph. He was happiest at his home on the remote Sicilian island of Pantelleria and sailing the Mediterranean on his yacht. In his later years, Armani involved various nephews and nieces in the business. Pantaleo Dell’Orco, who heads the men’s style office, has also taken on an increasingly important role. But Armani’s iron grip on the company leaves the question of who will succeed him unanswered. He knew as much himself. “I don’t know how any of us can think any of this is replicable without me.”

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Last summer, Sachin Dev Duggal and his family moved to Dubai, leaving behind an unexploded bomb. The self-proclaimed “chief wizard” of Builder.ai – the London start-up that grew into one of Europe’s biggest and buzziest AI unicorns – was already facing board concerns about “gaps” between the sales it reported and actual revenues. Debt was mounting and, although you might not have guessed it from Duggal’s glamorous Instagram account (yachting in Monaco, tennis in Capri…), money had become an issue. It was the start of the first big bust of the AI boom.

It took less than a year for Builder.ai to collapse, leaving a trail of creditors and some of the world’s top tech investors reeling in its wake, says the Financial Times. Duggal, 42, had raised more than half a billion dollars from the likes of Microsoft and Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund – with the simple pitch that the start-up could use AI to make building apps “as easy as ordering pizza”. Realising they’d backed a business whose seemingly healthy revenues were equally “artificial” was a shock.

The tech may be new, but the story’s as old as they come – the triumph of “hype over substance”. But building hype, or “vision”, came naturally to Duggal, says Bloomberg, and he was equally adept at transforming it into respectability. The catalyst that opened up the cash spigots for his idea of “democratising programming for the masses” was the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. By the following summer, both Microsoft and Qatar’s fund were on board, along with several other investors, including Lakestar, Iconiq Capital, Singapore’s Jungle Ventures and Jeffrey Katzenberg’s WndrCo. Duggal, meanwhile, had become a fixture on the tech conference circuit. Months before the first signs of trouble began appearing in 2024, he was at Davos sponsoring “glitzy events with celebrities”.

Can Sachin Dev Duggal bounce back?

A deeper dive into Duggal’s business history might have exposed his feet of clay. He enjoyed a dazzling start – at least according to online biographies – and colleagues at his first venture in 2004, cloud-computing firm Nivio, described him as “smart and charismatic”. But the company, based in Switzerland, always struggled with profitability, and one investor later alleged Duggal “inappropriately transferred” a large sum of cash to his personal bank account (an allegation never upheld in court).

Duggal claims that when he exited Nivio, which collapsed in 2013, it was worth $100 million. In fact, he was ousted by the board. Duggal’s next venture – a photo-sharing app called Shoto – was also short-lived, but his struggle to find competent software developers provided the inspiration for Engineer.ai in 2016. Yet within three years, he stood accused by his former chief business officer of overstating the firm’s technical abilities, using two sets of books and making transfers to his private accounts. The parties later settled the dispute, but it prompted a rebrand to Builder.ai in 2019.

Renowned for his love of globe-trotting and luxury, Duggal is currently keeping a low profile in Dubai, while investigations into the collapse of Builder.ai continue. “I’m proud of the team who dared to build a bold ambition. Every success was theirs; the failures were mine,” he says nobly. Meanwhile, he is actively fundraising for a new venture – “to help others navigate the wild world of start-ups and AI”.

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Earlier this year, the co-founder of America’s most controversial intelligence-tech company, Palantir, published a book, The Technological Republic – a distillation of a lifetime’s philosophical musing and a call to arms. The “treatise”, written by Alex Karp – often billed in the company’s mythology as the liberal yin to co-founder Peter Thiel’s hard-right libertarian yang – urges Silicon Valley to abandon its frivolous pursuit of “trivial consumer products” and recommit capital and talent to a “national project” – nothing less than a battle for Western civilisation in the teeth of Chinese aggression. America needs “a new Manhattan Project… to retain exclusive control over the most sophisticated forms of AI for the battlefield” and head off this existential threat, he writes.

Karp, one of a “gang of five” who founded Palantir in 2003, “brims with American chauvinism”, says The New York Times. Safe to say, he does not believe in appeasement, observing that the whole point is to “scare the crap out of your adversaries”. Palantir’s contribution to this process is “the finding of hidden things” – its ability to sift through mountains of data to perceive “patterns of suspicious or aberrant behaviour”, to join the dots. In the wake of 9/11, the CIA bet on Palantir auguring where the next terrorist attacks would come from and was an early financial backer. The company is often credited with helping locate Osama bin Laden in 2011 so that Navy SEALS could kill him, but it’s unclear if this is true.

From the outset, Palantir – named after a powerful “seeing stone” in The Lord of the Rings – was designed to give government, and increasingly, private companies, “a bit of Tolkienian magic”, says The Wall Street Journal. Critics have a darker view of its role as a shadowy US government aide, and in the years up to its flotation on the stock market in 2020, “the opacity of Palantir’s financials only added to its reputation as a black box”.

Alex Karp's cult status

In recent years, Karp, who spent years under the radar himself, has emerged as an online celebrity. His “meme-able look” and “unvarnished remarks” have made him into a cult figure among retail investors who count themselves as “Palantirians”. Indeed, “he sees himself as Batman”, notes The New York Times. The company’s Manhattan office, featuring a statue and prints of the superhero, is called Gotham – ditto, Palantir’s core government product.

Born in New York in 1967, to a Jewish paediatrician and a black artist, Karp went on to study at Haverford College, a liberal arts establishment in Pennsylvania, then Stanford Law School, before heading to Germany for graduate school. In 2003, he teamed up with Thiel – a former Stanford Law classmate – to launch Palantir, using a program that Thiel’s former company, PayPal, had deployed to identify Russian money laundering. Of late, the company has been on a roll. In 2020, Karp was paid $1.1 billion in total compensation, “the highest of any chief executive at a publicly traded company”. But the advent of Trump has put rockets under the stock – up by 110% in the year to date.

Karp’s general strategy is to position himself as a guy that can “talk sense” to the left, says The Nation. Palantir’s “carefully maintained mystique provides the perfect backdrop” for him “to play the eccentric intellectual” – mixing references to “philosophy, art and science” with “incendiary statements”. Yet the vision conjured up in The Technological Republic is chilling. The book is “a road map for a world in which warfare provides the essential impetus for social cohesion – where citizenship means compliance, where technology means weapons… and where the republic itself is a garrison state, built to Palantir’s specification”.

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“Dear President Trump: America must win the AI war,” ran a full-page advertisement in The Washington Post on the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration. Its author was Alexandr Wang – the billionaire “wunderkind” behind the start-up Scale AI and an accomplished networker.

Last month, his connections came to fruition when Wang, 28, became one of the most expensive “acqui-hires” in history after Meta’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, invested $15 billion in his business and brought him into the fold to lead Meta’s new “superintelligence” division, says The Telegraph.

The deal is the company’s biggest since buying WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014. Zuckerberg is betting that Wang can provide what Meta needs to catch up with rivals in the race to develop and commercialise AI – and, in particular, achieve the holy grail of becoming the first to develop systems that surpass human intelligence. Paying up for a 49% stake in Scale was “basically incidental”, one investor told the Financial Times. The real prize was Wang, who Zuckerberg had decided was the ideal “wartime CEO” to lead his push.

The two men have plenty in common; not least the fact that they have both in their time achieved the accolade of becoming the world’s youngest self-made billionaires. Wang has long “idolised” Zuckerberg and in recent months the pair have become close, spending time at the Meta boss’s houses in Tahoe and Palo Alto, California. He may even have had a hand in Zuckerberg’s conversion to a more muscular management style – having himself ditched diversity, equity and inclusion policies at Scale last year to focus on a “MEI” (“merit, excellence and intelligence”) hiring policy, notes Bloomberg. Zuckerberg has even “rearranged the desks” at Meta’s Menlo Park headquarters to seat Wang and other top AI talent as close to himself as possible.

When Wang was born in 1997, his Chinese immigrant parents named him Alexandr – missing out the final e because they wanted to give him the “numerologically lucky” benefits of an eight-letter name. But these were no ordinary immigrants, says Entrepreneur. Both his parents were physicists who worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where Robert Oppenheimer’s team had earlier developed the atomic bomb. They were “brilliant scientists” who “accomplished a lot in advancing their field”, Wang observed in a 2022 TED talk. From an early age, “I wanted to work on something as impactful, or even more impactful than that”. A maths prodigy, he finished high school early and enrolled at MIT. But he itched to start his own company and dropped out of college to move to San Francisco. He reassured his parents he would resume his studies – “a little white lie”.

Alexandr Wang: building Meta's AI titan

In 2016, Wang started Scale AI with Lucy Guo – a fellow college drop-out. Their idea of starting a company “to label and manage the data that companies use to train AI models” may not have seemed particularly exciting, but their services were soon in demand. Exploiting this niche made Wang the world’s youngest billionaire by 2021 – and it also opened the doors to a welter of high-powered players across Silicon Valley, says the Financial Times. “There are very few companies that have deep relationships with every top AI research team” apart from Scale and Nvidia, notes venture capitalist Dan Levine of Accel, an early investor.

Wang’s arrival has had something of a “halo effect” at Meta. Zuckerberg – who plans to spend hundreds of billions on two gigantic data centres dubbed Prometheus and Hyperion – has been continuing his recruitment blitz of top talent as Meta reinvents itself as an AI titan, says Bloomberg. Key to it all is Alexandr Wang.

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On Wednesdays, 32-year-old Palmer Luckey dresses up as his favourite Dungeons and Dragons character. On most other days, says The Times, he develops autonomous military hardware.

Welcome to the world of “the geek who builds lethal AI weapons” – and has a hotline to Donald Trump.

Some compare Luckey’s cutting-edge work with J Robert Oppenheimer’s development of the atomic bomb during World War II. “We want to build the capabilities that give us the ability to swiftly win any war we are forced to enter,” he says.

Whether or not he’s the “new Oppenheimer”, his company Anduril has played a pivotal role in the Ukraine conflict – to date, on the side of Kyiv. The war has been “a proving ground” for the use of drones over conventional artillery – and for Luckey’s company, noted The Economist last year. As the Californian entrepreneur and self-described “bad boy” observed back then, AI would have helped Putin make better tactical decisions.

For all his eccentricities – the mullet, the Hawaiian shirt, the flip-flops – Luckey is not a man to be taken lightly. Anduril, which he started in 2017, is now “nipping at the heels of America’s biggest armsmakers”, says The Economist. He’s driven by a sense of urgency. While many defence bosses “revert to euphemistic blather when asked about their products”, Luckey “embraces the fact they exist to blow things up”. One of his teams has an in-house slogan: “China 27”. It signifies that any products or features not ready for potential conflict in 2027 must be cast aside.

If Luckey’s claim to be overturning the old order in the defence industry comes across as “braggadocious”, it is “delivered with the conviction of someone who has predicted the future before”, says the Financial Times. Anduril, after all, is his second big venture. He was the “boy genius” who started Oculus – the virtual reality headset business sold to Facebook for $2 billion in 2014 when he was 21; appearing shortly after on the cover of Time magazine.

Raised in Long Beach, California, the son of a car salesman, Luckey was never an ordinary kid. Home-schooled by his mother, he devoured video games and manga. His favourite character was an anti-hero named Seta Kaiba who inherits a weapons empire and then “proceeds to kick everyone’s ass using this incredible technology”.

Luckey spent much of his youth “experimenting with electronics in an old trailer in the driveway of his home”, says The Times. He was fascinated by high-voltage weaponry and built an electromagnetic coil gun and Tesla coils – high-frequency transformers capable of creating high voltage at low current, frequently suffering electric shocks. He built his first VR headset when he was 16.

How Palmer Luckey went from Silicon Valley to AI surveillance

Luckey was fired from Facebook in 2016 “following a huge storm over his $10,000 donation to a pro-Donald Trump troll group”, says The Times. “Flush with cash and frustrated with Silicon Valley, he turned his hand to making lethal weapons.”

Anduril – which is named after the sword of Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings and means “flame of the west” – was backed early on by Peter Thiel, the controversial PayPal founder and Trump supporter.

The company’s first “big win” when it was just a few months old, says the FT, was “a contract with the Trump administration to supply AI-powered surveillance towers along the Mexican border”. Anduril was valued at $14 billion last summer, almost double its valuation in December 2022.

At home in California, Luckey collects antique military kit. He’s “the kind of guy who buys decommissioned nuclear missile silos… just because he can”, says The Times. As Luckey mourns the death of his pet shark Bonk at the hands of his lobster, Mr Lobster, it seems “sometimes our conversation is so wild it is hard to know if he is being serious”. Better believe it.

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When it comes to stirring up trouble in corporate America, Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest is gaining quite a reputation. Last year, the Australian mining tycoon turned green campaigner doubled down on his long-running war with Meta – suing the social media platform for failing to prevent numerous scams on its platforms. Now he is in the cross hairs of ExxonMobil, which has accused Forrest and others of orchestrating “smear campaigns” for “publicity and personal gain”.

Forrest himself is not a defendant in the defamation case, notes The Guardian. But he is “mentioned by name more than 20 times in the claim”, which targets a Forrest-linked charity – the Intergenerational Environmental Justice Fund (IEJF) – as well as several California-based environmental groups. In a nod to Maga’s preoccupations, Exxon alleges that Forrest harboured “a dream of upending the American oil and gas industry”. Twiggy’s reaction is to bring it on. He claims to be “personally delighted” by the lawsuit if it means that the fossil-fuel behemoth opens itself up to cross-examination in court. Worth around $16 billion, Forrest certainly doesn’t lack the funds to give Exxon a run for its money. Neither is he short of dedication and persistence. When waging war on Meta, he created “a mission-control-style room” staffed around the clock by cybersecurity professionals, says The Wall Street Journal. Doubtless he’ll deploy similar tenacity now.

A “complex personality”, Forrest, 63, is a bundle of contradictions, says the Daily Mail. Despite making his fortune mining iron ore and building his company, Fortescue, into an operation valued at around $60 billion, he has emerged as a prominent climate warrior. Born in Western Australia and raised on the family property, Minderoo (after which he named his not-for-profit foundation), Forrest is descended from “the equivalent of state royalty”. His great-great-grandfather was among four brothers who were the “founding parliamentarians” of Western Australia.

In the 1980s, he moved to Sydney and got into stockbroking, says Nikkei Asia. But the outback beckoned and “he turned his sights on Australia’s mineral riches”, buying his first mining venture, Anaconda Nickel, in 1993. As Forrest’s biographer Andrew Burrell noted 20 years later, it was the start of a “high-stakes” ride. The relationship between Anaconda and its key shareholder, the Swiss commodities group Glencore, was always “tense”, says the Australian Financial Review. But amid project delays and mounting debt, it drifted into “open warfare”. In the ensuing “Anaconda squeeze” in 2001, Forrest was forced to cede control amid losses of around $1 billion; shares plunged by around 89% from their peak. Forrest retreated to Europe but returned having spotted an opportunity to sell iron ore to fast-growing China. He gained control of a junior explorer for just $8 million, changed its name to Fortescue Metals, and set about building an empire.

Andrew Forrest's big bet on green energy

In 2011, Forrest stepped down as CEO of Fortescue and he and his wife became the first Australian billionaires to pledge the majority of their wealth to charity. As well as green causes, they have majored in children’s education, Aboriginal employment and a global campaign against human slavery. After a worldwide trip in 2020, “Forrest’s green ambitions roared into a new phase”, notes a profile by the Sydney investment company FC Capital.

As he describes it, “I felt a change in the global mood, a shift in belief that the impossible could be possible”. He responded by pushing audaciously into green hydrogen at Fortescue and beefing up his renewable energy company, Squadron Energy. Forrest’s ultimate aim is to transform Australia into “a renewable-energy superpower”. Don’t bet against it – whatever Exxon has to throw at him.

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Whatever else he does in his life, Justin Sun will always be known as the “banana” guy – having outbid six other contenders to secure a prime piece of the fruit for $5.2 million (plus $1million in fees) at Sotheby’s New York last week. Of course, it wasn’t just “any old banana”, says The Observer. The centrepiece of an installation called Comedian by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, it comes with 14 pages of instructions, a strip of duct tape to attach it to a wall, and is intended to be “frequently refreshed” or, indeed – as at its 2019 debut at Art Basel in Miami – eaten. The value lies in the “certificate of authenticity”.

Sun, the Chinese founder of the Tron blockchain and cryptocurrency, might have bought the piece for “a bit of fun”, says Fortune. But it’s already proving handy in terms of currying favour with the new regime in Washington. “I’m willing to donate my banana to Elon Musk, tape it to the body of a SpaceX rocket, and send it to both Mars and the Moon,” he posted on X.

Like Donald Trump himself, Sun is highly invested personally in a relaxation of law enforcement. He must hope there are good odds that a Trump-led Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will drop the charges he faces for “fraud and other securities violations” as it “resets its approach to cryptocurrencies”.

The booming crypto Trump trade, meanwhile, has given him largesse to spare, says Crypto.news. Tron (TRX) has been “one of the top-performing coins”, enjoying 80% year-to-date gains, while the company has shot to a market capitalisation of more than $17 billion – due to its emergence as one of the big players in “stablecoin” payments. The Tron network handled Tether tokens worth more than $196 billion in one day on 22 November. “Its average daily volume is often higher than that of Visa.”

Sun, 34, is one of a generation of Chinese entrepreneurs caught in limbo between the superpowers. An “arch internationalist”, he reportedly has a Maltese residency card and, a few years back, got himself appointed as Grenada’s ambassador to the World Trade Organisation, in hopes of promoting the Caribbean island as the test bed of a blockchain-driven economy. Last month, says The Telegraph, he became prime minister of the “bitcoin micronation” of Liberland – a patch of land on the banks of the Danube and “an experiment in crypto-sovereignty”.

Born in Xining, in China’s Qinghai province, Sun studied history at Beijing’s elite Peking University and then headed for the University of Pennsylvania for a masters in East Asian studies. During his time in the US, Sun encountered bitcoin for the first time and was smitten by its immense potential and disruptive power, says Quartz. He invested and by the time he returned to China in 2013 – with a role as chief representative and adviser to the US firm Ripple Labs’ under his belt – was already one of the youngest crypto millionaires. Sun’s prowess caught the eye of Jack Ma, the founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba, who recruited him to join his elite business school, Hupan University, says The Telegraph.

What's next for crypto mogul Justin Sun?

After launching Tron, Sun staged an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) in Beijing, days before the government banned them, and flew to San Francisco with the proceeds. Last year, he was sued by the SEC for allegedly trying to inflate the price of tokens through social media hype and by engaging in “wash trades” to inflate trading volumes. Sun is thirsty for success, with “seemingly limitless energy”, noted The Verge in 2022. In 2023, he proposed buying collapsed Swiss investment bank Credit Suisse for $1.5 billion to “integrate it into the Web 3.0 world”, says the Financial Times. Imagine the consternation in Zurich! Part shock-jock, part financial visionary, Sun is bent on impressing himself on mainstream finance and culture. The banana is just the start.

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In 2014, Henry Keswick wrote to the Financial Times to voice his opposition to Scottish independence. “I am a humble Scottish merchant trading in the China Seas. My family has followed this profession for almost 200 years,” he wrote. “When we are bearing the sticky heat of China’s Pearl River Delta or the tropical rainforests of equatorial Borneo, we dream about the cool, soft mist of the green Galloway hills where we were bred.”

Keswick, who has died aged 86, was “an almost extinct type”, says Charles Moore in The Spectator: “the patrician plutocrat – grand, usually benevolent, occasionally autocratic”. As a scion of the Jardine Matheson trading company – co-founded in 1832 in Canton (now known as Guangzhou, China) by a Jardine forebear to trade tea, silk, rhubarb and opium – he became the Hong Kong firm’s youthful “taipan” (leader) in 1970, and “therefore rich”.

Five years later, aged 36, he returned to Britain, “almost like Clive of India”, seeking a “country house, a wife and a seat in parliament”. The latter ambition went awry when, shortlisted for a Conservative seat in Wiltshire, he was asked if he’d buy a house in the constituency. “Madam,” he replied, “my arboretum is in the constituency… If you insist, I shall buy a house in every village in the constituency.”

Henry Keswick's legacy

“Tall, portly with a formidable appetite for Scotch eggs”, Keswick’s grand air belied a keen business brain, says The Times. Credited by the FT as the “taipan who took Jardine Matheson back to China” after the upheavals of the 1990s, he also pushed the trading house into new southeast Asian markets. By 2017, Astra International, an Indonesian automotive and industrial group, was delivering 25% of the group’s profits. Keswick “took the performance of the US investor Warren Buffett as his benchmark” – and gave the sage a run for his money. Jardine’s net assets grew from $70m to $26bn between 1972 and 2017.

Nonetheless, he had his critics, says The Telegraph. Not every hefty diversification bet paid off, and he and his brother Simon acquired a reputation for “buying high and selling low”. Still, Jardine’s “core businesses carried them through”. Keswick was admired (“grudgingly by some investors”) for his “tenacity in maintaining control of the group” through “complex voting rights and cross-shareholdings”.

Born in Shanghai in 1938, Henry Neville Lindley Keswick grew up in turbulent times. The family fled Shanghai to escape Japanese occupation in 1942 and returned after the war only to be expelled during the communist takeover of 1949 when Jardine’s then substantial property, railway and business assets were seized.

Regrouping in Hong Kong, Jardine’s “embedded itself into the fabric of the British colony”, says the FT. By the time he returned to Hong Kong in the early 1960s, Jardine’s had “recovered handsomely” and boomed during Hong Kong’s “period of rapid expansion” in the 1970s, says The Telegraph. Keswick, “rarely seen without a large cigar”, ran the business with a “commanding” style that won “the respect – if not necessarily the affection – of the colony’s leading Chinese entrepreneurs”.

Keswick never hid his distaste for communism and, in the run-up to Hong Kong’s 1997 handover to China, moved Jardine’s listing from Hong Kong to Singapore. He spent the next 30 years “mending fences with Beijing while hedging his bets”, says The Times. While enjoying a comfortable life in Britain – where Keswick owned the Oare estate in Wiltshire and two Scottish sporting estates – the Far East never lost its pull. “Mr Keswick you were bitten by the snake,” a senior Chinese leader once observed. “You waited, you watched, but you came back!”

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As it became clear that Donald Trump was heading for victory, Elon Musk posted a mocked-up picture of himself carrying a sink into the Oval Office – an echo of the day he took control of Twitter, says Richard Waters in the Financial Times. “It was easy to conclude that he was overplaying his hand.” Not a bit of it. “Musk is on the verge of the ultimate disruption – the US government itself.” Even Trump was prepared to take a back seat to his “super-genius” accomplice – at least for a while. “A star is born: Elon!” he said in a lengthy shout-out to his biggest donor while claiming victory. Trumpologists were quick to note that Musk and his four-year-old son, X Æ A-Xii, were the only outsiders included in the triumphant family photograph.

Musk, 53, who spent an estimated $200 million to help get Trump elected, might well conclude his bet has paid off handsomely. Already worth some $260 billion, his fortune shot up by £20 billion in a day as Tesla shares surged. “Pundits promptly wondered whether the world’s richest man was on a path to becoming its first trillionaire,” says The Economist.

Still, the real change is his new political clout. Trump confirmed Musk will co-lead a new department giving him sweeping powers to “dismantle government bureaucracy” – in a have-cake-and-eat-it arrangement that will allow him to keep control of Tesla, X, SpaceX, xAI and his brain-chip company, Neuralink.

Musk’s mischievous streak is already at play, says The Times. The new Department of Government Efficiency “shares an acronym” with his pet cryptocurrency, Doge. Its remit is to slash $2 trillion from government spending – a vast and some argue impossible task. But Musk is already flexing his influence in areas far beyond housekeeping, “even sitting in on the new president’s first phone calls with foreign leaders”. He has also already waded into US monetary policy, notes The New York Times – endorsing “a push to erode the Fed’s independence”.

During the course of his lengthy entrepreneurial career, South African-born Musk has been variously compared to Steve Jobs, Howard Hughes, Henry Ford and Bill Gates. None of these titans can really match his ambitions. Friends once described his internal narrative as going something like: “I’m going to take over the world. That’s going to be a super-crazy process.”

As with Trump, it’s hard to tell when Musk is being serious, says Fraser Nelson in The Telegraph. He once claimed his “finest piece of work” was fitting “a fart-sound button as standard in every Tesla”. Yet if anyone “can do the impossible and rewire US government”, it’s him. “The story of SpaceX and Tesla was about Musk “redefining what was possible” – it took a team of just 500 workers at SpaceX to send a privately-built rocket into orbit (Boeing’s equivalent division has 50,000 staff). But he succeeded by being “obsessed with process” – “marching round factories on a never-ending war against waste”.

Musk claims to have devised a formula for dissolving bureaucracy and sparking a new industrial revolution. But given the “legalistic weeds” he’ll face, “he may find it an easier task” to colonise Mars.

Are Elon Musk and Donald Trump headed for a fallout?

Musk could be “the breath of fresh air” the US government needs. But some worry about the conflicts of interest given Musk’s role in government, the boon he could grant to his own businesses and his cosy ties with autocratic regimes. “The merger of unrivalled power and wealth between two unashamed egomaniacs with boundless self-regard and scant respect for rules and regulations could go badly wrong” – if they don’t end up hating each other first. “The bromance has burned bright and fast.” Given Trump’s mercurial nature, and the sharp elbows of others in his court, “it could fizzle out just as quickly”.

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In 2018, Bill Gates gave a video interview to Wired in which he broke down six key moments in his life. They included his meeting as a teenager with Microsoft’s co-founder Paul Allen; the launch of Windows 95; his first trip to Africa with then future wife Melinda; and his friendship with Warren Buffett, which led to the ground-breaking Giving Pledge – encouraging other billionaires to donate their wealth to charitable causes. At the time, says The Economist, Gates was at the peak of his public popularity, having reconfigured himself from the rapacious tech monopolist of his Microsoft years into the world’s most prolific philanthropist. “So successful was this reinvention” that Gates was “the most admired man in the world from 2014 to 2019”, according to YouGov polls.

Bill Gates: billionaire, nerd, saviour, king

A lot can change in five years. Indeed, as Anupreeta Das writes in a new biography, Billionaire, Nerd, Saviour, King, “a large tear in Gates’ public image has forced us to reassess the man we knew”. The “tear” in question, says the Financial Times, started with Gates’ association with the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and continued with the 2021 break-up of his marriage and philanthropic partnership with Melinda, following a tawdry office affair. There are even reports that his famed friendship with Buffett is “fading” due to the latter’s “unease about Gates’ personal behaviour”. 

Meanwhile, the power of Gates’ foundation – which pours billions into global public-health initiatives, “outspending many governments” – has come under increasing scrutiny for its lack of accountability, says The Economist. Gates has long been a magnet for conspiracy theorists, but during the pandemic, they went into overdrive “with stories suggesting that he was profiting from vaccines and even injecting tiny microchips into people”. When it emerged that he had quietly become the biggest private landowner in America, critics suggested that Gates’ controlling nature had found a sinister new outlet. “The geeky hero had once again become a villain.” 

Das’s criticism is overdone, says The Guardian. Her book only lights up when we get “a sense of the extraordinary life that is to unfold”. It’s 1975, and a pair of young men are “huddled in the blue light of their computer screens in the early hours, chugging sugary drinks and writing the first lines of code for the company that will become Microsoft”. Gates and Allen hit the jackpot in 1979 when Gates learned that the industry’s biggest player, IBM, needed an operating system for its new PC. In the “genius” deal he struck, says Entrepreneur, Microsoft retained the right to license the software to other computer makers. The market was soon packed with IBM clones, and Microsoft cleaned up. When the firm floated in 1986, Gates became America’s youngest billionaire at 31. The aggressive business tactics and ruthless determination shown by Gates, and his lieutenant Steve Ballmer, made him a hate figure for many technology evangelists. But a new generation was rising fast. Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg identifies Gates as his “childhood hero”.

The motive driving Gates’ philanthropic work remains hotly contested, says the FT. In The Bill Gates Problem, published last year, Tim Schwab concludes that the foundation is little more than “a political tool, tax break and PR machine for Bill Gates”, who chases highly visible, self-aggrandising goals merely to extend his own influence. Most wouldn’t go that far. But, at 68, there is no sign that this complex, nuanced character “is slowing down or retreating from his self-appointed role as global seer and benefactor”. What has Gates’ long-term impact on the world been? It’s too early to judge.

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Michele Kang is arguably “the first tycoon of women’s football” – with three teams already under her belt, and plans to buy more in South Africa, Latin America and Asia. 

She’s also a great advertisement for happenstance, says the Financial Times. Having made her fortune in healthcare IT, her life changed in 2019 when she was invited to a reception on Capitol Hill to celebrate the US women’s national football team winning the World Cup. “That’s where I first learned about the professional women’s league, as well as a team called Washington Spirit.” 

After living for decades oblivious to football (“I didn’t even know who [Lionel] Messi was”), Kang’s interest was piqued. In 2022, she took over the club, “expecting to act chiefly as a role model for players, hosting team dinners and offering inspiring comments”. Then the enterprise mushroomed. In late 2023, she bought the London City Lionesses – one of the few women’s sides fully independent from a men’s team – and followed that up this year with the purchase of the French trophy team, Olympique Lyonnais Féminin.

Michele Kang's global sporting empire

The acquisition of Lyon, which has won eight European championships, was “a clear sign” that Kang, 64, was serious about creating “a worldwide footprint”, says Forbes. But soccer is just the start of her drive to advance women’s sport. She marked the start of the Olympic Games by launching a non-profit venture called Kynisca Innovation – named after the first female winner of Olympic chariot races – contributing half of an initial seed fund of $100 million. The aim is to “unlock female athletic potential” through training and education. What galvanised her, says Bloomberg, was the fact that just “6% of sports science data is focused exclusively on women”. She’s focused on the potential that might be unleashed if they stopped being viewed as simply “small men”. 

“I want the next generation to compete on an equal playing field,” says Kang of her ventures. But she says categorically that she’s in the game as a businesswoman. “This is an opportunity-rich environment,” she told the FT. She follows what she calls the “Silicon Valley model”: “[You] are convinced you have the solution, and you invest… It takes, to some extent, blind faith. That’s how I started my healthcare business. Everyone thought I was crazy when I invested right on the heels of the 2008 crash”. 

Kang describes herself as someone “who has never been good at being told she cannot do something”, says The New York Times. Growing up in South Korea, there were few opportunities for women in business. “Even if you graduate with the highest score, you would probably be an assistant to the chairman. Then, when you get married, you will be voluntarily or involuntarily asked to leave.” Fortunately, she had a father who pushed her to realise her potential. 

She moved to the US to study economics at the University of Chicago, later taking a master's at the Yale School of Management and joining Ernst & Young, specialising in IT. After an eight-year stint at Northrop Grumman, latterly in the health and science solutions unit, she quit to found Cognosante “to disrupt and challenge the status quo in the US healthcare system”. 

Kang succeeded in doing that so well – Cognosante won more than $300 million in federal contracts over the last two years – that she’s just sold it to Accenture Federal Services for an undisclosed sum to fund her new empire. She plans to spend big on new stadiums and talent. That’s quite a risk “given the cycles of boom-and-bust that litter the history of women’s football”, says The New York Times. But Kang is convinced she’s starting at a sweet spot in the game’s evolution to mainstream entertainment. “I’m not worried at all,” she says. “The train has left the station. I don’t think there’s any turning back.”

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Donald Trump’s net worth has skyrocketed since he was elected president for the second time during the 2024 US elections.

According to TheStreet, Trump is the richest US president of all time (after previous presidents’ wealth is adjusted for inflation), and the only billionaire to live in the White House.

So, how rich is he? Forbes estimates that Donald Trump’s net worth currently stands at around $7.3 billion.

Though still far from matching the wealth of billionaire Elon Musk, the US president’s fortune cements his status among the richest people in the world.

We take a deeper dive into what Trump owns and how much it's worth.

What makes up the majority of Donald Trump's net worth?

By far, the lion's share of Trump's net worth comes from cryptocurrency and liquid assets, according to Forbes. Trump is flush with cash thanks to his cryptocurrency sales, which have added around $2 billion to his wealth in the past ten months.

Second to stablecoins and memecoins, Trump’s social-media venture has made him billions. Trump Media & Technology Group Corp (NASDAQ: DJT), the parent company of his social network, Truth Social, generated sales of just $3.6 million last year, but due to noise around Trump on a daily basis, shares in his company remain highly priced, leaving him with billions. The media company went public via a merger with the special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Digital World Acquisition Company in March 2024.

Trump's booming real estate empire

A chunk of Trump's net worth also comes from real estate. Forbes estimates this to be worth $1.2 billion.

This includes his 30% stake in 1290 Avenue of the Americas in New York and 555 California Street in San Francisco, both valued at $1.4 billion and $1.6 billion, respectively.

Among Trump's other properties are Trump Tower ($215 million) in New York, 17 condos in Trump Park Avenue in New York ($94 million), Trump Winery ($44 million) in Virginia, and four homes in Florida, which are worth around $92 million.

He also owns an 11,000-square-foot Trump Tower penthouse in New York, several residential lots in California worth $50 million, and Seven Springs — a $30 million private estate in Bedford, New York.

Trump’s golf clubs and resorts are valued at $1.3 billion. The operating profits at his ten golf courses in six different states boomed from $19 million in 2020 to $66 million in 2024. He also owns three European golf properties – one in Ireland, two in Scotland – both valued at $118 million. The Trump Organization declared losses of over $100 million at these resorts, but business seems to have picked up in recent months, according to Forbes.

He owns several resorts, including the private club Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach worth $490 million, and the Trump National Doral Miami, worth $390 million.

According to Time, Trump also received £3 million in income from Bibles sold on musician Lee Greenwood’s website. Greenwood is a close ally of Trump. The president also brought in $2.8 million from Trump watches and $2.5 million from Trump sneakers and fragrances.

Other assets held by Trump include $11 million for a helicopter and aeroplane, $5 million in loans made to his children, and a licensing and management business worth $501 million. Trump’s pensions are worth $2 million.

How much have Trump's legal problems cost?

What lies in the debit column, detracting from Trump's net worth? Forbes estimated his legal liabilities at $95 million. This comes after a New York appeals court threw out a $500 million civil fraud penalty case against Trump, bringing down how much he needed to shell out. The judges stated that while Trump was liable for fraud, paying nearly half a billion dollars was excessive and couldn’t be justified.

How Donald Trump's net worth has fluctuated over time

Forbes estimated Donald Trump's net worth to be around $200 million back in 1982, rising to $1.7 billion by 1989. However, his net worth plunged in the 1990s, and he fell off the Forbes 400 list for the first half of the decade.

In 1996, he was worth about $450 million. From there, Trump's net worth gradually rose over time, and by 2007 it was $3 billion before tumbling again in 2009, at the end of the Great Recession (December 2007 to June 2009).

In 2009, Trump began building his billions again, reaching $4.5 billion in 2015. Trump's net worth began to decline again in 2016, falling to $3.7 billion before bottoming out during the pandemic at $2.5 billion in 2020 and 2021, likely in part because of closures that shuttered his clubs and resorts.

In 2022, Trump's net worth was $3.2 billion but dropped again, to $2.6 billion, in 2023. In early 2024, he grew his wealth to over $6 billion after Trump Media went public, per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

In 2025, a report by State Democracy Defenders Action estimated that his crypto holdings, namely $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins and a stake in World Liberty Financial (a Decentralised finance, or DeFi, tied to his family) were nearly 40% of his net worth – approximately $2.9 billion.

After Trump returned to office, his net worth jumped to $7.3 billion, up from $3.9 billion in 2024.

Steven Bartlett is best known for his podcast The Diary of a CEO and for being the youngest member on the Dragon’s Den panel.

Although the 32-year-old doesn’t come near the richest person in the world, his accumulated wealth is impressive — especially since he reached millionaire status in his mid-twenties.

According to Forbes, his net worth is £29 million, ranking him on their 2025 list of Top Creators.

Find out how Bartlett uses his business acumen and personality as his recipe for success.

Who is Steven Bartlett? 

Much of Steven Bartlett’s success is down to his branding – fitting for someone who started out in the marketing world. The entrepreneur made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2020 and has been a speaker on Ted Talks and at the United Nations.

Bartlett was born in Botswana in 1992 and moved to Plymouth, England, at the age of two. In 2010, he went to Manchester Metropolitan University but dropped out in the first year, as he decided to work on his business idea. His first venture, launched in 2013, was an online messaging board for students called Wallpark. It allowed them to share events and sell textbooks on the site.

A year later, Bartlett co-founded the marketing agency Social Chain with Dominic McGregor at the age of 22. The agency pulled in global brands, from Apple and KFC to McDonald's.

By the age of 23, Bartlett reached millionaire status. In 2019, Social Chain was publicly listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, after merging with German online retailer Lumaland AG. That company, ‘The Social Chain AG’ listed with a market valuation of more than $200 million, according to Forbes. In 2020, Bartlett, aged 27, stepped down as co-CEO of Social Chain AG.

In 2023, media group Brave Bison acquired The Social Chain AG in a £7.7 million deal, although it’s not certain if Bartlett made anything from this buyout.

Bartlett has said the decision to move away from Social Chain was to make room for other ventures – one of which being his successful podcast, The Diary of a CEO.

How Steven Bartlett started The Diary of a CEO

While heading up Social Chain, Bartlett aired the first episode of The Diary of a CEO. He said it was just a “one-off experiment”, but now, the podcast is renowned for its high-profile guests, ranging from Michelle Obama and Jimmy Fallon to Boris Johnson and Gary Neville. The podcast has more than 10 million YouTube subscribers and his social media following is around 25 million.

The Diary of a CEO ranks among the top podcasts on Spotify’s UK podcast charts. In November 2024, it reached one billion listens and streams across Apple, Spotify and YouTube. It was the first UK-produced show to hit the milestone. Last year, Forbes revealed that the franchise earned $20 million in revenue thanks to brand deals with LinkedIn, Oracle, Shopify, and other events and merchandise.

Bartlett leveraged the brand and released a book in 2023, called The Diary of a CEO: The 33 Laws of Business and Life. The book went on to become a No. 1 Sunday Times bestseller. According to the BBC, the entrepreneur also partnered with the Prison Service so that his book could be given to inmates to educate and inspire them. Prior to this, in 2021, the entrepreneur released his first book called Happy Sexy Millionaire, which was also a Sunday Times bestseller.

The podcast has had its fair share of controversy, however. An investigation by the BBC World Service found that Bartlett’s podcast was amplifying health misinformation, which could put cancer patients at risk. The analysis of 15 health-related podcast episodes discovered that each contained around 14 harmful claims that were not scientifically approved, such as guests promoting a keto diet as a form of cancer treatment.

A spokesperson for Flight Studio, Bartlett’s production company, told MoneyWeek: “The Diary Of A CEO (DOAC), is an open-minded, long-form conversation with world leaders, global experts, CEOs, athletes, authors, actors, and other individuals identified for their distinguished and eminent career and/or consequential life experience.

“Each guest episode is thoroughly researched prior to commission. DOAC offers guests freedom of expression and believes that progress, growth and learning comes from hearing a range of voices, not just those Steven and the DOAC team necessarily agree with.

“The BBC claims to have reviewed 15 specific episodes of nearly 400 published to date. For any reporting of DOAC to focus on less than 4% of episodes with an extremely limited proportion of guests – some of whom have featured on the BBC – to create a broader, and in our opinion, partial narrative is disappointing, misleading and frankly, disingenuous.”

What does Steven Bartlett invest in?

After stepping down from Social Chain, Bartlett moved into the world of investments in 2021.

He co-founded and launched a software platform called Thirdweb with Furqan Rydhan, which aids entrepreneurs in building and managing web3 apps. The platform is backed by Coinbase and Shopify. According to Private Equity Wire, Thirdweb was valued at $160 million in 2022, and within nine months, 55,000 users took advantage of the platform’s tools. As a result, Thirdweb was generating revenue of more than $1.5 million each week. But the fund has come under criticism by one crowdfunding forum, The Times reported, stating that it hasn’t been transparent with investors.

In the same year, Bartlett launched and co-founded a marketing investment company called Flight Group. It backs and invests in innovative companies. Within Flight Group sit three separate entities – Flight Fund (that invests in biotech, blockchain, technology, health and wellbeing, commerce and space), Flight Story (a marketing company) and Flight Studio, created to follow on from the success of Bartlett’s The Diary of a CEO, and will create more podcasts.

Steven Bartlett on Dragons’ Den

Bartlett became the youngest-ever “dragon” to join the BBC’s Dragons’ Den panel in 2021. He was just 28 when he sat alongside Peter Jones, Sara Davies and Deborah Meaden. According to the BBC, Bartlett has pledged nearly £2 million to invest ‘in the Den’.

“You might not recognise Dan Friedkin if you bumped into him,” observed the Houston Chronicle earlier this year. Although the billionaire businessman is “one of the wealthiest people” in the city (Forbes puts his worth at $6.4 billion), he keeps a relatively low profile. In Europe, on the other hand, his star is rising and rising – because of his love of the beautiful game. Having bought the Italian club AS Roma in 2020, Friedkin has now emerged as a potential white knight for Britain’s troubled Everton FC, says the Financial Times. Earlier this month he started talks to buy the heavily indebted club from its current owner, Farhad Moshiri, after another US suitor – the troubled Miami investment group 777 Partners – failed to complete its takeover. 

If Friedkin wins the club, fans can expect a dash of derring-do. Although his wealth derives from an unglamorous car and autoparts empire, he is also a Hollywood producer and “stunt pilot” with a passion for collecting vintage planes. When the director of Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan, was casting around for Spitfires to feature in the film, he discovered that Friedkin owned six of them – and went on to secure his services as the pilot of the aeroplane, ostensibly flown by actor Tom Hardy, that made a dramatic landing on Dunkirk beach. Friedkin later won an award for “best speciality stunt” for the feat. 

Born in 1965, Friedkin “comes from a long line of aviator businessmen”: his grandfather, Kenny – a former World War II combat pilot – founded Pacific Southwest Airlines in 1949, establishing it as a pioneer in low-cost air travel. Friedkin’s late father, Thomas, himself a stunt pilot, “extended the engineering passion into the world of automobiles”, says The Telegraph, establishing one of the first Toyota dealerships in America. Gulf States Toyota is still at the heart of the family business empire. But, since taking the reins from his father in 1995, Friedkin has extended its reach into Hollywood as the force behind film studios Imperative Entertainment and Neon. An impressive list of films includes the epic 2023 western Killers of the Flower Moon, directed by Martin Scorsese, and the 2019 Oscar-winner Parasite. The Friedkin Group also owns a portfolio of golf courses and luxury resorts globally, including a safari company in Tanzania. 

Friedkin has combined his “colourful career” with an avowed dislike of the limelight, says The Telegraph. But he’s far from being a recluse. A father of four, he is described by colleagues as a “private person”. He is “very poised”, one told the FT. “Not the first to speak, but when he does he’s always adding value.” What will probably please Everton fans most, if he does buy the club, is that he “brings a similar passion to football as he does to aviation”. According to one senior figure in the sport, “he feels every ball that’s kicked”. Certainly, he has won the respect of the citizens of Rome: not just for improving the financial fortunes of AS Roma, but for the respect he has shown for the club’s traditions.

Dan Friedkin's cautious optimism in Liverpool

Friedkin’s acquisition of Everton isn’t a done deal – although ploughing in £200 million to help with loan payments and provide working capital shows considerable good faith. There is also the possibility that it could “re-ignite debate” about “multi-club ownership”, says the FT, particularly when teams from the same stable are ranged against each other. The counter-argument is that none of Friedkin’s teams (he also owns France’s fourth-tier side Cannes) are likely to encounter each other in international competition any time soon. The overriding feeling in Liverpool, says long-term Everton fan Patrick Boyland in The New York Times, is one of “cautious optimism” after “years of near misses and false dawns”. Friedkin represents “a significant upgrade on the baseball-cap crew from Miami”.

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Anant Ambani is the son of Indian tycoon Mukesh Ambani, an Indian businessman and magnate who is the wealthiest man in Asia.

While Anant Ambani’s net worth may not be as extensive as his father’s, his wedding to Radhika Merchant in 2024 came to be known as India’s “wedding of the year” due to its opulence and star presence.

The pre-wedding festivities gained global attention, with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft founder Bill Gates rubbing shoulders while Rihanna performed her biggest hits. A local airport in the state of Gujarat was granted temporary international status to accommodate the guests. On top of that, the events included a $900 million cruise sailing between Palermo and Portofino in Italy.

The couple tied the knot in July 2024, and the wedding’s star-studded guest list included some of the richest people in the world, such as Kim Kardashian, David Beckham, as well as former British prime ministers Tony Blair and Boris Johnson.

The events gave the world a sneak peek into the magnificent lifestyle of the Ambani family. We look at how Anant Ambani built his fortune, his father’s investments and the factors contributing to their net worths.

How rich is Anant Ambani?

Anant Ambani’s net worth is roughly £29 billion (INR 3.59 lakh crore), according to a report by 360 ONE Wealth and Crisil.

He is the youngest son of the Reliance Industries chairman, Mukesh Ambani and businesswoman Nita Ambani.

Most of Anant’s fortune comes from inheriting Mukesh’s dizzying wealth and his booming Indian empire. It makes Anant, 30, one of the most prominent businessmen of his generation and one of the wealthiest young people in the world.

According to Reliance’s Q3 FY2026 results, the company has made $32.7 billion in gross revenue and $3.8 billion in capital expenditure, which is just a teaser to the family fortune.

Anant Ambani went to college in the US and earned his degree from Brown University, majoring in business management.

Since 2020, he has been making a fortune with his roles in the Reliance empire, spearheading its green energy operations and other corporate roles like human resource management and capital projects execution.

He is also the director of the multinational tech company Jio Platforms Limited. According to Reuters, the company is believed to be considering an initial public offering (IPO) in 2026, which would float 2.5% of the company and could make it India’s largest-ever IPO worth more than $4 billion.

Other factors contributing to Anant Ambani’s net worth include owning the Indian Premier League team Mumbai Indians, one of the most successful cricket teams in the league. Reliance purchased the team in 2008 for a staggering $111.9 million, making it the most expensive team to be sold.

More recently, the BBC reported that luxury watchmaker Jacob & C designed a new watch based on Anant Ambani’s private zoo, Vantara, which is home to over 2,000 species and is spread over 3,500 acres. Vantara was one of the many venues for his lavish wedding to Radhika Merchant.

Radhika is a businesswoman and the daughter of tycoon Viren Merchant, CEO of private pharmaceutical company Encore Healthcare, and Shaila Merchant. Radhika is a board member of the company.

Her family’s estimated net worth is $90 million, according to the Times of India. The most recent filing showed that the company generated a revenue of around £10 million (INR 128 crore) for FY24/25.

What is Mukesh Ambani’s net worth?

Mukesh Ambani is an Indian billionaire and the face of Reliance Industries, which he is the chairman and managing director of. His net worth stands at $104 billion, according to Forbes.

His father, Dhirubhai Ambani, founded the company in 1958, when it was originally set up as a small venture firm trading commodities like spices and polyester yarn.

Now, the conglomerate’s operations include energy, clothing and retail, and telecommunications, making it India’s largest public company by market capitalisation. The company’s website claims it owns the largest oil refining complex in the world.

Reliance’s telecom and broadband service Jio has more than 500 million subscribers, making it India’s largest mobile network operator and the third largest in the world.

The majority of Mukesh Ambani’s wealth comes from his stake in Reliance Industries. He is already the wealthiest man in India by a large margin, but his extensive fortune also makes him Asia’s richest person.

Ambani owns an $80 million beach villa in Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah Island, and snapped up a majority stake worth $98 million in Mandarin Oriental New York, one of the biggest luxury hotels in the world.

Mukesh Ambani also owns more than 150 luxury cars and three private jets, of which the most expensive is a Boeing Business Jet 2, worth $73 million. He owns an Airbus A319, which was a gift to his wife, and a Falcon 900EX Jet, according to GQ India.

Inside the Ambani family’s expansive fortune  

Each member of the Ambani family holds a stake in Reliance.

Mukesh and Nita Ambani, along with Anant Ambani and his two older siblings, Akash and Isha Ambani, both 34, own 0.12% each. Kokilaben Ambani, the mother of Mukesh and his siblings, owns the highest stake of 0.24%, equivalent to 31.48 million shares.

The family’s wealth does not end there. The Ambanis live at Antilia, the second most expensive private residence in the world after Buckingham Palace. It is a 27-storey tower that cost around £1.6 billion to build, which has famously been called the world’s first billion-dollar home. The property is 400,000-square-foot with three helipads, and has some unique features, like a 168-car garage, an ice-cream parlour and a snow room, according to Architectural Digest India.

The Ambanis also own teams in other cricket leagues around the world, including MI Cape Town, MI Emirates, and MI New York.

The Ambani family’s wedding celebrations are known to create a lot of press, as they have brought together some of the world’s biggest pop icons and global personalities.

In 2018, Isha Ambani married billionaire Ajay Piramal’s son Anand. Beyoncé performed at their pre-wedding bash in Udaipur, India. Chris Martin of Coldplay and The Chainsmokers performed at Akash Ambani and Shloka Mehta’s pre-wedding party in Switzerland in 2019.

The family’s wealth and influence extend far beyond mere financial success. Mukesh Ambani’s wife, Nita Ambani, is more focused on the non-profit side of the business. She launched the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre in Mumbai in 2023, and is the chairperson and founder of Reliance Foundation, one of India’s largest non-profits.

What UK business do the Ambanis own?

The family business includes various big-name ventures that you may be familiar with. In 2019, Reliance bought London toy retailer Hamleys for nearly £70 million, according to the Guardian. Hamleys is the world’s oldest toy shop, and with more than 160 stores in 18 countries, a majority of which are in India.

In 2021, the Ambanis bought the historic British private sporting estate, Stoke Park, for £57 million. Today, the property spans 49 rooms with 13 tennis courts and a 27-hole golf course. It was also the backdrop for two Bond films, Goldfinger and Tomorrow Never Dies, and the Netflix series The Crown.

Meanwhile, Reliance’s retail subsidiary is now an exclusive partner with fashion e-tailer ASOS, successfully bringing the e-tailer to India.

Reliance also attempted to acquire one of Britain’s largest pharmacy retailers, Boots, submitting a bid of around $7.2 billion. However, it was unsuccessful as Walgreens, which owns a majority stake in Boots, withdrew its sale offer, stating that none of the bids received adequately reflected the high potential value of the company.

In February 2025, Mukesh Ambani reintroduced Shein to Indian markets through his retail platform Ajio, after the fast fashion brand’s four-and-a-half-year absence in the country.

The net worth of the richest person in the world is double that of the billionaire with the second-largest fortune.

While the wealthiest people in the world often change places on the rich list, the one person who has consistently held the top spot since 2025 is Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder Elon Musk – except for one time when he briefly dropped to second place, behind Oracle’s Larry Ellison last year.

In total, the five richest people in the world have a combined net worth of close to $2 trillion, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index. Using the same index, we explore their wealth in detail below.

As the wealthiest bunch are all men, we take a look at the richest woman in the world in a separate guide.

The richest person in the world

1. Elon Musk  

Elon Musk is the richest person in the world, with a staggering $733 billion to his name.

The South African entrepreneur has added over a hundred billion to his net worth in the past year, thanks to buzz around the upcoming SpaceX initial public offering (IPO), touted to be the largest IPO in history. It has made him richer than the two billionaires right below him on the rich list combined.

Moreover, Tesla stock has surged nearly 14-fold since the pandemic, with a market capitalisation of $1.36 trillion at the time of writing.

Musk owns around 11% of Tesla and roughly 50% of SpaceX. We break down Elon Musk’s net worth in a separate guide.

2. Larry Page

Alphabet co-founder Larry Page’s net worth has topped $300 billion for the first time in history, as Google’s parent company’s stock rose in the latest Mag 7 earnings season after increased AI spending. His net worth now stands at $328 billion.

A majority of Page’s wealth comes from his stake in Google, which rebranded as Alphabet in 2015, grouping all its divisions – including Gmail, Android and YouTube – under one umbrella. He’s not the only mind behind Google in the rich list – as you’ll see below.

Find out more about Larry Page's net worth.

3. Sergey Brin

Sergey Brin, co-founder of Alphabet, is a new entrant to this list. He has a net worth of $305 billion, not far behind that of fellow co-founder Larry Page.

The American businessman was the president of Alphabet until 2019, and has since remained a board member and a controlling shareholder. He co-founded Google with Larry Page in 1998, after the two met at Stanford University.

Alphabet became the fourth company to achieve a market capitalisation of $4 trillion, joining the likes of Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple to hit the milestone. Its stock grew by 65% last year, marking the largest single-year jump for the company since 2009.

Brin has been donating millions of dollars of his shares in Alphabet to fund research on Parkinson’s disease.

4. Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos has a net worth of $284 billion. The billionaire is most famous for founding Amazon in 1994, which started when Bezos saw a gap in the market for e-commerce and began to sell books online, working out of his garage. Now, the empire has a market capitalisation of $2.85 trillion.

Bezos also owns The Washington Post, one of the largest newspapers in the United States. He also has a stake in Blue Origin, a space exploration company he founded in 2000.

Bezos is increasingly looking to dominate the world of film and fashion. He was the lead sponsor and honorary co-chair of the 2026 Met Gala and donated $10 million, making it the largest individual financial commitment in the event’s history.

Moreover, last year, Amazon took creative control of the James Bond franchise. Back in 2021, it acquired MGM Studios, a historic American production company, for $8.45 billion. Some of MGM’s most popular films include The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Find out more about the factors that contributed to Jeff Bezos’ net worth.

5.  Larry Ellison

Larry Ellison is the man behind one of the world’s largest software companies, Oracle, which he founded in 1977. His net worth is $248 billion.

Ellison owns more than 40% of Oracle – making him the largest shareholder – and has holdings in Tesla, having been one of the company’s board of directors from 2018 to 2022.

On 10 September 2025, Ellison briefly overtook Elon Musk as the richest person in the world, a title Musk had claimed for just over 300 days. This was due to Oracle’s earnings report, which revealed a deal with OpenAI.

It resulted in gains of 36% in a single day for the database software company’s share price, adding almost $250 billion to its market capitalisation and around $89 billion to Ellison’s personal wealth. Major Oracle shareholders also became wealthier instantly.

Read more on Larry Ellison’s net worth and how he makes the rest of his billions away from Oracle.

Vintage groups, from The Monkees to The Spice Girls, bear witness to the power of the manufactured pop band. Mix it up with K-pop, bang it out on TikTok and YouTube, sit back, and take the profits. That, at any rate, is the hope of South Korean music mogul Bang Si-hyuk, who for the past two years has been sifting through more than 120,000 applications to form a new girl group in partnership with one of the world’s largest record labels, IGA. 

The hype surrounding the joint venture – dubbed “The Debut: Dream Academy” – is so intense that a documentary charting its twists and turns is already slated to air on Netflix next year. 

Bang’s proposed formula, says Billboard, is “to form an international group based on the K-pop methodology” and “develop them into a global girl group” by way of a gripping contest all available to watch on YouTube. 

The action started at the end of August, when 20 finalists from a dozen countries were introduced at an event in Santa Monica, California. The wholesome aim, explained an executive, is to celebrate an “interconnected” world in which music “breaks down the barriers across languages and culture”. The final members of the group will be selected – and their names revealed – in a live finale on November 17.

You can understand the interest from both pop fans and the suits at Geffen Records (a subdivision of IGA, itself owned by Universal Music), says Bloomberg Businessweek. After all, Bang and his label Hybe are the driving force behind BTS (aka the Bangtan Boys) – “the world’s biggest boy band” credited with making K-pop into a global phenomenon. They were the first South Korean act to top the Billboard charts in the US and sell out stadiums across the world. BTS’s winning combination of catchy beats, delivered by seven attractive young men with a message of empowerment, has helped make Bang, nicknamed “Hitman” and now 51, very rich. Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index puts his fortune at around $2bn. Not bad for a kid whose parents once pooh-poohed his musical ambitions. 

Bang grew up in Seoul, the son of a government official, and cut his teeth “listening to hip-hop and British synthpop and forming bands with classmates” – he played guitar. Under pressure to study something more serious, his big break came in 1994 when he won a national song contest and committed himself to a career in music. Teaming up with fellow musician Park Jin-young, he became a founder producer of the latter’s JYP Entertainment. The pair quickly found success in Korea with solo artists and a boy band and moved to Los Angeles in hopes of making it big there. Though unsuccessful, the contacts made would later prove very useful. 

In 2005, Bang formed his own company, Big Hit Entertainment. Then, in 2010, a promising demo tape landed on his desk from a 15-year-old artist later known as RM. “Big Hit started a nationwide search for young hip-hop performers to join their new star”, subjecting hopefuls to “a multi-year training process”. Like many Korean media moguls, Bang is concerned that the “hallyu” – or “Korean Wave” – is now ebbing. Even Bang admits “there may never be another BTS”. But the pronounced internationalism of the Dream Academy project reflects a new drive. “To prevent against a dip and to satisfy growth-hungry investors – he wants to transform Hybe into “the first Asian music company with a global footprint”. 

The industry began waking up to Bang’s empire-building when he bought Ithaca Holdings, run by the famed music manager Scooter Braun, in 2021 for $1.05bn, says Music Business Worldwide – following it up this year with the acquisition of “rap powerhouse” QC Media. He’s also been rounding out his tech portfolio. Weverse, a Hybeowned app that lets fans interact with each other and musicians, is at the heart of Dream Academy. He’s also bought an AI company specialising in vocals. 

Can this combo catapult the “Global Girl Group” to superstardom? Don’t bet against it.

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Steve Ballmer was Microsoft’s CEO from 2000 to 2014, and today he is one of the richest people in the world, primarily thanks to his stake in Microsoft, along with the company’s founder, Bill Gates. 

As well as his investment in Microsoft, Ballmer is the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers an NBA basketball team. 

According to Bloomberg, Steve Ballmer has a total net worth of $141 billion, making him the eighth richest person in the world, and one of a group of individuals who’ve built large fortunes from technology. 

Here we look at how Steve Ballmer built his fortune and the factors contributing to his net wealth today.

Steve Ballmer’s net worth history  

Steve Ballmer became CEO of Microsoft in 2000, succeeding Bill Gates who co-founded the business and acted as its CEO until 2000. Ballmer had joined Microsoft back in 1980 as the company's 30th employee. As the business grew, he worked his way up through the ranks. He served in various roles, including senior vice president of sales and support, before being named CEO, having built a vast understanding of the enterprise. 

Ballmer's leadership style was known for being energetic and passionate, which was required at the time. During his tenure, Microsoft underwent a period of explosive growth, particularly in enterprise software and cloud computing, and Ballmer's leadership played a key role in the expansion of Microsoft's offering, mainly in the enterprise software (or business software) market. 

The Windows operating system has always been Microsoft's flagship product, and it was a world-beating product when Ballmer took over. However, it continued to evolve and improve throughout the 2000s, under the new CEO's leadership. The release of Windows XP in 2001 was a significant milestone, helping the company cement its position in the market at a time when the world was seeing a tech revolution. 

But Microsoft never took its position for granted. As the internet became more important in people's lives, and more companies sprang up offering connected services, Microsoft shifted to developing software and services optimised for online use, away from PC-based operating systems. Products like Internet Explorer and MSN Messenger made sure the business was at the forefront of the internet revolution, and Ballmer was a key player in pushing the business towards these markets. 

The development of products such as Azure and Office 365, also developed under Ballmer’s leadership, helped Microsoft become the go-to cloud computing and internet enable tech group in the world. As it rode the growth of technology, revenues grew from $25 billion in 2000 to over $70 billion in 2013.

Microsoft’s failures

Despite the company’s success during the 2000s, Ballmer missed some key opportunities, such as mobile devices and search. Ballmer famously dismissed the potential of the iPhone upon its release, and Microsoft's own attempts at creating a mobile operating system were met with little success – something the business is still paying for to this day, although its position in the cloud market has helped it offset most of the lost profits. 

Additionally, the company struggled to compete with Google in the search market, with its Bing search engine failing to gain significant market share. This is also something the business is struggling with even to this day, although Microsoft is a key shareholder in ChatGPT’s parent company OpenAI, and this might help the enterprise gain an edge over its long-time rival. 

What Ballmer did pick up on was the growth of the global gaming market. The establishment of the company's Xbox gaming division took Microsoft out of its core market and opened up a huge new one, even though it was a risk to begin with. Today, Xbox is one of the main console providers in the world.

In 2014, Ballmer stepped down as CEO of Microsoft, marking the the beginning of a new era as it started to build on the success of the Ballmer leadership.  

How Steve Ballmer spends his money  

Even though Ballmer retired as CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he has continued to stay active in the tech industry, investing in several other tech startups, including Twitter (now X) and Airbnb.

One of Ballmer's main focuses today is his role as the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team, which he acquired in 2014. He is also a lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he shares his insights and experience with the next generation of business leaders, and founded the Ballmer Group, a philanthropic organisation with his wife, Connie. 

Jeff Bezos is a billionaire thanks to Amazon’s domination in the world of online shopping.

The founder of the e-commerce company trails behind some of the richest people in the world — namely, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg — in the Bloomberg Billionaire Index with a net worth of $240 billion. Meanwhile, Forbes puts his wealth at $233.4 billion.

While the billionaire entrepreneur is often making headlines, all eyes are currently on Bezos and Lauren Sánchez’s wedding celebrations, a star-studded event that has reportedly cost millions.

There’s also a lot of buzz around what Amazon MGM Studios decides to do with the next James Bond movie as it assumes creative control of the 007 franchise.

We explore key factors that have expanded Jeff Bezos' net worth below.

How did Jeff Bezos start Amazon?

Jeff Bezos was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on 12 January 1964 and was raised in Houston, Texas and Miami, Florida. He studied computer science and electrical engineering at Princeton University and graduated with honours.

Bezos worked at many companies on Wall Street, including Fitel, Bankers Trust and D.E. Shaw. But despite his stable finance career, he made a risky move to e-commerce in 1994, by founding Amazon.com — an online bookstore that would revolutionise the way people shopped for books.

Initially, the company was run out of Bezos’ garage, with a handful of employees. In 1995, he managed to convince his siblings, Mark and Christina, to invest $10,000 each in the company. Their investment paid off, and within a year, the company was selling books to customers around the world.

In 1997, Amazon shares debuted via an initial public offering at $18 per share. It made Bezos a billionaire overnight. As of June 2025, Amazon’s market capitalisation is a staggering £1.728 trillion.

Bezos continued to expand Amazon's offerings, adding music, films and, eventually, just about everything else under the sun. Today, Amazon is the world's largest online retailer. The company was responsible for introducing the Kindle, an electronic book reader, in 2007.

In 2021, Bezos stepped down as Amazon CEO, and since then, he has shifted his focus towards other projects like Blue Origin.

Bezos now owns around 8.6% of Amazon, valued at roughly $190.56 billion. Last year, he sold about $13.5 billion worth of shares.

Other factors contributing to Jeff Bezos' net worth

In addition to his success with Amazon, Bezos has made several other investments and acquisitions that have contributed to his net worth.

He bought The Washington Post, one of the largest newspapers in the United States, for $250 million in 2013. Bezos also has a significant stake in Blue Origin, a space exploration company he founded in 2000. The all-female flight crew for its New Shepard rocket included singer-songwriter Katy Perry and TV star Gayle King.

Bezos also holds an extensive real estate portfolio stretching across 420,000 acres, making him America’s 23rd largest landowner, according to the Land Report. This includes a $165 million Warner Estate in Beverly Hills, a 14-acre compound in Maui that cost him $78 million, and three properties on an exclusive island near Miami, which he bought for a whopping $234 million, per the Wall Street Journal.

He also has a 417-foot superyacht, Koru, that cost him at least $500 million, two jets, and two helicopters.

Other than that, his portfolio also includes stakes in Uber, Airbnb, financial news website Business Insider, cloud human resources company Workday, and software company Nextdoor.

Bezos has pledged to give away a majority of his wealth to charity during his lifetime. He committed $10 billion towards fighting climate change through his Bezos Earth Fund, and gave out $117 million in grants to support homeless families across the US and Puerto Rico.

How much did Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez's wedding cost?

The Bezos-Sánchez wedding in Venice cost at least $20 – 25 million, according to Forbes’s estimates. Meanwhile, Reuters places the figures between $47 – $56 million.

There was no compromise on its 200-attendee star-studded guest list, with appearances made by Bill Gates, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kim Kardashian and several high-profile celebrities, who were staying at five-star luxury hotels across Venice.

Forbes also reported that the couple’s wedding planners commissioned around 30 private water taxis to escort the guests (Venice has 280 in total), which cost them roughly $270,000 for three days. The catering was by a three-Michelin-star chef, likely to have cost $360,000 for food and beverages for a night, or $1.1 million for the three days.

Bezos donated nearly $3.6 million in total to Corila, UNESCO’s Venice office, and the Venice International University.

While extravagant, the amount pales in comparison to Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant’s wedding last year, which cost between $400 – $500 million, and included performances from Rihanna and Justin Bieber.

However, Business Insider reports that the Bezos-Sánchez wedding boosted Venice’s economy by a staggering $1.1 billion. This is based on analysis from Italy’s tourism minister and consultancy firm JFC. A lion’s share of the figure (over 90%) came from publicity and media exposure.

What will Amazon do with the James Bond franchise?

Amazon revealed on 20 February 2025 that it had taken creative control of the iconic James Bond franchise. This comes after the e-commerce giant bought MGM — which shares the rights to the series with Eon — in an $8.5 billion deal. This gave Amazon access to a catalogue of more than 4,000 movies and 17,000 shows.

It also means that Amazon MGM Studios and Eon Productions now co-own the intellectual property related to the James Bond franchise.

In more recent news, Amazon announced that legendary Oscar-nominated filmmaker Denis Villeneuve of Dune and Blade Runner 2049 fame will direct the next James Bond film.

Variety reported that the studio is interested in casting Harris Dickinson, Tom Holland, or Jacob Elordi for the role of James Bond.

Gonzo journalist Shane Smith’s “gusto” transformed a small Montreal punk magazine into a sprawling global empire, regarded for years as “the future of media”, says the Financial Times.

Everyone from Rupert Murdoch – who famously drank tequila with the bearded, tattooed Smith at Vice’s Williamsburg office – to the cream of private equity piled in. But last month it all came tumbling down when VICE filed for bankruptcy after years of chaotic management and risky ventures. 

“You put a big target on your back when you say ‘we know better, we’re the future’,” says a former executive. “Shane was always out trying to be the rainmaker… Everybody bought into it. But it didn’t [come off], and now look at the downfall.”

How did the VICE bankruptcy happen?

For investors, led by the US private equity group TPG, it has certainly been a bruising adventure. An outfit trumpeting a value of nearly $6bn in 2017, when Smith ranged around Cannes in the French Riviera promising a “very sexy” public listing, is now worth less than $300m. 

TPG’s near half-billion-dollar bet, meanwhile, “has been wiped to zero”. The losses reveal “how a good sales pitch can impress even the most experienced giants of business” (other big investors included Bob Iger of Disney and WPP’s Martin Sorrell), especially those plotting to capture millennials and advertising dollars during the “free money” era of the 2010s. 

VICE went “from upstart disruptor to a standard bearer for the future of digital media”. The New York Times once described Smith as “a cross between a punk rocker and a Fortune 500 executive”. 

But when it comes to boasting about “personal dealmaking prowess”, noted New York magazine in 2018, he’s up there with Donald Trump. Born in Ottawa, Ontario in 1969, the son of a pioneering computer programmer, he learned from his father that “life isn’t fair and you have to be both the strongest guy and the smartest guy”. 

Smith claims to have left home and got himself a job and place to live aged 13, says The Observer. “I was in a bit of a gang, a headstrong guy.” He played in a punk band and travelled round Eastern Europe – picking up a degree in English and politics along the way – before finding himself in Montreal in 1994. 

There he co-founded Vice, a magazine sold on street corners and in record stores, which picked up an early following for its subversive articles about music, fashion, drugs and sex. 

In 1999, Smith moved the operation to New York, winning backing from film director Spike Jonze and former Viacom boss Tom Freston says the FT. “With their encouragement he expanded Vice into online video, where advertising money was migrating”. 

Smith’s “beard and Canadian drawl” became “an avatar of the company”: both on-camera, in Vice documentaries about drug gangs and warlords, and in front of corporate audiences, “where he persistently declared the inevitability of his company’s global domination”, says New York magazine. 

Cracks begin to show

The operation certainly looked the part: by 2018, Vice encompassed “a cable network... a dozen websites, two shows on HBO, an advertising agency, a film studio, a record label and a bar in London”. 

But cracks were beginning to show. Smith had promised his new channel, Viceland, would “bring millennials back to TV”. Yet the venture drew “miniscule audiences” and “bombed”, notes the FT. 

This bad miscalculation put acute pressure on finances just as online advertising was slowing. Today the blame game continues. Was Vice strangled by the strictures of its private equity investors, as some claim, or was it simply a chaotic organisation doomed to burn through cash? 

At the heart of the issue is “how you scale the essence of a punk-rock magazine into a multibillion-dollar media company”, says one former Vice executive. “There is no real answer. At some point, what got you there isn’t what you are”.

Legendary investor Warren Buffett has built an enormous fortune and is one of the richest people in the world.

His recent decision to step down as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway has sent shockwaves through the financial world, causing the 94-year-old’s net worth to shrink.

But despite the setback, he is still worth $160 billion, and ranks in the top ten on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, just behind Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. Buffett has consistently trailed Gates on the rich list since it launched in 2012.

As the CEO and largest shareholder of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett has made several successful strides, including generating average annual returns of 19.8% between 1965 and 2023 — roughly double what the S&P 500 gained over the same period, according to The Motley Fool.

We look at how Warren Buffett built his fortune and what his upcoming retirement means for investors and Berkshire Hathaway.

Warren Buffett’s early years

Born in 1930 in Omaha, Nebraska, Buffett showed an early interest in business. Buffett's father was a stockbroker and served as a role model for the young investor.

As a child, he would buy six packs of Coca-Cola for 25 cents and sell each bottle for a nickel, making a tidy profit. He also started a pinball business and purchased the newspaper Buffalo News in 1977.

Buffett grew his newspaper business over the years with the addition of local papers — but in 2020, he decided to sell 31 newspapers for $140 million.

After high school, Buffett attended the University of Nebraska but transferred to the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business.

In 1951, Buffett received his master's degree in economics from Columbia University. At age 24, he received a job offer from his mentor Benjamin Graham, with a salary of $12,000, reports Dividend Growth Investor.

His annual salary was thrice the annual median income for an average family in 1954, according to US Census Bureau data, which means Buffett was already well on his way towards accumulating wealth. Two years later, his net worth was already $140,000.

Warren Buffett's early partnerships significantly influenced his success as an investor and businessman. In the 1950s and 1960s, Buffett formed several partnerships that allowed him to pool his resources with other like-minded investors. These partnerships enabled him to invest in larger and more complex deals than he would have been able to do on his own.

How Benjamin Graham inspired Warren Buffett

Buffett studied at Columbia University’s Business School under Benjamin Graham, a renowned value investor who would later become his mentor.

Benjamin Graham is considered to be the father of value investing. He began his career in finance in the early 1920s, although he quickly realised that most investors were focused on short-term gains and speculation rather than investing in companies with strong fundamentals, such as robust balance sheets.

With this knowledge, he went on to develop his own investment philosophy, focusing on buying undervalued stocks. He believed buying equities cheaply, holding them for the long term and selling them when the market had realised the value was a great way to make money. Put simply, Graham believed that by carefully analysing a company's financial statements and other fundamental data, he could identify stocks trading at a discount to their true value.

This mentality shaped Warren Buffett's view of the world from a young age.

How Warren Buffett built Berkshire Hathaway

One of his most significant deals was Berkshire Hathaway. When Buffett first started buying the stock in the late 1950s, the business was a struggling textile manufacturer. He decided to try to buy enough shares in the business to force management to buy him out at a higher price – earning a handsome profit.

Management refused and Buffett lashed out, buying control and kicking the former management out.

Over the next few years, Warren Buffett wrestled with the business. He kept a tight rein on costs and used any excess cash to expand and diversify.

He started building on his empire with the acquisition of two small insurance groups. These companies gave Buffett an edge. Insurers have large portfolios of investments, giving Buffett a lot of flexibility around where and when he could invest. Over the years, the company has continued to acquire other insurance companies, including GEICO and General Re.

Despite these additional investments and diversification, Berkshire’s insurance businesses remain at the core of the group today. Berkshire Hathaway also owns a load of other well-known companies, including the battery brand Duracell and Dairy Queen ice cream parlours. Buffett now has 41 stocks in his Berkshire Hathaway portfolio.

Warren Buffett’s investing style

Buffett is known for his successful investing style. Historically, he has searched for undervalued companies that have a strong foundation and a competitive edge within a specific market. He then invests in these companies for the long term.

As a result, he has made impressive returns. Some of Berkshire Hathaway’s famous investments include Apple, Coca-Cola, American Express, Moody’s and several Japanese trading houses like Mitsubishi.

Looking to the future, Buffett has said he is not keen on the use of artificial intelligence (AI).

According to Motley Fool, Buffett expressed the opinion at the May 2024 Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting, comparing AI to a genie in a bottle: “It’s partway out of the bottle. We may wish we’d never seen that genie, or it may do wonderful things.”

Buffett is also known for his philanthropic efforts, including his commitment to giving away the majority of his wealth through the Giving Pledge – a commitment by some of the world's wealthiest individuals and families to give away the majority of their wealth to address society's most pressing problems.

We look at how to rival Warren Buffett when it comes to funds and trusts, and how to invest like him.

Who will replace Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway?

At Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting on 3 May, the investor announced that he would retire as CEO, in a shock to shareholders and the rest of the world.

Berkshire Hathaway announced that Greg Abel would be appointed as the next president and CEO. The 62-year-old currently serves as the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Energy and the vice-chairman of its non-insurance operations.

In his farewell address, Buffett said: “I think the time has arrived where Greg should become the chief executive officer of the company at year end.”

However, he insisted he would keep his fortunes invested in the company. “I have no intention – zero – of selling one share of Berkshire Hathaway. I will give it away eventually. “The decision to keep every share is an economic decision because I think the prospects of Berkshire will be better under Greg’s management than mine.”

As per Forbes, the conglomerate’s shares dropped by 5%, taking away more than $30 billion from its market capitalisation. Buffett’s fortunes also shrank by $8.9 billion.

The good news for investors is that Buffett will still serve as the chairman of the board once he retires, Berkshire confirmed on 5 May.

When you think of famous 21st-century pop stars, Rihanna’s name may well spring to mind. The Barbadian singer is one of the best-selling artists of all time and was the youngest self-made billionaire in 2022.

So, just how rich is she? According to Forbes, Rihanna’s net worth is $1 billion. While this doesn’t make her the richest woman in the world, the zeroes in her fortune put her third on the list of the wealthiest musicians, trailing behind Jay-Z and Taylor Swift.

Rihanna hasn’t released any music since 2022, and her last album came out almost a decade ago in 2016, so how has her net worth remained so high? The Work singer’s entrepreneurial side has contributed tremendously to her fortunes, putting her net worth above artists like Ed Sheeran and Selena Gomez.

Rihanna's net worth and her music career

Rihanna was born and raised in Barbados, where she formed a girl group with two classmates at the age of 15. Her talent for singing was quickly picked up by a local music producer named Evan Rogers, who invited her to New York.

The singer’s career took off from there. In New York, Rihanna recorded a series of demo tracks. These impressed the industry and, most importantly, Jay-Z, who signed her to his record label, Def Jam Recordings.

Rihanna’s music stood out for its mix of influences. Featuring a mix of reggae, dancehall and R&B influences, the singer’s music appealed to a wide range of listeners and fans.

It wasn’t long before the young star began to make waves around the world with her records. Debut single, Pon de Replay, was released in 2005 and quickly became a hit, reaching the top five on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Her debut album, Music of the Sun, followed shortly after.

Her third studio album, Good Girl Gone Bad, marked a turning point in the singer’s career. The album sold nearly three million copies in the US and over nine million worldwide. She won her first career Grammy for Best Rap/Sung Collaboration in 2007 with Umbrella featuring Jay-Z.

She went on to release four more albums between 2009 and 2012, namely Rated R, Loud, Talk That Talk, and Unapologetic.

After a hiatus, she released her eighth album Anti in 2016, which was certified six times platinum, with the ANTI World Tour grossing more than $134 million in ticket sales.

Over the years, Rihanna has sold more than 250 million records. She has won nine Grammys, 12 Billboard Music Awards and six Guinness World Records, among many other awards. She also received the prestigious Vanguard Award, which has been taken home by artists like Madonna, Beyoncé and Michael Jackson.

The singer performed at the 2023 Super Bowl halftime show, which became the third most-watched halftime show ever, according to Billboard. She also performed at Anant Ambani's pre-wedding bash in 2024, which earned her £5 million according to Daily Mail.

How Rihanna's business ventures made her a billionaire

Rihanna is not only a talented musician and actress, but she is also a successful entrepreneur.

She has launched several businesses over the years, including Fenty Beauty, Savage X Fenty, and Fenty Skin.

While Rihanna’s other businesses have helped the star build her wealth, it’s Fenty Beauty that’s been the most successful enterprise. Launched in 2017, Fenty Beauty revolutionised the makeup industry with its then-40-shade foundation line-up (now 50) for all skin tones. It was named one of Time magazine’s best inventions that year, and made a staggering $72 million in sales within its first month.

Since its launch, Fenty has grabbed a large share of the global cosmetics market by appealing to a wide range of skin tones, and heavy use of social media to tap into underrepresented markets. Being owned by LVMH, Rihanna was able to ensure that the brand reached the right audiences, and made a lasting impact.

In 2024, Fenty Beauty was named the top-earning celebrity beauty brand in the world, generated sales of over $600 million in revenue and had a valuation of $2.8 billion.

When will Rihanna release new music?

In February 2025, Rihanna confirmed to Harper's Bazaar that her ninth studio album (or R9) is on the way. She said: “I just cracked the code on what I really want to do for my next body of work. I am actually feeling really good about this. I know I kept saying this over the years.”

There’s no release date as yet, the singer told the magazine: “It has to count. It has to matter. I have to show them the worth in the wait. I cannot put up anything mediocre. After waiting eight years, you might as well just wait some more.”

However, Rihanna is booked and busy with her upcoming movie, Smurfs, for which she recorded the song, Friend Of Mine.

He may be one of the richest people in the world, but Bill Gates’ net worth isn’t as high as it could be – and for good reason. The Microsoft co-founder has donated tens of billions to charity through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Gates and his friend Paul Allen founded Microsoft in 1975 at the dawn of the personal computer revolution. They struck gold with the software, turning Microsoft into one of the most influential tech companies.

Though Gates has stepped back from Microsoft’s day-to-day operations, he left an indelible mark on the industry and has turned to more charitable causes.

Still, his stake in Microsoft, along with other investments, places his net worth at a whopping $159 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, making him the world’s eighth richest person.

He often drops in and out of the top ten richest people in the world. Taking the reins above him are Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison and Bernard Arnault.

We look at how Bill Gates managed to build his fortune and the factors that contribute to his net wealth today.

How Bill Gates founded Microsoft

Bill Gates is widely regarded as one of the most successful entrepreneurs in modern history. Gates was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1955. As a youngster, he showed an interest in technology and computers, even though the industry was still in its early stages.

By the age of 13, he’d taught himself how to program his first computer and went on to attend Harvard University. Despite making it into the prestigious university, Gates dropped out after two years to pursue his passion – computers and technology.

Gates co-founded Microsoft in 1975 with his childhood friend, Paul Allen, and they initially focused on producing software for personal computers.

Their big breakthrough came in 1980. That year, Microsoft signed a deal with IBM to provide the operating system for its new line of personal computers, MS-DOS – a game-changer for Microsoft. It cemented the firm’s position as a major player in the emerging computer industry.

Over the next five years, with the cash from IBM flowing in, Microsoft continued to innovate and expand its product offerings. The first version of Windows, which would become its flagship operating system for personal computers was put on sale in 1985.

In the years that followed, Microsoft released a series of highly successful products, including Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer and the Xbox gaming console.

The story behind Bill Gates’ net worth

In 1987, Gates became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire with a net worth of $1.25 billion, according to the Forbes 400 Richest People in America list.

After finding Microsoft, Gates made his first big splurge on a Porsche 911 in 1979, he said on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

Bill Gates was the world's richest person for several years in a row during the 1990s and early 2000s.

Bill Gates donated his Microsoft shares worth billions to the Gates Foundation trust in 2022. This means Gates now holds around 1% of Microsoft shares, which were worth over $40 billion as of August 2024, according to Investopedia. Adam Levy of The Motley Fool notes that if he had kept his 45% stake from the 1986 IPO listing, he would be worth eight times more today – which would have made him a trillionaire.

Gates has other investments that keep him atop the rich lists. He is the brain behind several companies including BEN, TerraPower and Gates Ventures.

A recent analysis by Business Insider breaks down some of his extensive wealth. Bill Gates launched a $1 billion investment fund Breakthrough Energy in 2016 to invest in the clean energy revolution.

With the help of his private investment firm Cascade, he has made several high-profile investments, such as partial ownership of the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Through it, he also owns the biggest private farmland in the US, which stretches across 275,000 acres, and has had a stake in the Canadian National Railway since 2013.

His property portfolio is just as vast as his wealth – Gates owns at least 12 parcels of land spanning about 10.5 acres in Medina, Washington, called Xanadu 2.0. The estate is home to a 60-foot pool, a $30 million 16th-century Leonardo da Vinci manuscript, and several famous paintings such as Winslow Homer’s Lost on the Grand Banks, which he purchased for $36 million in 1988.

Aside from Xanadu 2.0, he also has a 20-acre estate in Florida valued at around $35 million, which he bought to support his daughter Jennifer Gates Nassar’s passion for equestrianism.

Gates also owns several private jets, and his luxury car collection includes around 23 vehicles, including a Porsche 959.

How Bill Gates donates his wealth

Gates has vowed to give away most of his wealth through the Giving Pledge, which he launched in 2010 with his ex-wife Melinda French Gates and Warren Buffet.

The former couple founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to improve healthcare and fight poverty around the world. According to Forbes, Gates has donated at least $35.8 billion of his Microsoft stake to the foundation, while Buffet has contributed more than $36 billion to it since 2006.

In 2016, Gates invested in Amyris, a synthetic biotechnology company for the development of antimalarial medicine. However, the company filed for bankruptcy in 2023. Gates invested $50 million into Alzheimer’s research in 2017, and another £30 million the next year into the Diagnostics Accelerator.

Other than that, Gates and his ex-wife also pledged $2 billion to fight malaria, more than $50 million against Ebola, and $38 million for a low-cost polio vaccine.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced a $1.6 billion investment of five years for the international organisation Gavi to deliver lifesaving vaccines to the world’s poorest countries.

An avid traveller, Gates spends his time learning about innovations in different countries. He visited India for Anant Ambani’s pre-wedding bash, where he met with India’s prime minister Narendra Modi about how his foundation can support technology and innovation in India.

The entrepreneur has also announced that he will be publishing a memoir, Source Code, this year, which is set to come out in February. It will give readers an insight into his life as a young entrepreneur in his twenties before he was in the public eye.

Elon Musk is now not only the richest person in the world but also the first and only trillionaire in history.

After SpaceX’s highly anticipated IPO on 12 June, Forbes reported that Musk added $188 billion to his already astronomical wealth. It means that his net worth is now more than that of the four billionaires after him on the Forbes Real Time Billionaires List.

But where exactly did it all start, and how did the South African tycoon add 12 zeroes to his net worth?

We chart how his wealth has grown from his early years of founding what is now PayPal, joining Tesla, and launching SpaceX.

Elon Musk’s net worth over the years

At the time of writing, Elon Musk’s net worth is $1.3 trillion, according to Forbes.

To put that into perspective, Sarah Coles of AJ Bell says: “If you aimed for a trillion pounds and you were starting from scratch, you could put away £500 a month and, with growth at 5% a year and contributions rising 2% a year, it would take around 316 years.”

Musk’s net worth has grown substantially over the past few years, driven largely by his stakes in electric vehicle company Tesla and aerospace firm SpaceX.

He first appeared on Forbes’s World’s Billionaires list in 2012, when he had an estimated fortune of $2 billion, making him the world’s 634th richest person. From then on, it took Musk less than a decade to take the top spot, dethroning Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos as the world’s richest person in January 2021.

Elon Musk’s early life and career

Musk was born in South Africa on 28 June 1971. From an early age, he showed an interest in technology and innovation.

His first major success came with Zip2, a company that provided online business directories and maps to newsletters. In 1999, Compaq acquired Zip2 for nearly $300 million, paving the way for Musk into the tech industry.

Musk used proceeds from the sale to launch X.com, an online payment platform that eventually evolved into PayPal. In 2002, eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion. That same year, Musk used $100 million of his own fortune to start SpaceX, aiming to make space exploration more accessible and colonise Mars.

In 2004, Musk joined Tesla Motors and became the company’s CEO four years later. Under his leadership, Tesla emerged as one of the world’s most electric vehicle companies, with a market capitalisation of over $1.12 trillion.

Musk also co-founded solar panel installation firm SolarCity, neurotechnology company Neuralink and tunnel construction firm The Boring Company.

How SpaceX became the largest IPO in history

SpaceX’s meteoric rise to become the world’s largest-ever initial public offering can be attributed to Elon Musk’s larger-than-life public persona, widening interest in investing in space, and rising AI spending by tech megacaps.

On 12 June, shares in the AI and space company began trading on the Nasdaq at $150 per share, raising $75 billion and closing with a market cap of $2.11 trillion.

It makes SpaceX one of the world’s most valuable companies, reaching the milestone in an extremely short timespan.

Elon Musk’s role in the Trump administration

Elon Musk’s influence extends far beyond the tech world. He was a prominent supporter of Donald Trump during the 2024 US presidential election, spending over $290 million to get Trump into the White House, according to CNN.

Following Trump’s victory over Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, Musk secured a position in his administration, serving as the leader of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

DOGE emerged as a means to cut US government spending, which resulted in mass workforce layoffs and controversial cuts to USAID, which is responsible for foreign aid and humanitarian relief. On 28 May 2025, Musk departed from the role to focus on Tesla.

Elon Musk’s property portfolio and car collection

Musk has built up a vast property empire over the years. In 2020, he stated on X that he would sell all his “physical possessions” and “own no house”. At that time, the asking prices for his seven homes were more than $100 million in total, according to Architectural Digest, including a 16,000-square-foot home in Los Angeles, which sold for $29 million.

After shedding his property portfolio, Musk moved into a tiny home in Boca Chica, Texas, close to the SpaceX headquarters. In 2022, he bought a 6,900-square-foot mansion in West Lake Hills, Texas, worth $6 million.

The billionaire has also built his own company town called Starbase, named after his rocket launch site, on the southern tip of Texas. The city covers around 1.6 square miles and is home to some 500 people, according to The Guardian.

The Tesla CEO has a large collection of cars, ranging from a Ford Model T, a 1997 McLaren F1, a Tesla Roadster and the 1976 Lotus Espirit that James Bond drove in the 1977 film The Spy Who Loved Me. Musk bought it at an auction in 2013 for nearly $1 million, according to the BBC. He also owns private jets, each worth millions of dollars.

How does Elon Musk manage his wealth?

With so many billions to his name, it’s not surprising that Elon Musk has a wealth manager. His fortunes are handled by Excession LLC, a single-family office formed in 2016. It’s run by James Birchall, Musk’s trusted advisor and CEO of Neuralink.

While Musk doesn’t donate his wealth as generously as other billionaires like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, he still gives away billions in shares to charities. He has an organisation called the Musk Foundation, with more than $14 billion in assets. However, The New York Times reported that the charity failed to give away the minimum amount required by law for the fourth year in a row.

In 2011, the libertarian Silicon Valley financier Peter Thiel created a $100,000 scholarship to encourage promising young entrepreneurs to drop out of university and start their own ventures. Dozens of tech prodigies have passed through the programme to pursue their dreams – none quite so spectacularly as Austin Russell. The 26-year-old founder and CEO of Luminar Technologies is one of the few people to have amassed a fortune in the world of self-driving cars.

Following Luminar’s float last December, which valued his stake at $2.4bn, Russell can lay claim to being the youngest self-made billionaire in the world. More to the point, perhaps, the lanky six-foot-four entrepreneur – who “could pass, quite easily, for a young American pastor” – is one of the few people who has “got Elon Musk worried”, says The Times.

A tech prodigy to rival Musk

Luminar’s great breakthrough has been to produce a “relatively cheap” (in some cases less than £1,000 per unit) iteration of “lidar”: the laser-beam technology that enables driverless cars to “see” their surroundings, thereby allowing them to navigate and avoid obstacles. Considered by some to be the “keystone” to the autonomous driving revolution, Russell’s ultimate ambition is to see Luminar’s version “incorporated as standard into all vehicles”. If the $3trn-a- year industry backs him, Russell’s fortune could explode exponentially. But not everyone is sold on the technology –notably Musk, who is championing a different approach at Tesla involving digital video cameras, and has called lidar “a fool’s errand”.

Russell and Musk might disagree on this point, but the two entrepreneurs have plenty in common – not least being endowed with a powerful urge to invent. Russell has always been a prodigy, says The Verge. Born in California in the spring of 1995, even his birth date is “auspicious”: 14 March (or, in its US numerical format, 3.14) marks “Pi Day” – the annual celebration of the mathematical constant pi, and also happens to be Albert Einstein’s birthday.

“At an age when most toddlers are still in diapers, Russell memorised the periodic table of elements,” says CNBC. By the age of 10 or 11, he was writing software. When his parents – neither of whom had a technical background – refused to buy him a mobile phone, he re-wired his Nintendo DS game console as a substitute: “It did actually work”. Russell filed his first patent, for an underground system that would recycle sprinkler water, at 13, says The Times. Soon after, “he became fascinated with laser technology and turned the family garage into a makeshift lab”. He won a place at Stanford to study physics, but dropped out midway through his freshman year, aged 17, after winning the $100,000 Thiel Fellowship for his lidar concept. He founded Luminar in 2012 – “not long”, notes Forbes, “after obtaining his driver’s licence”.

It isn’t easy being brilliant

The route to scaling up the company and floating on Nasdaq hasn’t been easy. “To quote Elon, being an entrepreneur is like chewing glass while staring into an abyss,” says Russell, who regularly works 100-hour weeks. It’s such a rollercoaster that you need “some type of higher driver or passion”. After embracing the world of driverless cars, one of his is eradicating road accidents. But although development is racing ahead – Luminar has already secured deals with Volvo, Audi, Toyota and others, and eventually hopes to build its own car – he’s the first to admit there’s a long way to go, says The Verge. “We’re still years, if not decades, away from fully self-driving cars.” Fortunately for Russell and his investors, in this game, “youth is definitely an advantage”.

It’s been a barn-storming year for the Canadian e-commerce platform Shopify. Its shares more than tripled during the pandemic, taking its market value to a peak of $180bn in February, notes the Financial Times. Although still widely unknown to the general public, Shopify’s services – which allow brands and independent stores to sell directly to customers through their own websites or via social-media platforms – have been embraced as an alternative to trading through Amazon or other large marketplaces. Total spending by consumers on the 1.7 million merchants that use Shopify grew by 99% in the last quarter of the year.

Beyond the plumbing

Doubtless the backlash against the might and perceived monopolistic tendencies of Amazon has helped. But Shopify has also thrived on word-of-mouth during lockdown – as a hassle-free way for restaurants and independent shops to set up an online presence quickly while their premises were closed. The favourite statistic of the company’s president and driving force Harley Finkelstein, 37, is that “every 28 seconds, a new entrepreneur makes their first sale on Shopify”, says The Times. The only thing the customer sees is a “Shop Pay” logo flashing up at the checkout. Finkelstein relishes the anonymity. “We are intentionally not front and centre. We exist only to make merchants looks really good.” That said, his ambitions stretch far beyond technological plumbing. “Google is the search company. Facebook is the social company, but no one is the entrepreneurship company,” he says. “We’re not there yet – but we have the best shot at it.”

Entrepreneurship is a favourite theme of Finkelstein’s – not least because his own father was a failed serial entrepreneur. Born in Montreal, he was “a child of immigrants” – his father and grandparents, who were Holocaust survivors, immigrated to Canada from Hungary in 1966. Finkelstein has unreserved admiration for his grandfather who “spent his entire life selling eggs at a farmers’ market… and he never even liked eggs. But he put food on the table and a roof over their heads. And that allowed me to live this life.”

Finkelstein’s own father was also a positive influence on his youthful ambitions, says The Times. Although he couldn’t provide much in the way of business advice or financial leg-ups, “he would regularly print stacks of business cards for Finkelstein’s early business ventures”, which included a T-shirt company founded when he was a 17-year-old student at McGill University.

His proudest moment

Finkelstein initially seemed headed for the legal profession: his first job was at a Toronto law firm. But his life changed abruptly in 2009 when he met Tobias Lütke, a German-Canadian entrepreneur who had co-founded Shopify in Ottawa in 2004 as an online snowboard shop. The company’s founders had baulked at allowing marketplaces like eBay and Amazon to “own” their customers, so had written their own software. Finkelstein was hired as the company’s “chief platform officer”, with the brief of expanding the tech side of the business. He had no idea then quite how exponential that expansion would be, but cites his proudest moment as taking Shopify public in New York in 2015.

After a year of unbridled growth, Shopify now looks to be at a crossroads, says MarketWatch. Some are sceptical about its prospects “as the pandemic fades” and the froth around tech stocks subsides – Shopify’s shares have tumbled 28% since February. Finkelstein is certain that his pitch about liberating the inner entrepreneur in all of us has legs. But, given the possibly stomach-churning ride ahead, he will need all the resilience he can muster.

Shahrzad Rafati decided at 13 that she would one day build a global business. As Andreane Williams points out on the BBC, she was born into a family of business leaders in Tehran, but left her native country at 17 to avoid the Iran-Iraq war. She moved by herself to Vancouver to attend the University of British Columbia, having very little English. “I knew that I needed a different future, and a life where I could make a difference, and where equal was equal.”

After she graduated in 2000, Rafati studied French at the Université Paris-Sorbonne, and leadership at Oxford University’s Said Business School. Upon graduating she founded BroadbandTV (BBTV), which she still runs. Initially a hardware company that made set-top boxes that allowed users to watch internet videos on their televisions, Rafati quickly pivoted towards software once she noticed the way Apple’s music-streaming platform, iTunes, was disrupting the music industry. Video, she predicted, would inevitably follow suit.

Within three months she decided to change the focus of the company entirely, creating software that allows firms to profit from advertisements put on content that has been pirated and re-uploaded to a different platform, such as YouTube. It does so by tracking uploaded content, such as the highlights of sports games or clips from films, through audio- and video-recognition technology, and then places advertisements on the pirated videos. The revenue goes to the firms affected, and BBTV takes a percentage.

A number of investors sought to pile in on the action, with Canadian tech businessman Hamed Shahbazi purchasing a 51% stake for $36m in 2013. BBTV’s clients include the National Basketball Association, which the firm has worked with from the beginning, Sony, Warner Bros and Disney. BBTV employs more than 400 people in Vancouver, New York, Los Angeles and Mumbai, and is thought to be worth more than $1bn. Rafati, now 40, prides herself on the diversity and equality of her workforce: women make up 43% of employees and 46% of managers – high figures for a technology company. “This is a key factor in the reason why we are so successful at BBTV,” she says.

Trinny Woodall’s bid for world domination

Despite being one half of the hit “say-it-as-it-is fashion sensation” What Not to Wear TV programme that started almost 25 years ago, it wasn’t easy for Trinny Woodall to secure funding for her latest project, says Harry de Quetteville in The Daily Telegraph. It was only after pitching to around 30 venture-capital firms that she finally found a “mainly female-led” team of willing investors and secured funding for Trinny London, her eponymous make-up brand.

The online-only brand is designed to be an alternative to the old-fashioned department-store experience of buying make-up, which can often be quite alienating for middle-aged women — Trinny’s target demographic — who don’t see themselves reflected in the people behind the counters.

“There are a lot of women from 35 to 50, which is our core target market, who are ignored,” she explains. It seems they were desperate to be heard: revenues jumped from £500,000 from 6,000 customers in 2017 when the brand was founded to £26m from 300,000 so far in 2020. Trinny London “exchanged the bafflement of 150 lipsticks” on offer in the stores for clever stackable make-up pots that snap together for easy travelling and a bespoke product-matching service that directs customers to the best shades for them.

The company has attracted attention from major players, with Unilever recently buying a stake in the business, now valued at £46m. Woodall’s share of nearly £22m landed her at number 64 in this year’s Telegraph Hot 100 list of top tech entrepreneurs.

Woodall’s success is down in part to her mastering the art of contemporary selling. She has approaching 800,000 Instagram followers and uses the platform to promote her product and build a fanbase, which has been a critical part of growing the business.

Looking towards future expansion, Woodall, now 56, has launched “Trinny Tribes”, communities of like-minded women who act as unpaid promoters for her brand. Even though the firm started just three years ago, Trinny London ships to 68 countries, and there are now 33 different “tribes” all across the world. Trinny is certain that world domination is “already happening, darling”.

Anne Boden: “Work-life balance? I only have work”

Anne Boden is well aware that she doesn’t exactly look like your average banking mogul, says Anna Moore in The Guardian. As a 50-something woman, Boden embarked on a journey to start what is quite possibly the hardest business to crack: a bank. A challenger, online-only bank at that.

Boden hails from “a very ordinary background” – she grew up in Swansea, her father worked for British Steel and her mother in the local department store. But she “did well in school… and ended up in London working for Lloyds”. Her corporate career peaked with a move to Dublin in 2012 to join Allied Irish Banks as group chief operating officer. It was here she began to picture a new kind of bank, “without the bureaucracy, where opening an account took minutes not weeks”, where cheques could be deposited with just a photo, and card-lock facilities were available 24/7. All that, but without branches.

Boden left her job in 2014 and, “with no office and no business card”, chased meeting after meeting trying to sell her vision. The pressure was “unbelievable”, and she received hundreds of rejections. But after eight months, she managed to persuade a few firms to invest and recruited a small team. Starling Bank was born. Disaster struck when her chief technology officer, Tom Blomfield, left Starling over a disagreement about investment opportunities. He started his own online bank, Monzo. Boden was shocked by the move, but continued working until the end of 2015, when she was “summoned” to the Bahamas to meet billionaire Harald McPike, who invested £48m.

Now, Starling has 1.8 million customers and employs more than 1,000 people, with over 40% of senior roles occupied by women. The bank is on course to become profitable by the end of the year and it was the only challenger bank to grow in 2020. It’s taken a lot of work, as Boden readily acknowledges. “People talk about ‘work-life balance’, I only have work – and I enjoy every minute of it.”

At the age of 19, Ben Francis, an Aston University student who made ends meet working as a Pizza Hut delivery driver, started to sell bodybuilding supplements online. He changed tack when he realised “no one really made clothes for the bodybuilding scene”. So he spent his £1,000 in savings on a sewing machine and screen printer, and learnt how to make garments from his mum, says Liam Kelly in The Times. The business ticked along until, in 2013, Francis (pictured) secured a stand at a trade show at the NEC. Then things really took off: in the first half hour after the show, the Gymshark website took £30,000 in sales.

Gymshark only sells directly to customers online, a strategy that has helped it cope with the coronavirus crisis pretty well. Gyms are closed, but people exercising at home have shopped online to get the clobber to look the part. Gymshark has benefited from that trend. Francis once dashed off designs from his West Midlands home then queued at the Post Office to get them out. Now he operates from a gleaming £5m, 42,000 sq ft premises near Solihull.

Gymshark was one of the first brands to make extensive use of “social-media influencers”. Today, Gymshark has 1.7 million followers on Facebook and 4.2 million on Instagram, and Francis’s girlfriend, Robin Gallant, runs a YouTube channel that advertises his products too, inducting another 400,000 subscribers into the brand’s online culture. “We’ve led the direct-to-consumer revolution and built a truly community-first brand,” writes Francis on his blog. The company made £18.4m in pre-tax profits in the last year, and maintained 193% compound sales growth from 2013 to 2016. Francis himself is not done yet – he has ambitions of rivalling the likes of Nike and Adidas in the coming years.

Francis met Paul Richardson, the firm’s head of strategy, at his gym, and through him was introduced to the former Reebok boss Steve Hewitt, who is now chief executive. Francis still controls design and marketing. His stake in the firm has seen him amass a £138m fortune before he turns 30, but he insists he is not flash. His only extravagance is a pair of Triumph motorbikes.

Entrepreneur Tatyana Bakalchuk is “an anomaly”, says Max Seddon in the Financial Times. In Russia’s male-dominated business world, success often depends on ties to the Kremlin. Bakalchuk (pictured), though, is a self-made billionaire, the first such woman in the country. Wildberries, the business she founded in her Moscow apartment while on maternity leave in 2004, has “fought off venture capitalists and state-backed rivals” to become Russia’s leading ecommerce site.

Bakalchuk, 44, now has a $1.1bn fortune, and became rich by “reaching deep into everyday Russian life”. Her firm began as an online clothes retailer for women and took time to emerge as a serious business because ecommerce lacked an infrastructure – the long distances in Russia, poor roads and sclerotic postal service held up development. But she ploughed on regardless. “If I’d read business textbooks, I probably wouldn’t have done anything. I’d have worked out the business model and realised it was impossible. But if you don’t know, then it can’t scare you.” Today, the company offers four million different products from 35,000 brands and 26,000 suppliers.

Wildberries’ turnover grew 88% in 2019 to Rbs223.5bn ($3bn), with net profit rising from Rbs1.88bn to Rbs7bn, making Wildberries the leader in Russia’s fast-growing ecommerce market. Bakalchuk, who processed her first orders herself at home, now runs a business with no external investors and 48,000 employees, including 12,000 extra staff hired to cope with surging business as a result of Covid-19. In the first quarter of 2020, Wildberries doubled both turnover and sales year on year.

The secret to success, she says, is to start small and move slowly. “Russian entrepreneurs who go to schools such as Harvard are all obsessed with the idea that you come up with a business idea, raise money and grow as fast as you can.” But when you do that “your business model will have feet of clay. It has to be done right”.