Commodities trading firm Glencore released its much anticipated 1,600 page prospectus in early May.
In it, the firm revealed the identity of its biggest shareholders including five individuals who are now worth, based on the listing price, at least one billion apiece.
My colleague Chris Helman wrote an informative post on these new individuals, which got me wondering about what other companies had produced as many or more 10-figure fortunes.
Using Forbes’ comprehensive wealth database, I came up with the following list. A few caveats: the list is based on folks who ranked among the 2011 billionaires. Excluded are heirs to company founders who largely inherited their stakes thanks to good genes. Among those family firms that have indeed spawned multiple billionaires are (nyse: WMT) Wal-Mart (7), Brazil’s Itau Unibanco Holdings (7), Cargill (7), Turkey’s Koc (6),and S.C. Johnson (5).
Leading the pack of non-family firms is online search giant (nasdaq: GOOG) Google, with 7 billionaires. Among them are the cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, their top hired executive Eric Schmidt and Stanford U.
professor David Cheriton (full list below). Not counted is legendary venture capitalist John Doerr, who has a stake in Google, but was already a billionaire when the company went public in 2004.
Close on its heels is California neighbor and rival, social networking site Facebook.
Valued at $50 billion thanks to a Goldman Sachs investment announced in January, it has already pushed 6 into billionaire ranks including Mark Zuckerberg, two of his former Harvard buddies and the firm’s first president.
It could easily pass Google in terms of number of billionaires when it goes public, likely in 2012.
TNK-BP, the joint venture between a leading Russian oil firm and BP, ties Facebook with six billionaires, despite frequent dramas. Most recently, the Russian partners behind TNK quashed BP’s deal with state-controlled Rosneft, which would have given the company access to Russia’s offshore Arctic oilfields; they argued that BP had no right to negotiate a new deal in Russia without them. But TNK’s original investors have all extracted fortunes, both prior to the 2003 joint venture and since.
Indian outsourcing firm (nasdaq: INFY) Infosys, founded in 1981, counts five of its founders among the world’s super rich. For now, it is tied with Glencore.
But there is a good chance that when the commodities firm starts trading later this week, it may well move up these ranks.
Here is a complete list of the top five companies and their respective billionaires.
GOOGLE (7 billionaires)
Sergey Brin, $19.8 billion
Larry Page, $19.8 billion
Eric Schmidt, $7 billion
Andreas von Bechtolsheim, $2.3 billion
Michael Moritz, $1.8 billion
David Cheriton, $1.8 billion
Kavitark Ram Shriram, $1.6 billion
Facebook, (6 billionaires)
Mark Zuckerberg, $13.5 billion
Dustin Moskovitz, $2.7 billion
Eduardo Saverin, $1.6 billion
Sean Parker, $1.6 billion
Peter Thiel, $1.5 billion
Yuri Milner, $1 billion
TNK-BP (6 billionaires)
Viktor Vekselberg, $13 billion
Leonard Blavatnik, $10.1 billion
Mikhail Fridman, $15.1 billion
German Khan, $9.6 billion
Alexei Kuzmichev, $7.5 billion
Pyotr Aven, $4.5 billion
Glencore, (5 billionaires)
Ivan Glasenberg, $9.5 billion
Daniel Francisco Mate Badenes, $3.6 billion
Aristotelis Mistakidis, $3.6 billion
Tor Peterson: $3.2 billion
Alex Beard: $2.8 billion
Infosys (5 billionaires)
N.R. Narayana Murthy, $2 billion
Nandan Nilekani, $1.8 billion
Senapathy Gopalakrishnan, $1.6 billion
K. Dinesh 1.2 billion
S.D. Shibulal, $1.1 billion
*We valued the net worths of the Glencore billionaires using the recently released prospectus. For all other billionaires we took their net worths from the 2011 Billionaires list, which were calculated in February.
Luxury Info / Golden Choice by Lux Creative International Via Forbes
