For the first time, Forbes doesn't have a self-made young billionaire

Source: Huashang Taoluo (ID: hstl8888) Author: Huashang Taoluo

Billionaires on the planet have never been richer.

Successors

In early spring, the 2024 Forbes Global Rich List was released as scheduled, and the shortlisting conditions: net worth of $1 billion.

With 2,781 people on the list this year and a record $14.7 trillion in total assets, billionaires on the planet have never been richer, despite stock market turmoil and war conflicts.

The top two finalists continue to be the United States and China, with total assets of $5.7 trillion versus $1.7 trillion.

A phenomenon in the list caught the attention of the editors of Forbes, 15 billionaires under the age of 30 all have their wealth from inheritance, for the first time in 15 years -

There are no self-made billionaires under the age of 30.

Among the wealthy upstarts are South Korean sisters Kim Jung-min (22) and Kim Jong-won (20), whose father is Kim Jung-joo, the founder of South Korean online gaming giant NEXON.

Kim Jung-joo and NEXON may not sound familiar, but you may have played the games they developed: "Bubble Hall", "Go-Kart", and "Mapleshima".

IN FEBRUARY 2022, 54-YEAR-OLD KIM JONG-JOO PASSED AWAY, AND HIS TWO DAUGHTERS EACH INHERITED A 9% STAKE IN NEXON, WITH ASSETS OF $1.4 BILLION.

Then there is Kwok Kei-ho, the youngest billionaire in Hong Kong, with a fortune of $2.4 billion, his father was Sun Hung Kai Properties chairman Kwok Ping-sheung, and his grandfather was Hong Kong real estate tycoon and one of the founders of Sun Hung Kai, Kwok Tak-sheng.

In 2018, Guo Bingxiang passed away, and Guo Jihao and his brother Guo Jijun became directors of the Imperial Group founded by their father.

As the third generation in the family, Kwok has been preparing for his succession, having graduated from Cornell University with a degree in hotel management and a master's degree in real estate from the University of Hong Kong.

After talking about East Asia, let's take a look at the three Del Vecchio brothers in Europe, whose father founded the Italian eyewear giant Luxottica. In 2023, Luxottica and French optical lens manufacturer Essilor merged to form Essilorluxottica, becoming the world's largest sunglasses company.

In June 2022, the 87-year-old Luxottica founder Delvicchio Sr. passed away, and the three half-brothers each inherited a 12.5% stake in the company, with assets of $4.1 billion.

The 28-year-old brother Leonardo is now the chief strategy officer of Essilor Luxottica, while Luca, 22, and Clement, 19, currently have no roles in the company.

The youngest person on the Forbes 2024 rich list is from Brazil, and she is a 19-year-old female college student Livia Voigt, who is two months younger than Clement introduced above.

Livia's grandfather, Werner Voigt, was the co-founder of WEG, a Brazilian electrical equipment manufacturing giant whose "W" is taken from his name, and in 2005, WEG entered China and established Wangao (Nantong) Motor Manufacturing Company.

In 2016, Werner Voigt passed away at the age of 85. Livia and her sister Dora each inherited a 3.1% stake in WEG and have $1.1 billion in assets.

Livia, who is taking psychology courses at university, keeps a low profile online.

Interestingly, after the release of Forbes, a Brazilian girl with the same name was mistaken by netizens as the youngest billionaire in the new world, with 500 new followers per minute on her social account, and countless private messages about financial requests.

Can each of you lend me 15 Brazilian reais (about 21.5 yuan)?

The average age on the Forbes Billionaires List in 2024 is 66, and the oldest is George Joseph, founder of the American insurance company Mercury General, at 102.

This heralds that in the next 20 years, the first billionaires born in the 1940s and 1960s will leave the stage of history one after another, and their lifelong wealth will be inherited by their children and grandchildren, and a trillions of dollars of wealth transfer every year has begun.

Under the curtain of their wealth transfer, as reflected in the list, there are fewer and fewer self-made billionaires.

Wealth creators

The Forbes list of the world's richest people was born in 1987, which was also the golden age of the parents and grandparents of the successors.

In the 1990s, there were more than 60 billionaires in the United States, including the first rich born before and after World War I, and the tech elite who rose in the 1970s.

For example, TV tycoon John Kruger, born in 1914, immigrated to Detroit from Germany at the age of 8, and his first job was an assembler on the assembly line of Ford cars, and Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart born in 1918, the supermarket tycoon started doing odd jobs at the age of 7, rented a house and opened his first grocery store at the age of 26, and was once taken over by a jealous landlord because the business was too hot, all of whom were born during World War I, while Bill Gates and Paul Allen were the new rich at that time.

Whether it was the older generation or the new generation, ninety percent of the billionaires on the list at that time had one thing in common: self-made.

In 1994, when the Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai began trial operation, Geert Smith, an American businessman who went to Shanghai to run a bungee jumping company, looked at the Huangpu River and sighed, "Here, I can hear the roar of wealth, which is the sixth sense unique to businessmen." ”

That year, Forbes released the list of the richest people in Chinese mainland for the first time, and the roar of Shanghai spread to the north and south of the river, and there were "Bao" who wanted to become billionaires everywhere, and the first batch of entrepreneurs after the reform and opening up appeared on the stage, and the heroes did not ask where they came from, and the list was all self-made.

At the top of the list are the four Liu brothers of Sichuan Hope Group, with assets of 600 million yuan, and the start-up capital for their breeding farm came from 1,000 yuan sold as pawns.

The name in third place is like thunder, and Nande Group has assets of 300 million. His famous work was to exchange 500 wagons of unsalable light industrial products for four Soviet Tu-154 aircraft, and then sell them to Sichuan Airlines, which needed to introduce large passenger aircraft.

Many years later, Mu recalled the past and mentioned a detail, "The so-called 'canned food for plane' process is not thrilling, the Soviet planes arrived in China first, but due to the limited capacity of the train at that time, it takes five years for 500 wagons of small commodities to be transported, which is equivalent to delivery in installments, and the other party can't find fault, I planned it before the transaction began." ”

At the same time, there are also Zhao Zhangguang, the "hair growth king" from Wenzhou, and Zong Qinghou, the founder of Hangzhou Wahaha.

After graduating from middle school, Zhao Zhangguang became a barefoot doctor in the village, good at treating skin diseases, because of a patient, he began to delve into the formula for treating hair loss, and developed the "101 hair growth tincture" in six years;

Since then, it has been a passionate era of "how many times life can be beaten", from trade to real estate, from real estate to energy, from energy to technology, there are rich people from generation to generation. They have accumulated wealth and promoted the progress of business, economy and society.

Heroes are nowhere to be found

The technological revolution and entrepreneurial boom of the 1990s and 2000s made self-made young people a symbol of the Forbes rich list for a long time, but today in the 2020 era, more and more young people on the list have replaced the faces of successors.

Behind this is that it is becoming more and more difficult for people from ordinary backgrounds to make a class jump from scratch. This is true in Europe and the United States, in Japan and South Korea, and in China.

The reasons for the decline in self-made billionaires in Forbes may be as follows.

First, billionaires are getting richer.

Two-thirds of the 2,781 richest people on Forbes this year are richer than last year, and the top 20 richest people have increased their wealth by as much as $700 billion.

The richer the richer has pushed up the entry threshold, and only $1 billion in net worth is eligible for the "ticket", which also allows the heirs to obtain wealth at a very young age that is difficult for their predecessors and peers to achieve.

For self-made entrepreneurs, if they want to accumulate a wealth of $1 billion before the age of 30, it is possible to achieve at least one unicorn company and go public at the speed of light.

Second, the threshold for wealth creation is getting higher and higher.

Today, the era of opportunities is gone, many tracks have long been in the red ocean, market share and top talent are often occupied by the new rich, and some fields have even been monopolized by a few giants.

In the past, this kind of difficult opportunity was often in traditional industries, but in recent years, the technology industry is increasingly showing such a situation.

Take the hottest AI model as an example, this track is the largest, the fastest speed of wealth creation, but the conditions for entering the game are also the highest, the training cost of data alone is calculated in hundreds of millions, and the current powerful entrepreneurs are almost all middle and high-level executives who have left from world-class manufacturers, they have strong contacts and financing capabilities, and the most important thing is that there is room for continuous trial and error.

Therefore, some people describe the competition in the AI industry today as a "battle of the gods", which has nothing to do with mortals.

Third, the helpless "Buddhism" and "lying flat".

In recent years, there have been books and a film that have sparked a global debate about class solidification: American journalist George Parker's "The Sinking Age" and South Korean director Bong Joon-ho's "Parasite."

"The Sinking Age" uses the experience of several ordinary people to condense the social changes in the United States since 1978, that is, the relatively balanced and wealthy society after World War II has come to an end, and the new industries have gone all the way to the west, and the system has failed to play a role in regulating class mobility, allowing the old industrial areas to go to the edge and decay step by step.

In the book, a black woman from the Rust Belt broke away from her family of origin and entered General Motors on her own, which should have been the beginning of the "American dream" in the era of John Krueger and Sam Walton, but she caught up with the wave of layoffs in the auto industry during the financial crisis.

The family living in the semi-basement in "Parasite" was forced to embark on the road of "parasitic upper class" because of the failure to invest in the "ancient taste cake shop".

In 2021, a survey in South Korea showed that 60% of people over the age of 19 believed that "the social and economic status of individuals is not highly likely." ”

Former South Korean President Moon Jae-in said this when he met with the crew of "Parasite": "Korean films are internationally recognized and proud, and I am also very concerned about the social inequality that they depict." ”

In turn, they began to violently pursue a "life of certainty", which in Europe and the United States is reflected in "quiet quitting", that is, giving up their enterprising spirit, doing only the bare minimum work, no longer receiving training and looking forward to promotion;

To sum it up in one sentence, more and more young people around the world have embarked on a state of Buddhism and lying flat when there is no hope of working hard.

Of course, not everyone needs to aspire to be a billionaire, and it is not necessary to achieve financial freedom before the age of 30. Time and experience are always the friends of entrepreneurs, some people get rich overnight, and some people become late bloomers.

In 1988, 69-year-old Malcolm Forbes, the second chairman of Forbes, arrived in Shanghai on a yacht, and on the Huangpu River, Malcolm showed the city leaders who came to the luncheon an ornament embroidered with one of his favorite aphorisms:

Age and scheming will triumph over youth and talent.

It is precisely because of this that the world needs the adventurous "Bao" more than ever to promote its change and progress.

Resources

[1] 《The Richest In 2024》Forbes

[2]《The World’s Youngest Billionaires 2024》Forbes

[The author of this article is Huashang Taoluo, and the entrepreneur is authorized to reprint.] If you need to reprint, please contact the WeChat public account (ID: hstl8888) for authorization. ］