OK, there are exclusive clubs and then there is the “Centibillionaires” club.
It’s nice to be able to play a round of golf at ultra-chic resorts and ski at idyllic mountain hideaways — membership has its privileges.
But this club had only six members until Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin jumped aboard as their fortunes climbed past the required $100 billion plateau.
They are the newest centibillionaires, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
For these Google guys, the past year has boosted their wealth by more than $20 billion.
Page has become wealthy guy No. 6 on the list at $103.6 billion, while Brin hit No. 8, reaching $100.2 billion.
We’re not sure whether there was a formal celebration including the other six: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Tesla’s Elon Musk, Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffet and Bernard Arnault of French conglomerate LVMH.
Page and Brin are probably perfectly happy with simply the recognition.
And what a club. If you combine the gains for all eight, you’ll find the group added $110 billion overall.
Gates hit $100 billion in July 1999, falling back as Microsoft struggled. Then he was back, big, in 2019 and now sits at almost $145 billion.
Being first isn’t necessarily best in this group. Bezos now has a fortune of $196.6 billion, having just joined the group in 2017.
The mercurial Musk is perhaps the most interesting of the eight, riding Tesla’s success to approximately $175 billion and into second place on the also-impressive world’s richest people list.
But the new guys are on a roll. Google is way up this year, too, with its parent company, Alphabet, seeing shares rise 31% 2020, ahead of even Amazon, Apple and Facebook.
Something to talk about at the club this weekend.
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