The five biggest billionaire gainers of 2022 are together worth over $200 billion – $93 billion more than at the beginning of the year. All five of them hail from Asia.
The biggest gainer by far is Gautam Adani of India, whose Adani Group encompasses a network of publicly traded companies active in power generation, cement, real estate and more. In early February 2022, Adani became the richest person in Asia and the tenth richest person in the world worth $90.1 billion. As of mid-December, he ranked as the world’s third richest person. The other big gainers are not nearly as well known, and operate in fields like food distribution and coal, which don’t draw nearly as much media coverage as technology. One other gainer is from India, another is from Indonesia, and two are from China.
How quickly things change. Last year, four of the top five gainers hailed from the U.S. and had fortunes in tech or tech-adjacent fields like electric vehicles (i.e., Elon Musk). This year, only one–Colin Zheng Huang of China, who founded and formerly chaired e-commerce firm Pinduoduo–is a tech billionaire.
To measure the biggest gainers, Forbes looked at people who were billionaires at the start of the year (2,671 at the start of 2022), and who hold half or more of their fortune in publicly-traded stocks.
The five billionaires are Gautam Adani, Low Tuck Kwong, Colin Zheng Huang, Wu Yiling, and Ravi Jaipuria. (Forbes)
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