Forbes has unveiled the world’s richest people in terms of net worth. Mexican Carlos Slim ($70 billion) tops the charts for the second year running followed by Bill Gates.($54 billion) .Other notable names in the top ten include legendary investor Warren Buffet, steel magnate Mittal , Indian Mukesh Ambani and Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen; Steve Ballmer (Bill Gates Harvard roommate and current Microsoft CEO) Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang among other technology titans. In terms of countries/regions, the United States still leads with 413 billionaires, Asia has 332, Europe has 300, and Middle east/Africa has 89 whereas south America/Latin America has 76.
Excluding the Middle East oil magnates, a majority of the wealthiest people are knowledge/information merchants. Technology has gotten relatively cheaper today and forming an information company is now easier. This is as opposed to during the industrial age when forming a company required lots of money and many connections. This means that a teenager sitting somewhere in his room can easily hatch an idea on a website and before long the cash starts to trickle in. However, although the costs of forming an information company have virtually fallen to zero, the intellectual capital required is incalculable. This therefore means that whereas technology has really minted many tycoons, the gap between the rich and the poor has also increased, mainly because those with the knowledge and expertise are the most likely to start companies. As the late great management theorist Peter F. Drucker postulated, this is truly the age of the knowledge worker; and knowledge/information, instead of actual money, will now be the new capital. Perhaps, as the Kenyan tech community begins to gather shape, some fortune will also be made. There have been already some world famous applications from the Kenyan tech community, such as the disaster management website ushahidi.com developed by the likes of Eric Hersman and Harvard law graduate Ory Okollo(Now, Google's Africa internet policy maker).However, whereas the technical prowess is definitely there, what has been missing is the business genius to turn such local innovations into world beating companies.Get more of such breaking news in Kenya stories.
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