Two IITians made it to the Forbes list of the 400 Richest Americans

Moment of Pride!

Recently Forbes has published the list of the 400 richest Americans and the report has found two IITians made it to the list of 400 richest Americans topped for the 18th year in a row by Bill Gates with Warren Buffett second. As per the US Business magazine, Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, fortunes swelled up by $5 billion in a year to $59 billion. Bharat Desai attained the 329th spot with $1.35 billion with Vinod Khosla at 331st place with $1.3 billion.

Bharat Desai is a Kenya born, co-founder of Syntel, graduated from IIT Bombay, founded the outsourcing outfit in 1980, took the company public in 1997 and now has some 16,200 employees. Its shares have jumped to 20% over the past year.

Vinod Khosla, another IITian, is the Silicon Valley venture capitalist generating profits from a clean tech portfolio. He is a Indian-born engineer who has made its early fortunes as a cofounder of Sun Microsystems, recently declared to give away half his fortune to charity when he signed Bill Gates' and Warren Buffett's Giving Pledge last April.

According to the magazine, The Berkshire Hathaway Inc. chairman and CEO Buffett's is the one who has suffered the largest dollar amount and his fortunes decreased by $6 billion. He was the only person among the top 20 on Forbes' list to see his fortune shrink from a year ago.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has been declared as the top three richest Americans with a net worth of $33 billion, $6 billion more than last year.

Founder of Facebook has been marked as the biggest dollar gainer on the list, with a net worth of $17.5 billion that earned him the No. 14 spot.

Forbes said the combined wealth of the 400 people, including 42 women, on this year's list is $1.5 trillion, with an average net worth of $3.8 billion, up 12 percent from last year.

Source: Richha Bhatnagar (Shiksha Team)