Youngest Billionaires and how they got so wealthy

Here are Forbes' top 10 youngest billionaires 

Billionnaires in North America generally are mostly self made and do not start out life as super wealthy. They strive to share with the world their creations. Below are my favourite super wealthy entrepreneurs. Let me know what you think.
Elizabeth Holmes left Stanford University at 19 with a plan to start her own company. For money, she cashed out the funds her parents had saved for tuition. Now, she counts billionaire Larry Ellison as an investor and has former secretaries of state on her board. I

think a lot of young people have incredible ideas and incredible insights, but sometimes they wait before they go give their life to something," she said. "What I did was just to start a little earlier." Holmes, through her company Theranos, has taken on the $76 billion laboratory-diagnostic industry as her target. It's an industry that was just waiting to be disrupted, since blood testing has not changed since the modern clinical lab emerged in the 1960s.
Here’s the rest of the Forbes Top 10 list:

2. Mark Zuckerberg (see picture above)
Net worth: £2.6 billion ($4 billion)
How: Internet
Age: 25
Citizenship: US
Marital status: Married

The Facebook-founder launched the social networking site from his Harvard bedroom in 2004. Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerman, is another dropout and a great example to small business owners to focus and work to get the business growth required to create great wealth. 

3. John Arnold
Net worth: £2.6 billion ($4 billion)
How: Energy trading
Age: 36
Citizenship: US
Marital status: Married
Hired by Enron and founded hedge fund Centaurus Energy in 2002 after Enron collapsed.

4. Yang Huiyan
Net worth: £2.2 billion ($3.4 billion)
How: Property
Age: 28
Citizenship: China
Marital status: Married
Her fortune is tied up in her holding in Guangdong developer Country Garden, run by her father Yeung Kwok Keung.

5. Albert von Thurn und Taxis
Net worth: £1.4 billion ($2.2 billion)
How: Inheritance
Age: 26
Citizenship: Germany
Marital status: Single
Inherited fortune on his 18th birthday and lives in family castle, Schloss Emmeram.

6. Fahd Hariri
Net worth: £900 million ($1.4 billion)
How: Construction, investments
Age: 29
Citizenship: Lebanon
Marital status: Single
Youngest son of assassinated Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri inherited stake in his father's construction, telecom and property empire.

6.5 Aymin Hariri (Yup, another one)
Net worth: £900 million ($1.4 billion)
How: Construction, investments
Age: 31
Citizenship: Saudi Arabia
Marital status: Married
Brother of above, while other brother Saad is Prime Minister of Lebanon. Say no more...

7. Yoshikazu Tanaka
Net worth: £900 million ($1.4 billion)
How: Internet
Age: 33
Citizenship: Japan
Marital status: Na
Like Zuckerberg, Tanaka also made his fortune from a social networking site, Gree.
8. Kostyantin Zhevago
Net worth: £790 million ($1.2 billion)
How: Banking, mining
Age: 36
Citizenship: Ukraine
Marital status: Married
Has majority stake in iron ore producer Ferrexpo and Finance; Credit Bank.
9. Lee Ziaohui
Net worth: £658 million ($1 billion)
How: Manufacturing
Age: 28
Citizenship: China
Marital status: Na
Chairman of one of China's biggest private steel manufacturers Shanxi Haixin Iron & Steel Group, since father was shot in 2003.

10. Shahid Balwa
Net worth: £658 million ($1 billion)
How: Property
Age: 36
Citizenship: India
Marital status: Married
Partner in DB Realty whose projects include Turf Estate, a luxury high-rise, and the 108-storey Park Hyatt Hotel in Mumbai.

It is disconcerting to read about those who have inherited wealth due to fathers being gunned down (Lee Ziaohui, China) or assassinated (Fahd Hariri, Lebanon). As for the Lebanese brother billionaires, that's right, each one is a stand alone billionaire, is it not a bit suspicious that two Hariri brothers are billionaires while the third is Prime Minister of Lebanon. The brother who is Prime Minister took over after his Dad (who was the Prime Minister) after the assassination. America is a wonderful place which is structured to help young entrepreneurs get ahead. That is the kind of wealth to achieve.

To get the report Billionaires - Architect of Wealth and Legacy, please contact Jacoline.Loewen at ubs.com

Jacoline Loewen

Jacoline is the Director of Business Development with UBS (Canada), largest wealth manager in the world, voted Best Private Bank in 2014.

This article is for entertainment purposes only. Any financial advice must be from a registered financial advisor.

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"Delay and Pray" is new mantra of PE firms

Rather than addressing the underlying problem of too much debt, private equity firms’ refinancing of debt at their portfolio companies is simply extending the problems out to some point further in the future, say distressed investors.
“Many of these companies are able to service their debt,” said Jeffrey Aronson, managing principal at Centerbridge Partners. “They can pay the monthly Visa bill. The real question is, can they pay it back?”
Tennenbaum seemed to think the answer to that question is no, arguing that when these companies have taken on new debt, it has gone mostly to pay down existing bank debt - not to growth, or to somehow making a company’s model more defensible. And in many cases, companies have been replacing bank debt with high-yield bonds which, while maturing later, have a higher interest rate.
“More cash is going to get clawed up” to pay the interest rates on that debt, Tennenbaum said. He said the new debt is levied at an interest rate of around 10%, versus 4% on the old debt.
“I think this cycle is going to have a long tail,” Aronson said. “You haven’t really seen many of the buyouts hit the wall. At the DBR Restructuring and Turnaround Summit on Wednesday, they used a variety of colorful anecdotes for what PE firms are doing, ranging from the now common “extend and pretend” and “delay and pray” descriptions to some more creative phrases.

“The longer you kick the can down the road, the nastier the can gets,” said Michael Tennenbaum, senior managing partner of Tennenbaum Capital Partners.
“[They] kicked the can down the road, and everyone realizes that it’s the same old battered can,” said Angus Littlejohn, chairman and chief executive of Littlejohn & Co.
Read more at WSJ.

Canadian ABL lenders in the private equity indsutry are having the busiest time of their lives. Business owners still prefer to have the debt rather than give up equity and are using debt to pay off their short term debts and keep going business-as-usual rather.

Private equity motives for a business are helping at GM

“This was not a private equity investment,” Rattner, a co-founder of Quadrangle Group LLC, said at the DBR Restructuring and Turnaround Summit.That’s because the motives of the auto task force were wildly different than those of private equity investors. Instead of aiming to generate a profit, the goal was to lose as little taxpayer money as possible – and to avoid a meltdown in the Midwest.
Steven Rattner may have been hired by the government to turn around the U.S. auto industry in part for his private equity and Wall Street expertise. But the turnaround of General Motors Co. and Chrysler bore little resemblance to a typical PE investment.

“There was a systemic risk not unlike the systemic risk of Lehman Brothers,” Rattner said. The auto industry “could have brought the whole Midwest down with it.”
Given those goals, Rattner thus far is pleased with how the turnarounds have turned out. On GM, he said, the U.S. government’s investment is currently worth between $40 billion and $45 billion, versus the roughly $50 billion that it spent bailing out the company.
Still, Rattner’s private equity inclinations came out at times during the keynote address, especially when he discussed how poorly the company was run before the government intervened.
“This was one of the worst-managed companies I’ve ever seen in my life of any size,” Rattner said, adding that he’s happy with the management team that he helped to install. “I wake up every morning grateful that Ed Whitacre is there.”
Read more at WSJ.

Compared to the heyday of 2007, companies need to offer more equity for capital

“We’ve slowly been picking up speed as far as deal flow goes,” says John Gabbert, chief executive of Seattle-based Pitchbook Data Inc., a private equity research and news company. "So far this year, 20 private equity funds have raised $15 billion nationally."
Speaking at the ACG conference held in Houston, private equity experts seemed more positive than six months ago.But lenders are still holding back on their end, the panel of private equity experts said.
“It’s still very difficult to get financing,” said Peter Rosenberg, managing director of the middle market group of investment banking and capital markets at Wells Fargo Securities LLC in San Francisco. “We have not seen many stable situations and we are finding out now that the lenders are being much more detailed in performing their own scrutiny and their own due diligence.”
Compared to the heyday of 2007, companies need to offer more equity to move forward.
“As we see it, the structures tend to be requiring about 40 percent or more equity to get the deals done,” said panelist Charles Riceman, managing director of Chicago-based Golub Capital. However, Riceman also said he expects to see a further increase in deal activity in the second half of 2010.
"Canadian business owners are recognizing these shifts as their top market, America, is not the economic powerhouse of five years ago. It is painful to make the adjustment and not believe that over the mountain, an economic recovery is coming," commented Jacoline Loewen, author of Money Magnet: Attracting Investors to Your Business. "A business is a life long work of art and to suddenly see the value fall drastically is hard to accept."

America overtaken on Forbes Billionaires' List

Scratch Bill Gates off the top of the list of richest people in the world. The new bizillionaire is Carlos Slim of Mexico who makes his money from...wait for it...finance and teleco. Read more...

China is now home to 64 billionaires – the most of any country outside the US – with 27 of them reaching the $1bn mark for the first time. Newcomers include Li Shufu, who runs Chinese car manufacturer Geely - which is on the verge of buying Volvo from Ford – and Fu Guangming who runs Fuijan Sunner Group which processes chicken for Kentucky Fried Chicken in China. Anyone catering to Chinese consumers is doing very well. The 14 self-made women on the 1,011-strong list have one interesting trend: Seven are in China.

Brazilian mining magnate Eike Batista saw a dramatic increase in his wealth over the year, up $19.5bn to $27bn, the biggest wealth gain of anyone on the list. Overall, the Forbes annual survey reflected a significant return in many billionaire’s fortunes, with the average net worth of those on the list rising from $3bn to $3.5bn, although that is perhaps not surprising as the cut-off date for the 2009 survey was February 13 2009, close to last year’s stock market lows. Aside from Messrs Slim and Gates, investment guru Warren Buffett took third place, with a fortune valued at $47bn, up $10bn from the prior year. Other notable constituents on the list include LVMH chief Bernard Arnualt, Europe’s richest man with a $27.5bn fortune. Ranked seventh, he has seen his fortune rise by $11bn in the last 12 months. Steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal saw his fortune increase $9.4bn to $28.7bn, pushing him up two spots to fifth place.

In terms of British billionaires, Sports Direct and Newcastle United owner Mike Ashley is now worth $1.5bn, while the Duke of Grosvenor and his family remain the wealthiest Britons, with a $12bn fortune, up $1bn in spite of the fall in the value of commercial property. One UK newcomer to the list is hedge fund manager Alan Howard – of Brevan Howard – with a net worth of $1.8bn, while David and Simon Reuben ($7.5bn), Sir Richard Branson ($4bn), and Joe Lewis ($3bn) all saw their fortunes increase in the last 12 months.

Read more.

Western world standards for business, such as paying a fair, living wage to employees and  paying taxes are increasingly driving good companies out of North America to offshore factories.