By the time you read this, the richest person in the world may not be the first white man who springs to mind. The prize that has been swapped back and forth between Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Microsoft founder Bill Gates, is now within the reach of Louis Vuitton head Bernard Arnault, whose personal wealth went up by 1 per cent when his company acquired yet another luxury brand, Tiffany, recently. That's not much if you're a per cent, but it's more than one billion dollars if you're Bernard Arnault's bank account.
Elsewhere in the billionaire hot 100, investment doyen Warren Buffet and social media automaton Mark Zuckerberg are at least 20 billion behind the top three. Google co-founder Larry Page just squeaks into the top 10 ahead of his partner Sergey Brin, although both are nudging $60 billion. And old favourite the Sultan of Brunei has been out of this race for yonks.
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A billion dollars isn't, for sure, what it used to be. In the Chinese Parliament alone, there are 100 billionaires. Some of them, doubtless, with only a couple of billion to their name.
That money doesn't make you happy is a truism often noted in this space. Less frequently observed is the fact that watching others accumulate wealth doesn't inspire much in the way of joy either, especially when that wealth is attained by flogging overpriced, monogrammed handbags to people without the intelligence or imagination to think of a better use for their thousands.