Playing with the billionaires

By Dian Vujovich

If you’ve ever wanted to play around with all of the world’s billionaires, there’s a Bloomberg site to let you do just that.

While reading about how Charles and David Koch had picked up another $1.3 billion, bringing their net worth to more than $100 billion, I was directed to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index to get the details.

Turns out the site is a playground for anyone wanting to learn more about the 200 billionaires whose sketched head shots appear at the site. And whose wealth is tallied at the close of every business day. That means you can see how much these uber-wealthy guys and gals have made or lost in any given 24-hour time frame. That’s also where you can learn more about the Koch brother’s wealth trove as well as that of others.

Under the heading “Bloomberg Visual Data: Billionaires” you can Explore, Rank, Plot and Map data about these billionaires using tabs that include, the industries they’re in, their citizenship, gender, age group and where they obtained their wealth—inherited or self-made. Nope, “lucky” was not one of the drop-down choices under that  heading.

Here’s some of what I learned while playing around with the world’s richest:

• Select the age group “20-29” and  “self-made” and   no female heads appear. Keep both the age group and how they obtained their wealth selections the same and there’s only one billionaire whose head pops up: Mark Zuckerberg. He happens to be ranked #22 with a net worth of $2.2 billion.

•Finding wealthy billionaire ladies meant moving out in the age category to the “50-59” slot. Suzanne Klatten is ranked #42 wit her $17.1 billion and goodie for her, saw her wealth increase over $1 million from April 15 to 16.

Next in line was Laurene Jobs at # 78 with her $13.5 billion, followed by Charlene de Cavalho-Heineken with $11 billion and ranked at 104.  Last on this list of four was Abby Johnson, ranked at #131 with her $9.2 billion. Abby, btw, lost $689.6 million in one day earlier this week.

• Looking at the most senior of billionaires—of which there are only five– the oldest billionaire lady listed is Liliane Bettencourt. She is the first one listed and ranked #16 in wealth with $32.8 billion as of April 16, and happens to be Europe’s wealthiest woman as she owns 31 percent of L’Oreal. Age category: 90+.

In the fifth position is Anne Cox Chambers who is the largest shareholder of Cox Enterprises. She’s worth $93. billion and ranked #129.

Of the three gents in the age group, following Bettencourt is  Karl Albrecht, ranked #29 with his $23.9 billion. He  is the sole owner of Aldi Sued, Germany’s second largest closely-held discount grocer. FYI, his brother Theo, owns Trader Joe’s.

Behind Albrecht is Robert Kuok, Malaysia’s riches man ranked #44 with $17 billion gotten from the palm-oil business. Last, but certainly not least, is Jack Taylor, #53 with $15.6 billion, of Enterprise Holdings.

I could fiddle around on this site for hours and figure maybe you could to. Try it by visiting: http://tinyurl.com/mf5njew. Or, bloomberg.com/billionaires/2014-04-16/ada/jqaac .