Mark Zuckerberg overtakes Warren Buffett as world's third richest person
July 07, 2018
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is now the third richest person in the world, surpassing investor Warren Buffett.
The 34-year-old currently trails behind Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, taking over the third spot from Buffett on Friday, Bloomberg reported.
The standings mean that this is the first time the world’s three richest people all made their fortunes in technology.
Zuckerberg is now worth $81.6 billion, about $373 million more than 87-year-old Buffett.
Buffett, who once ranked as the world’s wealthiest person, has now slid down to number four, largely in part to his charitable giving.
According to the Bloomberg Index, fortunes made in technology make up about a fifth of the more than $5 trillion, more than any other sector.
Despite the recent string of scandals surrounding the social networking site, Zuckerberg's fortune does not appear to be suffering for any of it.
The world’s largest social media network is facing scrutiny in Europe and the United States about allegations that London-based political consultancy Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed user information to build profiles on American voters that were later used to help elect US President Donald Trump in 2016.
In 2014, Cambridge Analytica obtained data on 50 million Facebook users via means that deceived both the users and Facebook.
The data was harvested by an application developed by a British academic, Aleksandr Kogan.
Some 270,000 people downloaded the application and logged in with their Facebook credentials, according to Facebook. The application gathered their data and data about their friends, and then Kogan passed the data to Cambridge Analytica, according to both Cambridge Analytica and Facebook.
The British firm had initially denied any knowledge of Kogan violating Facebook’s terms and said that it had deleted the data once it found out about user breach.
