“Ingvar Kamprad, the Swede who founded furniture retail chain IKEA, has overtaken Microsoft’s Bill Gates as the world’s richest man, Swedish TV news reported on Sunday,” Reuters reports. “Citing next week’s edition of the Swedish business weekly Veckans Affarer, public service SVT2 television said Kamprad, 77, has a personal fortune of 400 billion crowns ($53 billion).”
“Gates’s fortune is put at $47 billion, according to the latest list of the world’s rich in U.S. Forbes magazine, SVT2 said. SVT2 said the dollar’s slide against other currencies is the main reason why Kamprad has now overtaken Gates,” Reuters reports.
Full article here.
For the record, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple and Pixar sits at #262 on Forbes World’s Richest list with US$2.1 billion.
gates and windows sucks rats ass
dumbest “news” posting ever.
i doubt anyone here cares. our love for macs doesn’t mean we track the life and times of gates. the fucking guy is still worth $47 billion more than anyone here, so who cares?
rageous “i doubt anyone here cares. our love for macs doesn’t mean we track the life and times of gates. the fucking guy is still worth $47 billion more than anyone here, so who cares?”
Or $45 billion if ron turns out to be Steve Jobs
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rageous
Gates is fucking? THAT is news! Today? Or was it in his dreams last year?
I am not sure $47 billion? I have to check what is in �uros.
Now watch for MS to move into IKEA’s space. They do that every time out of jealousy: Netscape after they IPOed at over $100, Google now in in their sights, Java is being bastardized by J# and .NET
You see the pattern?
Just to raise the level of the discourse here.
The thing that few people know or even understand about Ingvar Kamprad, is that he had the idea about flat-packing furniture for self-assembly back in the 1940s and then spent 5 years trying to get financial backing for his idea. (While he waited he sold pencils and other stuff).
Today IKEA is the world’s No: 1 furniture company and it owns the second biggest – habitat – furniture company in the world outright.
Not bad doing for someone that had an idea and pursued it!!
TheSwede
But I thought you only got to be #1 richest person by stealing ideas and crushing all business rivals? You mean I’ve spent my adult life being a complete evil toad for nothing?!!!!??
I’m just trying to get in the positive numbers. So, even though I have indoor plumbing, I have less wealth than people with nothing.
Oh crap! Who wants to bet that Microsoft will bundle Longhorn with Microsoft Desk(TM)? Without MS Desk(TM), Longhorn will not operate properly since the desktop metaphore will rely exclusively on MS Desk(TM) APIs.
IKEA will be beleguered by 2007. Or 2008. Well, maybe 2009. Oh heck, one year after Longhorn ships, assuming that MS Desk(TM) does not have bugs.
Can we just get along? We can all learn from this lesson: You can get to be the richest man in the world by selling the cheapest products.
Acts of freedom from the free world. Look at your responses for the most part (except the Findland guy..hi dude we talked before and YOU make sense).
Bury your head in the sand US
You are NO longer the best.
Put the Swedes on your anti-free world list.
You are no longer the greatest and your fall is going to be long and hard.
Oh the fun of it all.
A french lawyer for Saddam wants to take on the US for breaking the Geneva convention. Act of freedom.
The pope wants catholics to stop watching Sunday sports. Act of freedom (the feedback is that is will never work, sports is a religion but what the heck).
The Euro case against MS.
The Swedes with the richest guy.
Frankly the free world has had enough of the US bully, so wise up.
I don’t see how “wealth” based on stock ownership can be considered real wealth. It’s very illiquid, and any attempt to sell off significant amounts of stock would result in a plunge in the stock price. So I would discount over 90% of these guys’ supposed wealth. Now, an oil-rich sultan, there you’re talking real wealth!
This applies to commodity prices too. My grandfather was wealthy, up until the crash of 1929, when he lost everything. He was a big cotton grower, and the price went from .48/lb to .02/lb overnight, and he was sitting on a big harvest, waiting for the price to reach .50/lb.