The annual list of the richest people on the planet has been published by Forbes, revealing that almost half of those who made it in are poorer due to a decline in stocks and rising interest rates.
Most notably, Elon Musk, has dropped from No.1 to No.2 after his expensive Twitter takeover helped sink Tesla’s shares.
In total, the world’s billionaires are now worth $12.2 trillion, a $500 billion drop from $12.7 trillion the list combined amounted to back in March 2022.
The world’s richest man is now France’s Bernard Arnaud, head of luxury goods giant LVMH, the first French citizen to top the list.
No one seems to have lost more than Jeff Bezos who fell from second place to No.3 , however, as Amazon shares fell a whopping 38 per cent which translates into a damage of no less than $57 billion.
The Forbes List included the Lazari Family, John Christodoulou and Stelios Haji-Ioannou all billionaires.
The Lazari Family through Lazari Investments owns more than 3 million square feet of commercial real estate in London, mostly office space that it rents out and is now controlled by Leonidas. Nicholas and Andrie Lazari .
Stelios The son of a Greek Cypriot shipping magnate, Stelios Haji-Ioannou founded the budget airline easyJet in 1995 after leaving his father’s company,Stelios owns an estimated 4% of the airline, Stelios maintains ownership of the easy brand through his private company, easyGroup. Through easyGroup, Stelios has licensed the easy name to such businesses as easyHotel, easyCar and easyCoffee.
John Christodoulou is the founder and owner of the Yianis Group, a London-based real estate firm with properties in the U.K. and Europe.Born in Cyprus, he fled the country with his family after the Turkish invasion of the island in 1974 and resettled in the U.K.He dropped out of school at age 16 and worked as a diamond mounter, using his early profits to buy his first property: a studio apartment in London.The Yianis Group’s portfolio includes residential, retail, office and hotel properties, including two five-star hotels in London’s Canary Wharf. The Monaco resident still maintains close ties with his birth country and his Yianis Christodoulou Foundation supports children’s education in Cyprus.
The world’s richest Cypriots
The first on Forbes’ 2023 list of Cypriot billionaires is John Fredriksen, a Norwegian-born Cypriot citizen.
Fredriksen’s empire includes oil tankers, dry bulk carriers, LNG carriers and deep-sea drilling rigs. His company started trading oil in the 1960s in Beirut, bought its first tankers in the 1970s and handled crude oil for Iran in the 1980s.His offshore drilling rig company Seadrill emerged from bankruptcy in 2018, with Fredriksen helping to raise about $1 billion in new debt and equity.
The other Cypriots that have amassed the most wealth in the world, according to Forbes, are, Polis and Celia HadjiIoannou, Yakir Gabay, Vinod Adani, Sergey Dmitriev and Valentin Kipyatkov.
The golden-eight are either Cypriots by descent, they obtained Cypriot citizenship, and some have gotten themselves an EU citizenship by investing in Cyprus, an EU member state.
