9 Facts: The Lonely Female Billionaire
Though billionaire females are greatly outnumbered by billionaire men, their combined wealth is still staggering.
Credit: Alan Alfaro - www.flickr.com
Takeaways
- Though billionaire females are greatly outnumbered by billionaire men, their combined wealth is still staggering.
- The combined wealth of the world’s billionaire women is larger than the GDP of Indonesia.
- Nearly two-thirds of the world's female billionaires inherited their entire wealth.
1. Of the 2,325 billionaires worldwide in 2014, 2,039 – or 88% – of them are men.
2. Only 286 women are billionaires – or just 12%.
3. Still, these 286 female billionaires have a combined net worth of $980 billion.
4. That is an amount larger than the GDP of Indonesia ($868 billion), a country of 252 million people and the world’s 16th-largest economy (as measured in current U.S. dollars).
5. Nearly two-thirds of the world’s female billionaires inherited their entire wealth.
6. By comparison, only 17% of female billionaires are fully self-made.
7. The world’s wealthiest woman is Christy Walton, the daughter-in-law of Walmart founder Sam Walton.
8. Her net worth — inherited upon the death of her husband, John Walton, in 2005 — is an estimated $42 billion.
9. that is about half the $87 billion net worth of the world’s richest person, Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
Source: Wealth-X and UBS Billionaire Census 2014 and the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with additional analysis by The Globalist Research Center
