While New York and San Francisco made it into the top three, no city in the world has more billionaires than London, according the U.K. newspaper the Sunday Times’ annual Rich List. While London boasted the highest number of billionaires of any city — with 77 in all — many top-earners worldwide have seen a slight dip in their finances in the past year, as slumps in multiple industries worldwide took a chunk out of their heavy wallets.
"The guys at the top who are feeling the pain this year are often hit by a cocktail of plunging stock markets, low oil prices and the crisis in the steel industry — sometimes by all three," list compiler Robert Watts said.
New York came in second, San Francisco third and Hong Kong fourth when it came to the number of billionaires living in the metropolitan area. In terms of billionaires nationwide, however, the U.S. beat the U.K.’s 120 billionaires with 378, and China came in No. 2 with 193 people worth more than 1 billion pounds, or approximately $1.4 billion.
The richest men in London are David and Simon Reuben, a pair of brothers who own property in the U.K. capital as well as data center operator Global Switch. They are worth a combined 13.1 billion pounds, or approximately $18.9 billion, up 3.4 billion pounds, or approximately $4.9 billion, from last year, according to the same report.
The richest man in the world continues to be U.S. billionaire Bill Gates, founder of tech industry giant Microsoft, according to Forbes. Worth approximately $75 billion, Gates continues to donate hefty sums of his personal wealth to charitable causes, often through the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, a nonprofit he runs with his wife that does charitable work across a variety of sectors.
"Is the rich world aware of how 4 billion of the 6 billion live?” Gates once famously said, adding, “If we were aware, we would want to help out; we'd want to get involved."