Top 10 Richest U.S. Immigrants as of 2020
The number of immigrants in the United States has spiked in the previous years amidst the new immigration policy of President Donald Trump. Most of these immigrants are hoping for a brighter future and looking for greener pastures.
Forbes published recently its annual list of billionaires of the year and billionaires of the decade. Jeff Bezos from Amazon is the richest billionaire of the decade and is the first man alive who earned hundreds of billions.
This time, we will share with you the richest immigrants living in the United States who earned billions of dollars from their investments and profit shares.
#10 George Soros from Hungary- $8.3 billion
George Soros was born from a well-off Jewish family in Budapest. They migrated to England in 1947 to escape Germany's Nazi occupation in Hungary. Soros moved to New York City in 1956 where he started to work as an arbitrage trade. His career helped him to amass half a million dollars which was enough to start his own hedge fund business. He could be the richest immigrant in the United States if he did not give away $32 billion of his fortune for philanthropic work.
#9 Micky Arison from Israel- $8.9 billion
Micky Arison was born in Israel. He was only 5 years old when his father decided to move to the United States due to a lack of business opportunities. His father founded the Carnival Corporation and later on, Micky Arison inherited his father's wealth and became the chairman of the corporation at the age of 69. He is also the owner of the Miami Heat Basketball team since 1995.
#8 Sun Hongbin from China- $9 billion
Sun Hongbin was born in the Shanxi province of China. He has a master's degree in engineering that he obtained from Tsinghua University. There are no many details about how he landed in the United States and how he got his American citizenship status except only for his six-week management program at Harvard University. At present, he is the founder and chairman of Sunac China Holdings, one of the largest real estate companies in China.
#7 Jan Koum from Ukraine- $9.6 billion
Jan Koum was born in Kiev, a former part of the Soviet Union. Together with his mother and grandmother, they moved to Mountain View, California. He worked as a janitor in a grocery store and in 1997 Koum worked as an infrastructure engineer at Yahoo while attending Computer Science classes but later on he was dropped out. He worked for nine years at Yahoo before he founded WhatsApp, a messaging application. However, Facebook acquired the company in 2014 for an amount of $19.3.
#6 Pierre Omidyar from France- $11.4 billion
Pierre Omidyar was born in Paris from Iranian parents who sent them to France for college. His father was a urologist who moved to the United States when Omidyar was a child. He, later on, he acquired his degree in Computer Science. In 1991, he co-founded Ink Development which was rebranded into an e-commerce industry and renamed eShop. The company was later on acquired by Microsoft. In 1995, he started writing the code for a direct person to person auction for collectible items. The site is what we know now as eBay.
#5 Thomas Peterffy from Hungary- $17.1 billion
Thomas Peterffy was born in Budapest. He migrated to America in 1965 penniless and unable to speak in English. He started his career as an architectural draftsman and later as a computer programmer in the country. At present, he is the CEO and founder of the Interactive Brokers. His company specializes in trading platforms for sophisticated platforms.
#4 Len Blavatnik from Ukraine- $17.7 billion
Len Blavatnik was born in Ukraine and migrated together with his family to the United States in 1978. He obtained from Columbia University his master's degree in computer science and a master's degree in business administration at Harvard Business School in 1989. He founded in 1986 the Access Industries, an international conglomerate company located in New York. He also invested in different companies such as oil, entertainment, coal, aluminum, and more.
#3 Rupert Murdoch from Australia- $19.4 billion
Rupert Murdoch was born in Melbourne. His father owned two popular newspapers which he inherited. It was in 1970 when Rupert Murdoch started to buy American newspapers. In 1979, he founded a News Corporation and years after he purchased 20th Century Fox Film Corporation which he recently sold to Walt Disney Company. In 2013, the media company was renamed as 21st Century Fox Film where he still serves as the Executive Chairman.
#2 Elon Musk from South Africa- $22.3 billion
Elon Musk was born in South Africa and at the age of 12, he taught himself computer programming. At the age of 17, he moved to Canada and later on moved to the United States to pursue his degrees in physics and economics. Musk co-founded Zip2 in 1995 and X.com in 1999 which later became PayPal. One of the three technology companies he owned is Neuralink which aims to integrate human brains into artificial intelligence.
#1 Sergey Brin from Russia- $49.8 billion
Sergey Brin was born in Russia. His family migrated to the United States when he was still six years old to escape Jewish persecution. He was a Ph.D. student at Stanford University when he met Larry Page and the two started to create the most popular search engine in the world, Google.
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