Covid-19 couldn’t stop some of America’s most successful entrepreneurs from making good fortune, though it may have brought the world to a near standstill with the unprecedented growth of job loss. Forbes has released the list of eighteen newcomers on its 400 lists of richest Americans this year. All the newcomers entering the list are worth a minimum of $2.1 billion, the minimum needed to enter the list.
While the entire world is suffering from the pandemic-with decline in income, some have utilized this unprecedented situation to propel their fortune. To name some, Alice Schwartz, whose Bio-Rad produces Covid-19 diagnostic tests, and Eric Yuan, the man behind the now-ubiquitous Zoom call, made the most out of this pandemic situation to grow their wealth.
Below we have listed five out of the 18 new members of The Forbes 400 according to their net worth:
Eric Yuan & family
NET WORTH: $11 billion
SOURCE: Videoconferencing
Long before Covid-19 quarantining at home turned his company into a household name, the 50-year-old Zoom Video Communications founder worked as a manager at Cisco’s WebEx video platform. An engineering graduate of the Shandong Institute of Business and Technology in Yantai, China, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1997 after eight failed attempts to obtain a visa. Zoom’s stock has risen by nearly 300 percent since it went public in April 2019. Revenues surged 96 percent to $146 million in the second quarter of 2020, driven by rising demand during the pandemic. Yuan owns roughly 16 percent of the Nasdaq-listed company.
Sami Mnaymneh
NET WORTH: $4 billion
SOURCE: Private equity
Tony Tamer
NET WORTH: $4 billion
SOURCE: Private equity
Mnaymneh and Tamer founded New York-based private equity firm HIG Capital in 1993 in their mid-thirties and now serve as co-CEOs. HIG, which has $39 billion in assets under management, excels at investing in mid-sized companies in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America, including online women’s retailer Lulus and online high school yearbook vault Classmates. Mnaymneh and Tamer are among several new private equity billionaires to debut on The Forbes 400 thanks to previously unreported deals in which their firms sold stakes to large asset managers, raking in billions of dollars; HIG Capital sold a 15 percent stake to Dyal in 2016.
Trevor Milton
NET WORTH: $3.3 billion
SOURCE: Electric Vehicles
College and high school dropout Milton founded electric vehicle maker Nikola Corp. in 2014 at age 33. It went public through a reverse merger in June, sending Milton’s net worth skyrocketing. The Phoenix-based company is developing electric trucks that run on pure electric or hydrogen-electric powertrains. While Nikola has yet to generate revenues, it’s received orders for 800 trucks from beer giant Anheuser-Busch and for 2,500 refuse trucks from waste disposal firm Republic Services.
Ken Xie
NET WORTH: $3.3 billion
SOURCE: Cybersecurity
Xie cofounded cybersecurity firm Fortinet with his brother, Michael, in 2000 and took it public nine years later. Trained as an electrical engineer at Stanford, Fortinet wasn’t his first foray in entrepreneurship: he founded a firewall software company, SIS, in 1993 and started IT security outfit NetScreen three years later, which was acquired by Juniper Networks for $4 billion in 2004. The sudden shift to work-from-home this year has boosted demand for Fortinet’s network security solutions, pushing the stock up by 66 percent since last year’s Forbes 400 list.
Info Source: Forbes
