A record number of U.S. billionaires are immigrants
Elon Musk, chief executive officer for SpaceX, is the 5th richest immigrant in the United States with a net worth estimated at $11.6 billion. (Susana Gonzalez/Bloomberg)
A friend of mine whose family emigrated from Argentina to the United States when he was a kid recently told me he could never have built his small business back home because he wasn’t born to the right class. No one in the United States cares about his background, he said. They cared about what he could do.
My friend isn’t rich, but he is comfortable, with a full-time job and a robust furniture resale business. It’s a tale worth telling as Forbes Magazine on Tuesday released its annual list of the 400 richest Americans , a record 42 of whom are immigrants from 21 countries.
The 42 have a combined net worth of $250 billion, Forbes reports, and include New York City grocery mogul John Catsimatidis ($3.3 billion, Greece), Tesla founder Elon Musk ($11.6 billion, South Africa) and WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum ($8.8 billion, Ukraine).
“There is no other country on the planet where you or your parents can show up and with a lot of hard work create huge wealth within one generation,” said businessman Raul Fernandez, who was born in Washington to immigrant parents from Cuba and from Ecuador.
Six of the 42 richest immigrants on the Forbes list are from Israel, five are from India, and four each are from Hungary and Taiwan. Moscow native and Google co-founder Sergey Brin, whose parents brought him to the United States when he was six, leads the immigrant list with an estimated net worth of $37.5 billion.
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Brin’s “mathematician parents faced anti-Semitism in their homeland,” Forbes staffer Jennifer Wang writes. “They were reportedly forced to sit in separate rooms during university entrance exams, and were limited in their choice of careers.”
All but two of the Forbes 42 are self-made, and a third are richer than real estate baron Donald Trump, who has made immigration a central theme of his candidacy. The Donald fell 35 spots to number 156. The billionaire still clocks in with a fortune of $3.7 billion, down $800 million from 2015.
The Kauffman report said “immigrants are twice as likely to become entrepreneurs as native-born Americans.”
Kirsh, I believe that the immigrants are more likely to become entrepreneurs as native born Americans has been true for quite some time.
When I lived in So Cal with it diverse population, the number of immigrant businesses was amazing.
It would be interesting to figure out wonder why that is so . . . ?