A year of steady losses. Of the 793 billionaires on Forbes’ 2009 Billionaire List, 656 lost money while 44 surprisingly added multi-millions in the downturn. Bill Gates returned to the top position ($40B net worth, down $18B) with Warren Buffett ($37B, down $25B) and Carlos Slim ($35B, down $25B) changing the first three seats. From a list of 1,125 billionaires recently, and $1.4T (that’s “trillion“) lost, we’ll look at a few of the past year’s success stories - and offer discussion and links to how those few overperformed.  

In 2008, many of our national billionaires gave much of their fortunes away, involuntarily. From Sheldon Adelson, the Vegas and Macau casino billionaire who lost $24 billion ($24B) to Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and the Google guys, last year was a very difficult year to amass. Now who’s to say that losing “a few personal billion” when you still have “a few” is an innovation problem - it matters when these entrepreneurs pull back on progress and humanitarian giving to stem private losses.

Per Forbes, Warren Buffet lost $16.5B, Gates was down $12.3B and Google’s Larry Page lost more than half of his g-trove: $11.9B.