Today, Forbes released its annual list of global billionaires. In 2022, there are 2,668 billionaires worldwide, down 329 from last year.

There are 748 billionaires in the United States, and California is the state with the most. One hundred and eighty-six billionaires live in California.

But of these 186, only one can call himself the richest person in California. So let’s see who it is.

California’s richest person

With an incredible net worth of $111 billion, the richest person in California is Larry Page. He is also the sixth richest person in the world.

Larry Page took the title from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who falls to the third richest in California and 13th in the world. Since its name change to Meta, the decline in Facebook’s share price has seen Zuckerberg drop out of the world’s ten richest for the first time in six years.

Larry Page made his fortune from Google, the company he co-founded in 1998 with his fellow Ph.D. from Stanford. student Sergey Brin. Together with Brin, he invented Google’s PageRank algorithm, which powers Google and is responsible for 5.6 billion searches per day.

Page served as Google’s CEO from its inception until 2001, and then from 2011 to 2015. During that time, he was voted America’s most popular CEO. In July 2015, he became CEO of Alphabet, Google’s parent company.

Although he stepped down as CEO of Alphabet in 2019, he is a majority shareholder, which explains his enormous net worth. Larry Page is a clean energy advocate and his Palo Alto home uses fuel cells and geothermal energy. He is also an investor in Tesla.

Philanthropy

I always love watching how these mega-billionaires give back to the community.

There have been some criticisms of Page and his philanthropy. While other top ten billionaires, such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, give away most of their wealth, some critics believe Page should follow suit and give away more.

In 2014, he donated Google stock worth $177 million to the Carl Victor Page Memorial Foundation. He started the foundation in 2006 and named it after his father. Larry Page has disclosed more than $2 billion in donations to his foundation since its inception.

Are you surprised to see Zuckerberg dethroned as the richest person in California? Do you think Page should donate more to charity?

Please leave your comments below.