When he was 16, Jan Koum emigrated from Ukraine to California with his mother. They settled in a small Mountain View apartment, paid for with government assistance. She babysat, and he swept floors in a grocery store. When his mother was diagnosed with cancer, they lived off of her disability payments.
In high school, Koum taught himself computer networking with manuals from a used bookstore. Eventually, he got a job as an engineer at
This year, Koum is one of 43 people on The Forbes 400, including two billionaire couples, who were born outside of the U.S. That is to say, 41 of the Forbes 400 fortunes, just about one in ten, were created by those who were foreign born.
They came from 23 countries on every continent except Antarctica. Four emigrated from India, and three each from China, Hungary, Israel, Russia and Taiwan. They made their money in everything from tech to investing to real estate.
Quite a few, like Koum, came with little to nothing. Igor Olenicoff and his family arrived with $800 and four suitcases, only to be robbed. Born in Pakistan, Shahid Khan came to the U.S. at 16 and realized in his first days that even as a dishwasher he could earn more than most people in his home country.
The three richest American immigrants haven’t changed since last year. Moscow-born Sergey Brin, the Google cofounder, is No. 1, with a net worth of $31 billion. He’s followed by George Soros, who emigrated from Hungary, and Len Blavatnik, who was born in Ukraine.
Besides Koum, two other newcomers to this year’s list were born abroad. John Kapoor came to the U.S. from India on a graduate school scholarship in 1964. The first in his family to go to college, he became a billionaire when shares in his pharmaceutical firm, INSYS Therapeutics, surged earlier this year. Douglas Leone, who worked on boats after emigrating from Italy at age 11 (and was called "pasta" in high school), debuted on this year’s list with $2.1 billion.
Here’s the complete list:
- Sergey Brin, Russia, $31 billion
- George Soros, Hungary, $24 billion
- Len Blavatnik, Ukraine, $21.5 billion
- Rupert Murdoch, Australia, $14.2 billion
- Patrick Soon-Shiong, South Africa, $12 billion
- Elon Musk, South Africa, $10.3 billion
- Thomas Peterffy, Hungary, $9.1 billion
- Pierre Omidyar, France, $8.2 billion
- Jan Koum, Ukraine, $7.6 billion
- Do Won and Jin Sook Chang, Korea, $5.2 billion
- David Sun, Taiwan, $4.8 billion
- John Tu, China, $4.8 billion
- Shahid Khan, Pakistan, $4.5 billion
- Jeffrey Skoll, Canada, $3.8 billion
- Steven Udvar-Hazy, Hungary, $3.7 billion
- Isaac Perlmutter, Israel, $3.5 billion
- Haim Saban, Egypt, $3.4 billion
- Igor Olenicoff, Russia, $3.3 billion
- Roger Wang, China, $3.3 billion
- Jorge Perez, Argentina, $3.1 billion
- Peggy and Andrew Cherng, Burma and China, $3 billion
- Tom Gores, Israel, $3 billion
- Min Kao, Taiwan, $2.9 billion
- Bharat Desai, Kenya, $2.5 billion
- Victor Fung, Hong Kong, $2.5 billion
- Michael Moritz, U.K., $2.5 billion
- Romesh T. Wadhwani, India, $2.5 billion
- John Kapoor, India, $2.4 billion
- Mortimer Zuckerman, Canada, $2.4 billion
- John Catsimatidis, Greece, $2.3 billion
- Peter Thiel, Germany, $2.2 billion
- Alec Gores, Israel, $2.1 billion
- Alexander Knaster, Russia, $2.1 billion
- Douglas Leone, Italy, $2.1 billion
- C. Dean Metropoulos, Greece, $2.1 billion
- Fayez Sarofim, Egypt, $2.1 billion
- John Farber, Romania, $2 billion
- Jerry Yang, Taiwan, $2 billion
- Kavitark Ram Shriram, India, $1.9 billion
- Marc Lasry, Morocco, $1.8 billion
- Vinod Khosla , India, $1.7 billion
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