Billionaire Blacks Club

You know you do this. You see a list or ranking, and before you look at in detail, you scan it quickly for members of the group that interests you (Blacks, Latinos, Asians, women, etc) to see how many of them are on the list. Unless you're white. In which case, you probably just read the list from start to finish. Fortunately for those of us looking up the number of blacks on any given list, William Reed has done the heavy lifting on the Forbes World's Billionaires List. There are 1125 people total on the list, and five are black. Wikipedia lists seven with "any" sub-saharan ancestry. The World's Richest Blacks include: Mohammed Al Amoudi, Ethiopia, $9B Aliko Dangote, Nigeria, $3.3B Oprah Winfrey, United States, $2.5B Mohamed "Mo" Ibrahim, Sudan (London-based), $2.5B Patrice Motsepe, South Africa, $2.4B Robert Johnson, United States, $1B (his wife took quite a bit in the divorce) There's also this dude named Donald Watkins, who was estimated to have $1.5B in 2002, but the claim was never verified. Says Watkins (in an oh-so-gangster quote, emphasis added): "There are only 12 investment bankers who have the expertise to properly calculate my net worth. But this isn't about how much money I make. I don't work for money. Money is not happiness. The fulfillment of achieving goals is happiness. Money doesn't motivate me, but achievement does." Oh, and if you're wondering about the young'ns, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, is the youngest on the Forbes list, at 23. I wasn't having a quarter-life crisis before, but now... man.