Almost one-fourth of the 50 richest people on earth made their extraordinary fortunes founding and building today's largest tech companies.
Together, the 13 billionaires have a net worth of about $450 billion. That includes Microsoft visionary Bill Gates, the richest person on earth with a fortune of $87.4 billion, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the richest tech CEO in the world with a fortune of $56.6 billion.
This comes from new data provided to Business Insider by Wealth-X, a company that conducts research on the super-wealthy. Wealth-X maintains a database of dossiers on more than 110,000 ultra-high-net-worth people, using a proprietary valuation model to discern the size of their fortunes.
Although the American tech scene is home to the most billionaires on our list — nine of the top 50 — the emerging economies in China and India are starting to churn out enormously rich tech moguls of their own.
Read on to learn about the richest tech titans in the world.
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13. Jun Lei
Net worth:$14.4 billion
Age: 45
Country: China
Source of wealth: Self-made; Xiaomi
Like several of his fellow 21st-century Chinese billionaires, Lei Jun earned his $14.4 billion fortune in tech. His smartphone maker, Xiaomi, became the fourth-largest smartphone vendor in the world, and the largest in China, within about three years of its founding.
Lei got his start in tech shortly after college when he joined Kingsoft, a Chinese software company similar to Microsoft, as an engineer. During his tenure at Kingsoft, Lei served as chief technology officer, president, and CEO, succeeding in taking the company public in 2007 before resigning. In 2010, after spending a few years as a venture capitalist, the already-wealthy Chinese entrepreneur founded Xiaomi with a former Google China executive. Lei was appointed chairman of Kingsoft in 2011 and forged a partnership between the two companies to provide cloud-storage capabilities for his phones.
Xiaomi, often referred to as "the Apple of China," is now the second most valuable private-tech company in the world, with a $46 billion valuation. But as sales growth has slowed, experts are contemplating the sustainability of Xiaomi's business model in overseas markets.
12. Azim Premji
Net worth:$16.5 billion
Age: 70
Country: India
Source of wealth: Inheritance/self-made; Wipro
In 1966, 21-year-old Azim Premji dropped out of Stanford in the wake of his father's death to take the helm of his father's company Western India Vegetable Products — later renamed Wipro. It was under Premji's leadership that the company diversified into toiletries and bath products and, eventually, IT, and the company grew exponentially. Now India's third-largest IT giant, Wipro generated revenues of $7.6 billion in its most recent fiscal year.
Just days into the new year, Premji named Abidali Neemuchwala, a Dallas-based consultancy executive, the new CEO of Wipro, citing him as the best leader to take Wipro into "its next phase of growth." Neemuchwala had been brought on to Wipro as chief operating officer last April after years of working for rival Tata Consultancy Services.
Premji is known for his generosity. He signed the Giving Pledge, committing to donate at least half of his wealth to charity, and in 2015 was named "the most generous Indian" on the Hurun India Philanthropy list for the third year in a row.
11. Ma Huateng
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