Romania has six representatives in the ranking of the world’s billionaires published on Tuesday by Forbes magazine: Daniel Dines, Ion Ţiriac, the Dragoş and Adrian Pavăl brothers, Ion Stoica and Matei Zaharia. Their combined fortunes total $10.6 billion.
The richest Romanian is Daniel Dines, 52 years old, the co-founder and CEO of the technology company UiPath, with a fortune estimated by Forbes at 2.7 billion dollars. He ranks 1,238 in the ranking of 2,781 people from around the world with assets of at least one billion dollars.
UiPath, the first Romanian “unicorn”, is a robotic process automation company, which was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in April 2021.
Dines, a graduate of the University of Bucharest, currently lives in New York and entered the Forbes list in 2020. His fortune increased by 1.1 billion dollars in 2024 compared to 2023, but he reached the peak in 2021, the year of the stock exchange listing of New York, when it was valued at $6 billion.
The second richest Romanian is Ion Ţiriac, with a fortune of 2.1 billion dollars. Aged 84, the former tennis player made a fortune in banking and insurance, in real estate and cars, occupying the 1,545th place in the Forbes ranking, which he entered for the first time in 2019, with a fortune then estimated at 1.2 billion of dollars. Now, in 2024, Ţiriac has reached the highest estimated value of the wealth, in a slight increase compared to last year, when it was valued at 2 billion dollars.
On the 1,623rd place in the Forbes ranking, with a fortune of 2 billion dollars, is Dragoş Pavăl, 57 years old, the co-founder of the chain of construction and DIY stores Dedeman. Entered in 2022 among the world’s billionaires, his wealth is on the rise, increasing from 1.5 billion to 1.7 billion in 2023 and reaching 2 billion in 2024.
His brother, Adrian Pavăl, 55, co-founder of Dedeman, has an estimated fortune of 1.4 billion dollars and is ranked 2,152 on the Forbes list. And he entered the top again in 2022, with a billion dollars, reaching 1.1 billion dollars in 2023 and increasing to 1.4 billion in 2024.
The Pavăl brothers founded their business in 1992, with a single location, in Bacău, and now it has reached 57 stores, with a turnover of 2 billion dollars, having approximately 60,000 products in stock, from tools and construction materials to furniture and household appliances. The Pavăl brothers also own shares in several Romanian companies listed on the stock exchange and a portfolio of real estate properties in Bucharest and Cluj-Napoca.
Romania’s fifth billionaire is Ion Stoica, 59, co-founder and executive chairman of the software startup Databricks, valued at $38 billion in August 2021. Cloud giants Microsoft and Amazon are among the investors.
Stoica ranks 2,410th in the Forbes ranking, with a fortune of 1.2 billion dollars, as last year, but down from 2022 when it was valued at 1.6 billion dollars.
With a doctorate from Carnegy Melon University, Stoica lives in the United States. He was the original CEO of Databricks from its inception in 2013 until early 2016, when he relinquished the position to co-founder Ali Ghodsi. Prior to Databricks, Stoica co-founded video streaming start-up Conviva. He is also a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley. Stoica co-founded Databricks with six UC Berkeley collaborators who built the popular Apache Spark data analysis engine. Databricks uses artificial intelligence to help companies store and use their data.
His business partner, Matei Zaharia, 38, co-founder and technology director of the software startup Databricks, is on the same position in the Forbes ranking, 2,410. He has an estimated fortune of $1.2 billion. With a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and a graduate of the University of Waterloo, he is the brain behind the popular Apache Spark analytics engine, which was conceived when he was a 24-year-old PhD student at UC Berkeley. Spark set a world record for data sorting speed in 2014 and earned Zaharia an award for the best computer science dissertation of the year. In 2013, Zaharia and six collaborators from UC Berkeley co-founded Databricks, whose software is built on Spark. He led the development of several new AI features beyond Spark.
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Tags: Romanians Forbes list worlds billionaires
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