Who are the six Romanians on the Forbes list of billionaires in 2024

Six Romanian entrepreneurs are this year in the list of the richest people in the world made by the American magazine Forbes, with fortunes between 1.2 billion dollars and 2.7 billion dollars.

The best-ranked Romanian in the world ranking is Daniel Dineş, the founder of UiPath, in position 1,238 out of 2,781 people, with an estimated fortune of 2.7 billion dollars. UIPath was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2021 and is now valued at $12 billion.

He is followed by Ion TIriac, with 2.1 billion dollars, the owner of several companies in the banking, automotive, real estate and transport fields, included in Ţiriac Holdings. Former athlete, Ion TIriac is also the first Romanian to enter the list of billionaires, in 2007.

Dragoş Pavăl and Adrian Pavăl, the two brothers from Bacău who founded the construction materials retailer and DIY Dedeman, have fortunes estimated at 2 billion dollars and 1.4 billion dollars, respectively.

Ion Stoica also appears in the Forbes Top and Matei Zaharia, two professors from American universities who founded the technology company Databricks in the USA.

Ion Stoica is currently a professor of computer science at Berkeley University in California and co-director of AMPLab, and Matei Zaharia, co-founder of Databricks, is also an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University. The company they founded, Databriks, has Microsoft and Amazon among its investors, being valued at $38 billion in 2021.

For the richest people in the world, 2023 was an extraordinary year. The Forbes ranking includes a record 2,781 billionaires, 141 more billionaires than in the 2023 edition and 26 more than the previous record, set in 2021. The super-rich are also richer than ever, their wealth combined reaching $14.2 trillion – $2 trillion more than just a year ago and $1.1 trillion above the 2021 record.

According to the American magazine, as with the economy in general, money is concentrated at the top. There are 14 people who have reached 12-figure fortunes. These lucky few are worth a total of $2 trillion, which means that only 0.5% of the world’s 2,781 billionaires own 14% of the total wealth.