Editor’s note: This article was first published in July 2015; the Forbes rank, ages and fortunes of David Rockefeller, Perenna Kei and Dustin Moskovitz are 2015 figures. Rockefeller died in March 2017, and the oldest and youngest titles have changed since.
They say money can’t buy happiness and that love and health matter far more. The world’s oldest billionaire has enjoyed the whole package: he recently turned 100, he is immensely rich, and he was married to, and deeply in love with, his wife, who has since passed away.
We’re talking about David Rockefeller, a member of the Rockefeller family, who ranks 603rd on the Forbes list of the world’s richest people, with an estimated fortune of 3 billion dollars.
In his memoirs, David Rockefeller acknowledged that he had been very lucky in the life he was given, above all in the people he met and the time he spent with his family. Even so, he had to get over the death of the love of his life, Peggy McGrath Rockefeller, who died in 1996, and just over a year ago he suffered the misfortune of burying his son Richard, 65, after Richard crashed his light aircraft.
A grandson of John Davison Rockefeller, founder of the oil company Standard Oil, he is known for two very different sides: a high-profile financier and businessman, and at the same time a great philanthropist.
In fact, David Rockefeller doesn’t want to be remembered for his fortune, but for his good deeds and the good things he has done for others.
He has given away large sums of money during his lifetime, from building libraries (he believes everyone should read and learn) to rebuilding the World Trade Center after the 9/11 attacks. He is also one of the billionaires who joined the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation initiative for billionaires to donate more than 90% of their fortunes to philanthropic causes after their death.
And the youngest billionaire?
Technically, the world’s youngest billionaire would be a 25-year-old woman from Hong Kong named Perenna Kei, daughter of the chairman and CEO of Logan Property Holdings, who has inherited an estimated fortune of 1.3 billion dollars.
But if we look for the youngest billionaire who got there through “something” less easy than inheriting part of a parent’s fortune, someone who earned it, that young billionaire would be Dustin Moskovitz, aged 30.
Moskovitz was Mark Zuckerberg’s college roommate. He dropped out of university to become Facebook’s third employee, working full time on the social network.
His fortune is estimated at more than 7 billion dollars. He later left Facebook to build his own project, a software company that helps people take part in projects and collaborate.
Further reading
Featured image: Gotfryd, Bernard, photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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