Forbes rich list: Do you want to be really rich? To get to the top of the Forbes magazine list of the World's Billionaires? Here is a good way to increase the odds: have rich and entrepreneurial parents.
Take Carlos Slim, who has edged out Microsoft's Bill Gates to claim the title of world's richest in the 2010 list compiled by Forbes magazine. Only a tiny fraction of the Mexican telecom magnate's $53.5 billion fortune was inherited from his father, a poor Lebanese immigrant who became a successful retailer and real estate investor. But Slim got a good nest egg and grew up surrounded by the commercial instinct.
Half of the top 20 on the list would have to include their parents' funds as contributing to the total. Like Slim, several were the children of self-made men. Lakshmi Mittal, the Indian-born steel magnate who is in fifth place, spent his childhood in poverty, before his father made his own smaller fortune in steel.
Even when there wasn't that much money at home, there was often ambition. Investor Warren Buffett's father moved from the grocery trade to stock-broking and eventually to the U.S. Congress. Like Buffett, most of today's mega-mega rich worked hard with what they were given. Of the top 20, only the three children of Wal-Mart's Sam Walton can be classed as traditional heirs. The rest can look at their fortunes as mostly self-made.
Money makes more money, but rags can also turn into riches. Larry Ellison, ranked sixth, grew up without much, dropped out of university and eventually founded software maker Oracle. Long before Ingvar Kamprad, number 11, founded retailer Ikea, he was a poor Swedish farm boy who figured out that he could make a good profit margin by buying matches wholesale and selling them retail.
Jealous and ambitious students of wealth pore over the Forbes list each year with great attention. A close study will show how fast wealth is shifting from rich to developing countries and how some of the economically mighty rise and a few fall. But for all the shifts, the recipes for great wealth do not change much.