The superrich: the global power elite

Meet the Superrich, 200 citizens of the world who are both

rich and powerful. Coupon clippers need not apply.

BILLION BUCKS isn't what it used to be. Own a few apartment buildings in Tokyo, and—even in this market—you're almost certainly worth a bill. Take a high-tech company public when it's hot, and you're in the no-longer-so-exclusive billionaire club.

Ten years ago Forbes Magazine started counting billionaires outside the U.S.  It found 96. Last year, 298—plus 149 American billionaires. With stock markets around the world up an average 23% in the last year, the billionaire population, like the deer population, is sure to have increased.

Bowing to economic reality, they have revised their selection process this year. A billion bucks no longer gets you in. You've got to have made it yourself, or you've got to be actively managing it. This eliminates a fair number of jet-setters and Palm Beach residents. They have culled the roster of billionaires down to 200 people around the globe, the Global Superrich.

Take Microsoft's Bill Gates. He is by no means the richest on the list, but the company he has built is shaking the computer industry to its core.

Sixty of the Global 200, 30%, are Americans—roughly in line with the U.S.' 26% share of the world's gross economic product. Asia accounts for 56 names on the list, a reflection of the dynamism in Asia in the 1990s. Only 44 call Europe home, a comment on that region's declining economic status. Their fortunes were valued using stock prices from early June.

From the Global 200 Forbes editors have highlighted ten who they think are the most creative and successful—though again not necessarily the wealthiest—businesspeople in the world today. They appear starting on the right. The choices are, of course, somewhat subjective, but in business as in everything else you can't judge an entrepreneur's importance simply by the size of the pile he has made. In places like India or Eastern Europe someone who has put together a $250 million fortune is probably worth knowing as much as your average American billionaire is. They address this problem by including 27 "heavy hitters"—men (yes, they're all men) who aren't yet worth a billion, but who nonetheless wield outsize influence in their countries.

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