Cities of the billionaires

**Lambo** · 08-02-2008 11:47 AM

Gourmet restaurants, world-class nightclubs, favorable tax breaks--not to mention proximity to the world's financial centers. These are some of the attributes that make a city particularly attractive to billionaires and cause many of them to cluster in the same urban communities. It's no wonder, then, that one in three billionaires call one of 10 cosmopolitan cities home.

Despite all the squabbling between New York and London for bragging rights, neither is actually home to the largest number of billionaires. That honour belongs to Moscow.

The Russian capital is home to 74 billionaires, with an average net worth of US$5.9 billion. That's quite a jump from just five billionaire residents in 2002. Among Moscow's wealthy denizens: Russia's richest person, aluminium magnate Oleg Deripaska, who just announced plans to take a stake in oil group Russneft, and Roman Abramovich, who owns an expensive dwelling in London but insists that Moscow is his home.

What makes Moscow so popular with Russia's wealthiest? Says billionaire oilman Viktor Vekselberg, "The standard of living in Moscow is on par with all of the world capitals." And it's less expensive. A ticket to Russia's famed Bolshoi Theater--where the likes of Mikhail Baryshnikov has danced--will only set you back US$50. And top-notch kindergartens run by the government are free.

Moscow knocked off perennial No. 1 city New York, who is close behind with 71 billionaires and an average net worth of US$3.3 billion. It is the first time since 2001, when we started closely tracking the city data, that New York hasn't been at the top. More than half of these New Yorkers make their money in finance and investments.

Other well-known New York tycoons include Mayor Michael Bloomberg, media mogul Rupert Murdoch and real estate honcho turned TV celebrity Donald Trump, who says this about his hometown: "Everything is here, everything is accessible, and there is always something great to do."

Coming in a distant third is London. We found just 36 billionaires whose primary residence is the U.K. capital. But what is interesting is that 18 of them are citizens of other countries. Leading that list is Indian steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal, who ranked fourth in our March wealthiest billionaires list (he was worth US$45 billion then). "I find London an excellent place to live largely because of its geographic location," Mittal says. "I can fly pretty much anywhere in 12 hours."

Other notable foreigners calling London home include Iceland's richest citizen, Thor Bjorgolfsson, and shipping tycoon John Fredriksen, who switched his citizenship from Norway to Cyprus recently but chooses to live in London, where he owns one of the city's most expensive houses. There are also a number of billionaires, like Abramovich, who own second homes in London but don't consider it their main dwelling. Meanwhile, New York City has just one foreign billionaire who claims residence there, and Moscow is home only to Russian billionaires.

The U.S. has more cities in the top 10 than any other country: four including Los Angeles, home to 24 billionaires, including director Steven Spielberg; Dallas, home to 15, including oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens; and San Francisco, with 19 billionaires, including tech wunderkinds like Google's (nasdaq: GOOG) Larry Page (his co-founder Sergey Brin and the world's youngest billionaire Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg live close by in Silicon Valley).

Hong Kong is the most popular city for Asian billionaires; 30 live in the former British colony. But Mumbai, India, earns bragging rights as the city on our list with the richest billionaires. Mumbai's 20 billionaires, including two of the world's 10 richest (brothers Mukesh and Anil Ambani), are worth an average US$7.6 billion, handily besting Moscow's US$5.9 billion average.

And where billionaires go, the luxuries follow. These centers of finance and culture welcome you--if you can afford them, that is.

Cities of the billionaires - Yahoo! Finance

**byzantium** · 08-02-2008 01:28 PM

The thing I don't particularly care for about San Francisco is its far left culture. I'm not just talking typical urban liberalism, but an aggressive extreme communism. All the political leaders follow it, so ordinary citizens typically pay ruinous taxes. SF has extensive private schools since the public schools are in a state of chaos. California in general tends to squeeze its citizens extremely hard on taxes, and has regular tax raids in which lower tier rich who try regular tax avoidance are thrown in jail for failing to pay what the state thinks they should pay. I'm not a fan of banana republics in which bribes equal freedom from taxes, and that includes California.

**Lambo** · 08-03-2008 06:30 PM

yeah the tax situation can get complex

**MattV** · 08-03-2008 08:03 PM

Billinaires, I assume, value privacy more than anything.
Moscow might be the most expensive city, of course, and London and NY the Civilization's capital cities. But why not look at where the billionaires go when they want to enjoy civilization and privacy at the same time?

Punta del Este, Uruguay

Roman Abramovich and Paul Allen are seen in Punta a lot, but it doesnt appear in the news.

Uruguay is an unofficial tax haven, ideal for anonymous tycoons to buy like locals.

**cosmocentral26** · 08-03-2008 08:18 PM

Quite an article, very interesting read.

**byzantium** · 08-03-2008 09:17 PM

Some parts of South America have always been welcoming to Westerners. Most of what the American masses know about south of the border is 1) Mexican hillbillies, aka illegal immigrants, who act much like a Mexican version of American rednecks; 2) Hugo Chavez and related 3) Fidel Castro, the area's two big communist leaders, who relentlessly tease the US.

The Old Money elite in the US are still steamed about being booted out of Cuba 50 years ago-one minute they had the island by the tail, the next they were being ordered to leave. They've never forgiven Fidel, and have spent five decades trying to get rid of him. Hugo Chavez is Fidel Castro: The Next Generation. Since old money owns the US media, we hear about those two guys a lot.

Then there's the illegals, desert rednecks from Mexico with ideas and inbreeding far more bizarre than anything the local version has ever come up with, and even worse they seem to be winning. That's about the sum total of American knowledge of Latin America.

Places like Argentina and Uruguay (Buenos Aires and Montevideo are only a couple hundred miles from each other) that are happy to have gringos never make the news. George W Bush recently bought a 100,000 acre ranch in Paraguay, another haven. Paraguay doesn't like to extradite anybody, even foreigners who have bribe-obtained papers, which is also rumored to have played a role in W's purchase.

**MattV** · 08-04-2008 07:11 AM

byzantium, a "gringo" just can't be noticed in either Uruguay or Buenos Aires - excdept if wearing a baseball hat

-

Paraguay is cool and enjoys more economic freedom, but it's not very attractive unless you buy a feud for yourself such as:
The Bush Family bought in western Paraguay, which is to say like western texas to the max
there're only bushes (literally), some grass and few mennonite colonies. We call it the desert (Chaco) even though is somehow humid. Like African Sabana ond Sahel now that i think about it I could propose the Bushes to make an artificial safari importing a lot of endangered elephants and rhinos from Zimbabwe and other African dictatorships that don't care about their animals.

oh in answer: yes: Paraguay is rule of bribe not law. It's just not the case in Buenos Aires and all of Uruguay (the latter, being the best country in the world - and I'm not a national!!!!)

**1entrepreneur** · 08-04-2008 08:45 AM

I suppose billionaires, like everybody else would want to live in their motherland.

So I don't suppose an American billionaire would choose to live in Moscow any more than a Russian billionaire would choose to live in New York.

**MattV** · 08-04-2008 09:00 AM

I'm not "everybody else"
:P

**byzantium** · 08-04-2008 09:21 AM

Originally Posted by 1entrepreneur

I suppose billionaires, like everybody else would want to live in their motherland.

So I don't suppose an American billionaire would choose to live in Moscow any more than a Russian billionaire would choose to live in New York.

The USA DOES have the most billionaires of any country in the world. There have been several recent books and cable shows on "the new rich" and they tend to be more liberal than old money and to be bigger fans of cities, spending most of their time in places like New York or San Francisco, where old money spent a lot of time at country estates. Russian billionaires, while fewer in number, are wealthier individually because their wealth is oil based. Americans tend to be based heavily in real estate and paper assets like stocks. The real oddity is London, where most of the billionaires are not native Brits, unlike Moscow and US cities where most of the rich are native to those respective countries.