Forbes has issued its annual rankings of where the uber-rich live, showing that the US is still dominant in some ways, while Asia is the region with the most billionaires.

He may be more associated with giving his fortune away than creating it these days, but Microsoft tycoon and philanthropist Bill Gates tops the Forbes’ Billionaires list this year, standing at $86 billion, ahead of his friend, the investor Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway), at $75.6 billion, new data shows. 

The Forbes list, published annually, also underlines that, for all the supposed worries about the challenge from Asia to US economic might, Uncle Sam still reigns supreme in the number of billionaires in the top-20 rankings. Some 14 persons in the top 20 are from the US, and only two are from Asia, the figures show.

The rankings, in descending order, are:

Bill Gates; Warren Buffett; Jeff Bezos (Amazon); Amancio Ortega (Zara); Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook); Carlos Slim (telecoms); Larry Ellison (software); Charles Koch and David Koch (diversified); Michael Bloomberg (media); Bernard Arnault and family (LVMH); Larry Page (Google); Sergey Brin (Google); Liliane Bettencourt and family (L’Oreal); S. Robson Walton (Wal-Mart); Jim Walton (Wal-Mart); Alice Walton (Wal-Mart); Wang Jianline (real estate); Li Ka-shing (diversified) and Sheldon Adelson (casinos). 

Forbes said that a record 2,043 billionaires made it to the list with a collective net worth of $7.67 trillion, up from $6.48 trillion in 2016 (all figures are in dollars). Gates, top of the list for the fourth year in a row, saw his fortune of $86 billion rise from $75 billion last year.

Regionally, Asia-Pacific boasts the most number of billionaires, at 720. Among the billionaires from Singapore on the list are Robert and Philip Ng (No. 150, $8.7 billion), Goh Cheng Liang (No. 219, $6.5 billion), Kwee family (No. 315, $5.1 billion), Wee Cho Yaw (No. 324, $5 billion) and Kwek Leng Beng (No. 745, $2.7 billion). By country, the US led with the greatest number of billionaires, with 565, followed by mainland China with 319, Germany with 114, India with 101 and Russia with 96. California alone has 140 billionaires, more than any country besides the US and China.

As far as gender of billionaires is concerned - an issue highlighted recently with reports that women still feel under-served by wealth managers - the total number of women on the list is 227, up from 202 in 2016. A record 56 of those women are self-made billionaires; an all-time high of 25 per cent of the world’s women billionaires are self-made, compared to 21 per cent in 2016.  The richest self-made woman is Hong Kong’s Zhou Qunfei, whose Lens Technology went public in 2015.

The US boasts the most women billionaires on the 2017 list, with 74, followed by Germany with 28 and China with 23 (10 more than a year ago). These numbers include five women in the US who have built companies with their husbands (with whom they are listed), and one woman in Germany who shares an inherited fortune with her brother-in-law.