Black Billionaires of 2019

As 2019 comes to an end and we wrap up the decade, we have an updated list of the world’s top billionaires. According to Forbes 13 of the World’s Billionaires are black, up 11 from a year ago.

Below we feature all 13 black billionaires and their companies ranked in order. Be sure to visit all 13 pages so you don’t miss out on any of the Black business moguls.

Who do you think is #1? Let us know your guess down below in the comments.

13. Mohammed Ibrahim

Mohammed is a British businessman who has focused within the Mobile Telecommunions and investment space.

Sudanese-born Mohammed “Mo” Ibrahim started Celtel International in the year 1998. The company was one of the first mobile phone companies serving Africa and the Middle East.

He sold Celtel International to Kuwait’s Mobile Telecommunications Company for $3.4 billion in 2005 and pocketed $1.4 billion. Later on, in his business career, he founded the Mo Ibrahim Foundation in 2006, which promotes good governance in Africa.

His foundation is focused on fighting corrupt leadership in Africa and is directed by his daughter, Hadeel.

12. Folorunsho Alakijabrahim

Folorunsho Alakija a Nigerian who has gained her wealth in the Oil industry. She is Nigeria’s first female billionaire and is the founder of Famfa Oil.

The company owns a substantial participating interest in OML 127, a lucrative oil block on the Agbami deep-water oilfield in Nigeria. 

Alakija has had quite a career. She started off as a secretary in a Nigerian merchant bank in the 1970s, then quit her job to study fashion design in England.

Upon her return, she founded a Nigerian fashion label that catered to upscale clientele, including Maryam Babangida, wife to Nigeria’s former military president Ibrahim Babangida.

Famfa Oil’s partners include Chevron and Petrobras. The Nigerian government awarded Alakija’s company an oil prospecting license in 1993, which was later converted to an oil mining lease.

11. Abdulsamad Rabiu

Abdulsamad is a Nigerian man who earned his fortune in the Cement and Sugar industries. He is the founder of BUA Group. The company is a Nigerian conglomerate with interests in sugar refining, cement production, real estate, steel, port concessions, manufacturing, oil gas and shipping.

BUA Group’s annual revenues are estimated at over a whopping $2 billion. Abdulsamad got his start in business working for his father, Isyaku Rabiu, a successful businessman from Nigeria’s Northern region.

He started his own business in 1988, importing rice, sugar, edible oils as well as steel and iron rods. Like father like son could not be any more true with Abdulsamad and his father Isyaku.

10. Michael Lee-Chin

Michael Lee-Chin is a Canadian businessman who has had much success within the Financial Investments Market.

Lee-Chin, a Canadian of Jamaican origin, made a fortune investing in financial companies. He owns a 65% stake in National Commercial Bank Jamaica, which makes up the bulk of his fortune.

He also acquired AIC Limited in 1987, when it had less than $1 million in assets under management. In 2008 the firm was hit hard by the recession, and Lee-Chin sold AIC to Canadian financial services group Manulife in 2009 for an undisclosed price.

Under Lee-Chin, the Canada-based wealth management and mutual fund business managed more than $10 billion in assets by 2002.

9. Michael Jordan

The number 9 slot is also claimed by another Michael, the great Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan is regarded by most as the NBA’s greatest all-time player and has won six titles with the Chicago Bulls.

He is the majority shareholder of Charlotte Bobcats and enjoys lucrative deals with the likes of Gatorade, Hanes and Upper Deck. His biggest pile of wealth comes from his Brand Jordan, a $1 billion (sales) sportswear partnership with Nike.

Jordan bought a majority stake in the Charlotte Hornets in 2010 for a grossed-up value of $175 million. The Hornets are now worth $1.05 billion with Jordan owning 90% of the team. His $175 million investment sure has been one that has paid off.

8. Patrice Motsepe

Patrice Motsepe is a South African who has achieved his business success within the lucrative Mining Industry. He is South Africa’s first and only black billionaire.

Motsepe is the founder of African Rainbow Minerals (ARM), a Johannesburg Stock Exchange-listed mining company that has in platinum, nickel, chrome, iron, manganese, coal, copper and gold.

He also owns a large stake in African Rainbow Capital, a private equity firm focusing on investments in the financial services sector. African Rainbow Capital was launched in 2016 and has the main focus of investing in Africa.

7. Isabel Dos Santos

Isabel is an Angolan investment and business mogul. She is the oldest daughter of Angola’s longtime former president, Jose Eduardo dos Santos, who stepped down in fall 2017.

Santos has built an impressive investment portfolio that includes a 25% stake in Angolan mobile phone company Unitel and a 25% stake in Angolan bank Banco BIC SA.

Other holdings include a substantial stake in Nos SGPS, a Portuguese cable TV company and just under 20% of Banco BPI, one of Portugal’s largest publicly traded banks. 

A spokesperson for Isabel told a member at Forbes that she “is an independent business woman and a private investor representing solely her own interests.”

6. Strive Masiyiwa

Strive Masiyiwa is a Zimbabwean who has achieved excellence within the Telecoms space. Masiyiwa, who is worth $2.4 billion, is the founder of Econet, one of the leading mobile telecoms companies in Africa.

The company has more than 10 million subscribers spread across many contries including Zimbabwe, Botswana, Burundi and Lesotho.

In February of 2019, he pledged the sum of $100 million to establish a fund to invest in rural entrepreneurs in Zimbabwe.

He and his wife Tsitsi founded the Higherlife Foundation, which supports orphaned and poor children in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Burundi and Lesotho.

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5. Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Winfrey is an American Entrepreneur, TV Personality, and Philanthropist. Oprah is still the richest African-American woman in the world thanks largely to the 25 years of her profitable daytime TV show and earnings from her Harpo production company.

Her cable channel, OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network) is also cash-flow positive for the first time and is enjoying favorable ratings as a result of securing exclusive TV interviews with headline-grabbers like disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong, Beyonce and gay NBA player Jason Collins.

Oprah is one of America’s most generous philanthropists and she continues to give to educational causes. She has also spent about $100 million on the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa.

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4. David Steward

David is an American businessman who has accumulated his wealth within the Tech Industry. He is the co-founder and chairman of IT provider World Wide Technology, World Wide Technology, an $11.2 billion (sales) IT provider, whose customers include Citi, Verizon and the federal government.

In the early days, Steward sometimes went without a paycheck and once watched his car get repossessed from the office parking lot. He grew up in the segregated South with seven siblings; his father worked as a mechanic, janitor and trash collector.

Steward donated $1.3 million to the University of Missouri-St. Louis in 2018 to create the David and Thelma Steward Institute for Jazz Studies.

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3. Robert F. Smith

Robert F. Smith is an American Private Equity Investor that has a net worth amounting to $5 billion. He a former Goldman Sachs executive, and founder of private equity firm Vista Equity Partners that focuses exclusively on investing in software companies.

The firm has more than $46 billion in assets and is one of the best-performing private equity firms, posting annualized returns of 22% since inception. As a college student, Smith secured an internship at Bell Labs after calling the company every week for five months.

An engineer by training, he worked at Kraft Foods and Goodyear Tire before getting his MBA at Columbia University. During a commencement speech, Smith vowed to wipe out the student debt of the entire 2019 graduating class of Morehouse College.

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2. Mike Adenuga

Mike Adenuga is a Nigerian businessman with interests in Oil and Telecoms. Nigerian-born Mike Adenuga, the world’s second-richest black person, built his fortune in oil and mobile telecoms.

His Conoil Producing Company was one of the first indigenous Nigerian companies to be granted an oil exploration license in the early 90s. The company is the operator of six blocks in the Niger Delta and also owns a 25% stake in the Joint Development Zone (JDZ) Block 4.

He is also the founder and sole owner of Globacom, a Nigerian mobile phone network that has more than 40 million subscribers in Nigeria and neighboring African countries. His property company, Cobblestone Properties, owns hundreds of prime residential and commercial property all over Nigeria.

Mike Adenuga made his first million at age 26 selling lace and distributing soft drinks.

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1. Aliko Dangote

Aliko Dangote is a Nigerian with businesses focusing on the Sugar, Cement, and Flour Markets. The Cement and commodities tycoon retains his title as the world’s richest black man this year.

After building his fortune in sugar, flour and cement, the Nigerian tycoon is embarking on his most ambitious project to date- a private oil refinery in Nigeria which will have a refining capacity of 6500,000 barrels a day and is expected to reduce Nigeria’s dependence on oil imports.

Dangote started out in business more than 3 decades ago by trading in commodities like cement, flour, and sugar with a loan he received from his maternal uncle and went on to build the Dangote Group, the largest industrial conglomerate in West Africa.

Dangote Refinery has been under construction for three years and is expected to be one of the world’s largest oil refineries once complete.