Nine Tigers make Forbes richest 400 list

Nine Princeton alumni are among the 400 wealthiest Americans, according to the Forbes magazine rankings released last week.

The list, which is in its 27th year, ranks the nation's richest people by net worth.

The collective wealth of the group declined $300 billion in the past 12 months, from $1.57 trillion to $1.27 trillion. The 400 individuals included on this year's list are each worth at least $950 million. Besides the nine Princetonians, more than 50 alumni of other Ivy League schools also made the list.

Microsoft founder and Harvard dropout Bill Gates topped the list with a net worth estimated at $50 billion. Investor Warren Buffett, an alumnus of Columbia Business School, came in second, with $40 billion.

The top-ranked Tiger is 73-year-old investor Carl Icahn ’57, whose net worth of $10.5 billion places him at number 22 on Forbes’ list. A philosophy major at the University, Icahn received the McCosh Prize for the finest thesis in his department, titled "The Problem of Formulating an Adequate Explication of the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning." He attended medical school but left after two years to work as a stockbroker. Less than 10 years later, he founded his own securities firm.

In 1999, Icahn donated $20 million dollars to the University to create the Carl Icahn Laboratory.

Ranked number 326 is former eBay CEO Meg Whitman ’77, a Republican candidate for governor of California. Whitman donated $30 million to the University toward the construction of Whitman College. She also earned an MBA from Harvard and is worth $1.2 billion.

Two other Princetonians made the list based on fortunes earned in the technology sector: Google CEO Eric Schmidt ’76, who is worth $5.5 billion and ranks 40th, and Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos ’86, who is worth $8.8 billion and ranks 28th.

Schmidt was an electrical engineering major at Princeton and later earned a Ph.D. from UC-Berkeley before beginning work in the technology sector. He joined Google in 2001. He also teaches business at Stanford.

Like Schmidt, Bezos majored in electrical engineering, as well as computer science. He worked on Wall Street after graduation before founding Amazon.com in 1994. Most of his wealth comes from stock in the company.

Industrialist Henry Hillman ’41, ranked at number 154, inherited his family's steel-and-coke fortune and later diversified the firm into real estate. He is now worth $2.1 billion.

Three alumni brothers are also on the list. The Fisher brothers inherited their wealth from their parents, who founded apparel chain Gap, Inc., in 1969. John Fisher ’83 ranked 326th and is worth $1.2 billion. His brothers Robert Fisher ’76 and William Fisher ’79 are ranked 347th and 371st and are worth $1.1 billion and $1.0 billion, respectively.

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The three men, who donated the money for Fisher Hall in Whitman College, followed their Princeton undergraduate degrees with MBAs from Stanford Business School.

Businessman and University trustee Peter Lewis ’55 is ranked 366th, with a net worth of $1.05 billion. In 2001, Lewis announced that he would make a $60 million donation to fund the new science library bearing his name that opened last fall. In January 2006, Lewis donated $101 million to the University to support the creative and performing arts.

Among Ivy League schools, Harvard has the most undergraduate alumni on the Forbes 400 list, as 16 of America's richest citizens having pursued bachelor's degrees there. That figure includes Gates and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, both of whom dropped out of Harvard.

Yale and Penn edged out Princeton as well, with 15 and 12 undergraduate alumni on the list, respectively. Columbia had eight alumni, Dartmouth had seven, while Cornell boasted five, and Brown rounded out the Ivies with two.