World's 15 richest tech billionaires

Nothing changed the world so much as information technology.

Gradual progress of IT gave birth to a new generation of tech billionaires.

Recently, Forbes published names of 15 richest tech people.

It should be mentioned here that Microsoft and Google executives play a big role in this year's list.

Click NEXT to know about these billionaires. . .

1. Bill Gates
Total worth: $59billion

Gates is the former chief executive officer and current chairman of Microsoft.

He founded Microsoft with Paul Allen.

Gates is consistently ranked among the world's wealthiest people and was the wealthiest overall from 1995 to 2009, excluding 2008, when he was ranked third.

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2. Larry Ellison
Total worth: $33billion

Lawrence Joseph aka Larry Ellison is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Oracle Corporation, one of the world's leading enterprise software companies.

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Jeffrey Preston 'Jeff' Bezos is the founder, president, chief executive officer, and chairman of the board of Amazon.com.

He was named Time magazine's Person of the Year in 1999.

In 2008, he was selected by US News & World Report as one of America's best leaders.

Bezos was awarded an honorary doctorate in Science and Technology from Carnegie Mellon University in 2008.

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4. Mark Zuckerberg
Total worth: $17.5billion

Zuckerberg co-created the social networking site Facebook, of which he is chief executive and president.

It was co-founded as a private company in 2004 by Zuckerberg and classmates Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, and Chris Hughes while they were students at Harvard University.

In 2010, Zuckerberg was named Time magazine's Person of the Year.

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5. Sergey Brin
Total worth: $16.7billion

and

Larry Page
Total worth: $16.7billion

Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin is a Russian-born American computer scientist and internet entrepreneur who, with Larry Page, co-founded Google.

The Economist magazine referred to Brin as an 'enlightenment man', and someone who believes that 'knowledge is always good, and certainly always better than ignorance'.

Larry Page returned as CEO of Google in January, 13 years after he co-founded the Internet company with Brin.

Page, who laid the foundation for Google in postgraduate research on how Internet websites link to each other, is regarded as the a heavyweight thinker.

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7. Michael Dell
Total worth: $15billion

Michael Dell isthe founder of Dell Inc, one of the world's most successful IT companies.

In May 1983, Dell incorporated the company as Dell Computer Corporation.

In 1985, Dell started to design and make computers with components sourced from outside. His focus, right from the beginning, was on customers and good service.

By 1992, Dell Computer Corporation entered the Fortune 500 list of the largest companies in the world. At the age of 27, he became the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company.

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8. Steve Ballmer
Total worth: $13.9billion

Steven Anthony 'Steve' Ballmer is an American business tycoon.

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9. Paul Allen
Total worth: $13.2billion

Paul Gardner Allen is an American business tycoon, investor, and philanthropist.

Allen co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates.

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10. Steve Jobs
Total worth: $7billion

From a college dropout to heading an over $350 billion Apple empire, Steve Jobs dramatically transformed the worlds of personal computing, music and mobile phones, ushering in a new digital era.

Jobs, who died in October 5, 2011 at the age of 56 after a seven-year battle with pancreatic cancer, was also the man behind the stupendous success of the computer animation firm Pixar.

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11. Charles Ergen
Total worth: $6.4billion

Ergen is the chief executive officer of DISH Network.

He founded DISH's predecessor parent company EchoStar Satellite in 1980 with his pal Jim DeFranco.

EchoStar spawned DISH in 1996, launching its first satellite and subscription television services. DISH split off in 2008, but Ergan maintained control.

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12. Eric Schmidt
Total worth: $6.2billion

Eric Emerson Schmidt is an American software engineer and the current executive chairman of Google.

From 2001 to 2011, he served as the chief executive officer of Google.

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13. Pierre Omidyar
Total worth: $6.2billion

Pierre Morad Omidyar is a French-Iranian American entrepreneur and philanthropist/economist, and the founder/chairman of the eBay auction site.

Omidyar and his wife Pam are well-known philanthropists who founded Omidyar Network in 2004.

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14. Gordon Moore
Total worth: $3.7billion

Gordon Earle Moore is the co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of Intel Corporation and the author of Moore's Law (published in an article April 19, 1965 in Electronics Magazine).

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15. Dustin Moskovitz
Total worth: $3.5billion

He founded Facebook along with Mark Zuckerberg.

Their friendship dates back to college days when the two quit dropped out midway to start their social networking sensation that today has more than 500 million registered users.

Dustin started his own software venture in 2008, Asana, that offers a platform to small companies and individuals to collaborate.