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Four Indian Americans have made it to the Forbes list of richest Americans this year. They are acoustics pioneer Amar Bose, Google founder director Kavitark Shriram, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and Bharat Desai, CEO of an info-tech outsourcing firm.
The 77-year-old Sultan of sound, Amar Bose, shares the 271st place in the list with the founder director of Google Kavitark Shriram, with a net worth of US$ 1.8 billion.
Both Bose and Shriram shared the 242nd spot last year. Though they rank lower on the list this year, their personal fortunes have gone up from US$ 1.5 billion to US$ 1.8 billion.
Bose, an acoustics pioneer, formed his firm 43 years ago, which today thrives on the latest in iPod speaker docks, home theatre systems, noise-killing headphones, with a sale of US$ 2 billion.
Fifty-one-year-old Kavitark Shriram, an India-born financier, is an early investor and a board member of Google who owns 1.7 million shares worth US$ 870 million.
Another NRI Bharat Desai and his wife Neerja Sethi, founders of an info-tech outsourcing firm Syntel, have been ranked 286th with a fortune of US$1.7 billion in the list.
Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, who has appeared in the list frequently, is ranked 317th this year with a net worth of US$ 1.5 billion.
Desai, who was born in Kenya but moved to India at the age of 11, has studied engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology and worked with the Tata Consultancy Services in 1976.
Desai earned a MBA from the University of Michigan and founded info-tech outsourcing firm Syntel with his wife Neerja Sethil. He is also an international level bridge player and has represented India in the 1995 world championship.
Bose, who started repairing radios in high school to help his family after his father's import business was hit by World War II, earned a PhD in electrical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and started research in hi-fi sound.
He founded Bose Corp in 1964 and won contracts with NASA and the US military to improve radio communications. His brand is known for its groundbreaking loudspeaker design and he presently owns 60 per cent stake in the company.
Khosla, 52, studied engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, did his Masters in biomedical at Carnegie Mellon and MBA at Stanford.
He co-founded Daisy Systems, an electronic design automation company, in the early 1980s. Khosla then joined Andy von Bechtolsheim, Scott McNealy and Bill Joy to form Sun Microsystems.
After being the chief executive of the company for a short stint, he turned into a full-time investor in 1986. In 2004, he formed Khosla Ventures to fund research projects.
The price of admission to America's most exclusive club is now US$1.3 billion, instead of a billion. America had a record 313 billionaires this year, up from 262 last year, according to the list published in Forbes magazine on Friday.