Moscow Tops Forbes List of Cities With Most Billionaires

Forbes has recently released the cities with the most billionaires. In their attempt to determine the most elite individuals around the world, Forbes tallied the cities for all the primary residences of all 1,210 billionaires on the 2011 Forbes World Billionaires List. Their list includes some of Haute Living’s notable markets such as Moscow, London, New York, Los Angeles, and Asia.

Moscow leads the way with 79 billionaires, the most billionaire residents in the world. In the past year, Moscow has had an increase of 21 billionaires, a truly impressive feat with their combine fortunes exceeding $375 billion. Vladimir Lisin, whose commodity rests upon steel, one of the country’s natural resources, is Russia’s richest person. Other top billionaires in Russia include Alexei Mordashov, also involved in steel, and Roman Abramovich, relative to the oil industry.

In Asia, three Chinese cities ranked high with billionaire presence: Hong Kong ranking fourth in the list with 40 billionaires, Beijing ranking 10th with 19 billionaires, and Shanghai ranking 13th with 16 billionaires.

New York continues to maintain their high profile, ranking second, with a collective net worth of their 59 billionaires amounting to $221 billion. New York has some of the most expensive real estate in the world and no doubt that Moscow billionaires own secondary homes in some of the most upscale New York residencies.

London comes in third with 41 billionaires and Los Angeles falls at number eight. Other cities in the top 15 include rising cities such as Mumbai, Taipei, Sao Paolo, and Istanbul.

Something surprising is the extreme growth in billionaires in the BRIC nations (Brazil-Russia-India-China), with 108 new billionaires in the past year.