President of Dangote Group Aliko Dangote has emerged the only African to make the Bloomberg list of 50 most influential people in the world this year.
Bloomberg on Monday announced The Bloomberg 50, a new annual, multi-platform initiative that honours 50 icons and innovators who have changed the global business landscape in measurable ways over the past year.
The first Bloomberg 50 honorees were selected by the Bloomberg Businessweek team after months of input from many of Bloomberg’s 2,700 journalists and analysts around the globe, leveraging the resources of the Bloomberg Terminal, and representing the most influential thought leaders in business, finance, technology and science, politics, and entertainment.
The executives, entrepreneurs, experts, and entertainers on the Bloomberg 50 all have a quantifiable metric underpinning their inclusion.
“What sets The Bloomberg 50 apart from other lists is that each person chosen has demonstrated measurable change over the past year,” said Megan Murphy, editor of Bloomberg Businessweek.
“Readers will find many names they recognise, but will also discover new visionaries—people who are impacting the world in significant ways, and are rapidly gaining the attention they deserve.”
Other prominent honorees on the Bloomberg 50 include – Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, a primary proponent of an initiative that would allow women to drive, a decision that is forecast to add $90 billion to the economy by 2030; Elon Musk, CEO, Tesla Inc. and Space Exploration Technologies with a market capitalisation of over $50 billion.
Elon Musk nurses the ambition to establish a human colony on planet Mars by 2022; Jeff Bezos, CEO, Amazon, the biggest global retailer, with a major interest in sending tourists into space in Blue Origin rockets; Masayoshi Son, Founder, Softbank Groups Corp.
who engineered $93 billion, the largest ever technology investment fund, to fund ride-hailing, artificial intelligence, connected devices, satellites, and the integration of computers to humans; Diane Greene, CEO, Google Cloud and the brain behind integrating advances in artificial intelligence and quantum computing to market; and Ken Frazier, CEO, Merck & Co., a leader in drug makers market with an innovative drug for advanced lung cancer treatment.
Dangote who only last week inaugurated his $300 million 1.5 mtpa capacity cement plant in Congo Brazzaville, has remained top-notch in various global rankings.
Dangote said: “I am very delighted with this selection and I see the recognition as a call to do more towards youth empowerment, job creation, better health for the people and economic emancipation of the African continent.”
As of February 2017, Dangote, according to Forbes magazine, had an estimated net worth of US$12.5 billion. He is ranked by Forbes magazine as the 67th richest person in the world and the richest in Africa and peaked on the list as the 23rd richest person in the world in 2014.
Photographer: Misha Friedman/Bloomberg
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Bloomberg, in the preface written by Paul Wallace, synopsized Dangote’s person and business in the following words: “The quiet billionaire for his relatively frugal lifestyle, Dangote fast-tracked plans to help his country of 180 million people import less of what it eats.
“Dangote, who made his fortune in the cement industry, is turning his attention to dairy and sugar farming; he’s earmarked $800 million to buy 50,000 cattle in the hope of producing 500 million litres of milk annually by 2019.
“He’s also racing to finish a 650,000-barrel-a-day oil refinery in Lagos, set to be one of the world’s biggest, and says he intends to spend as much as $50 billion in the next decade on renewable energy and petrochemical refineries, including investments in the U.S. and Europe.“Which is all fine, but not quite his grand ambition: buying Arsenal, his favourite soccer team.”