Article content continued

“Tsai accepted an initial salary of only US$50 a month from Jack Ma when the pair first met in 1999,” Forbes said in its annual list, but the gamble appears to have paid off as the company stock has climbed around 100 per cent in the past five years alone.

Galen Weston, chairman emeritus of George Weston Ltd. and Loblaws Companies Ltd., the Canadian food and retail giants, is the third richest person in the country, ranked 160 globally His net worth stands at US$9.5 billion, the same as 2017.

Other notable Canadians include the New Brunswick-based James Irving, who runs the J.D. Irving conglomerate comprising more than two dozen companies in frozen foods, retail, shipbuilding, transportation and more, giving him a net worth of US$8.3 billion.

Rounding up the five richest Canadians is Jim Pattison, who bought a GM dealership in 1961, and has since acquired more than 200 companies to create The Jim Pattison Group that’s netted him US6.9 billion.

A couple of Canadian tech entrepreneurs also cracked the list. David Cheriton, the ‘professor billionaire’, has seen his US$10,000 investment in Google when the search company was getting started, turned him into one of the wealthiest people in the world. Since then he has gone on to build and spin-off several companies including Arista Networks and Granite Systems, giving him a networth of US$6 billion.

At 39, Uber chairman Garrett Camp, who co-founded the ride-hailing startup with Travis Kalanick in 2009, is the youngest Canadian on the list with a net worth of US$4.8 billion.