Bernard Arnault world’s second-richest man ahead of Bill Gates

France's Bernard Arnault, 70, the president of luxury group LVMH, has become the world's second-richest man, overtaking Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates but ranking behind another American, Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos, according to Forbes and Bloomberg.

Forbes’s website regularly publishes real-time assessments of the personal wealth of billionaires. On Wednesday at midday, it estimated Arnault’s at $105.1 billion, ahead of Gates’s $103.7 billion. Bezos still remains the world's richest man, with a personal fortune estimated at $164.8 billion.

On Tuesday, the ranking calculated by Bloomberg also placed Arnault ahead of Gates. The news agency indicated that Gates dropped out of the ranking's top two places for the first time since the ranking was first published seven years ago.

According to Bloomberg, Arnault has a personal wealth of $108 billion, up $39 billion since the start of the year, the largest gain among the world's 500 richest persons in 2019.

In the Bloomberg ranking, Arnault is marginally ahead of Gates, whose fortune is estimated at $107 billion. Both sit behind Bezos, whose personal wealth is estimated at $125 billion.

Unlike Forbes, Bloomberg already deducted $38 billion from Bezos’s worth, equivalent to the value of the Amazon founder’s recent divorce settlement, finalised in early July. His ex-wife MacKenzie Bezos is in 22nd place in the Bloomberg ranking.

According to both Forbes and Bloomberg, Warren Buffett and Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg complete the top 5.

Since personal wealth varies depending on stock exchange fluctuations, these rankings too are liable to change from one day to another.