Bill Gates dethroned again as World's Richest Person - Spanish retailer Ortega moves top

It might be for a day, it might be for longer, but once again Bill Gate has been knocked off atop the list of richest person in the world for just the second time in two months.

Zara founder and cofounder of Spain's Inditex, Amancio Ortega, 81 is now the richest person on the planet, with a fortune worth $85 billion, putting him just more than  $200 million ahead of Gates at $84.9 billion and Bezos at $82.5 billion according to Forbes’ real-time rankings of the world’s billionaires.  

Rounding out the top 5 richest people is Warren Buffett at $77.7 billion and Mark Zuckerberg, on whose platform you might well be reading this article, at a mere $70.7 billion.

It's an odd competition when you think about it, but for most of this summer, Jeff Bezos has been nipping at the heels of Bill Gates when it comes to the title of richest person in the world and briefly lead the list in July.

But then Amazon's stock price dropped, and he fell off the list. And then Gates gave $4.6 billion to charity. And suddenly this week, an incredibly successful European entrepreneur whose name most Americans don't even know crept into the top spot.

This is actually Ortega's fourth time atop the list as the world's wealthiest person, but his tenure has always been brief--a few days in 2015 and 2016. His lead is slender, and might not last the depending on stock market fluctuations.
Only six people have ever having topped the list since it was first compiled. 

According to a biography, [Ortega] grew up very poor in postwar Spain. His drive to succeed came when he was about 14, after his mother was turned away from a shop while trying to buy food, because the family no longer had credit.
"The consequence of that slap on the face he suffered when still he was a very young boy has been the creation of one of the most important Spanish enterprises... with a global presence in most of the world," biographer Covadonga O'Shea said.

From a slap in the fact to richest man in the world.