Mike Ilitch, 87 US, $6 bln | Food & Beverage Founder in 1959 (with his wife, Marian) of Little Caesars pizza. Detroit native and longtime resident who poured money into revitalising his beleaguered hometown. Owner of baseball’s Detroit Tigers and hockey’s Red Wings development of his company’s $1.2 billion District Detroit mixed-use project in the city’s midtown continues.Cheng Yu-Tung, 91Hong Kong, $14.5 bln | Real EstateDiversified businessman whose conglomerate’s most prominent holdings were jeweller Chow Tai Fook and real estate company New World Development, both now run by his son, Henry. A member of Forbes’s inaugural billionaires list in 1987, Cheng was an elementary school dropout whose wife’s father owned jewellery stores in the 1960s and ’70s Cheng built them into Hong Kong’s biggest jewellery chain.Jean-Claude Decaux, 78France, $6.5 bln | Media & EntertainmentA pioneer of outdoor advertising—ads in Paris’s public toilets were a signature innovation of his—and founder in 1964 of JCDecaux, which at the time of his death was the world’s biggest outdoor-ad firm. In 2014, the company set a Guinness World Record for largest outdoor-advertising billboard with an immense 32,000-square-foot sign at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor, 64 UK, $13 bln | Real Estate England’s Duke of Westminster and a friend of the royal family (his son, Hugh, is reportedly Prince George’s godfather). His company, Grosvenor Estate, oversees property in more than 60 cities worldwide it has vast, valuable holdings in London and throughout the United Kingdom.Forrest Mars Jr, 84 US, $23.4 bln | Food & Beverage Heir to the eponymous candy company founded by his grandfather in 1911. Mars joined the business in 1959 after a stint at what was then Price Waterhouse he became co-president with his brother John in 1975 and built it into a global conglomerate with 80,000 employees and $35 billion in annual revenue.
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Jack Taylor, 94US, $5.3 bln | Services Founder in 1957 of Enterprise Holdings in St Louis, the rental car company he named after the aircraft carrier on which he served in World War II. The business, now overseen by Taylor’s son, operates the largest rental fleet in the world, with some 1.9 million cars and trucks under the Enterprise, Alamo and National brands.
Images from top: Rebecca Cook / Reuters, Bobby Yip / Reuters, Alain DENANTES/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images, Colin McPherson/Corbis via Getty Images, Gerald Martineau/The Washington Post via Getty
