NEW YORK -- John Werner Kluge again topped the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans with a $5.9 billion fortune built on holdings that have run the gamut from cellular phones and Orion Pictures to the Harlem Globetrotters, Forbes magazine said Sunday.
A record 71 billionaires headed this year's Forbes Four Hundred list despite the recession that has gripped the United States. There were 66 last year.
Kluge, 77, made $4.65 billion before taxes in 1984, when he liquidated Metromedia, a business empire that included radio and television stations, billboards, the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team, the Ice Capades and cellular telephones, Forbes said in the 10th annual survey released Sunday.
Kluge, who was born in Germany to a poor family and studied at Columbia University in New York on a scholarship, used money from the Metromedia sale to invest in a variety of businesses, including Orion Pictures. He still has a half interest in a Philadelphia cellular franchise and has an estimated net worth of $5.9 billion, Forbes said.
'I've never liked the weekend in my life. I was enthusiastic about Monday morning from the day I left college,' he told the magazine. He lives in Charlottesville, Va., and New York City.
Second place went to William Henry Gates III, 35, of Seattle, who built a $4.8 billion fortune after dropping out of Harvard at age 19 to found Microsoft Corp. with friend Paul Gardner Allen, 38, of Mercer Island, Wash., who placed 16th on the list with a net worth of $2.4 billion. Gates moved up from 16th place in 1990; Allen moved up from 56th place last year.
Sam Moore Walton and relatives held the No. 3 through No. 7 ranks with their collective $22 billion of stock in the family's discount chain Wal-Mart Stores Co., which was founded in 1969 in Bentonville, Ark. Sam Walton moved to third place from 11th place with a $4.4 billion fortune.
The magazine said the survey has demolished the myth that the rich are a static class passing money from one generation to the next.
'The Forbes Four Hundred shatters that myth by showing that staying rich is nearly as difficult as getting rich, that wealth is not something that automatically passes from generation to generation like titles of nobility,' the magazine said. 'Nor does wealth stay put geographically.'
Since the first list appeared in 1982, fortunes have shifted away from New York and Texas to California, the South and the Northwest, Forbes said. The metropolitan area with the most Forbes 400 members was New York with 66, followed by Los Angeles with 29, and San Francisco with 25. The state with the most members was California, moving into first place with 75, followed by New York with 71 and Texas with 33.
Rich families such as the Rockefellers, Mellons and DuPonts must spread the wealth among more people in each generation as the drive to make more money gets weaker, Forbes said.
The recession has taken its toll on some of the richest Americans, who lost their places on the list, Forbes said. Nevertheless, the total net worth of people commanding a spot on the Forbes list rose to $288 billion this year from $273 billion in 1990 and nearly tripled during the boom years of 1982 to 1989.
The soft real estate market bumped a number of people from the list for the biggest drop-out rate of any field. They included Mortimer Zuckerman and Peter Kalikow of New York, Harold Brown of Boston and Herbert Simon of Indianapolis.
Other members of the top 10 included:
--Warren Edward Buffett, 61, of Omaha, Neb., whose shares in the Berkshire Hathaway investment company were recently worth over $4.2 billion took the No. 8 spot. The company has large investments in American Express, Coca-Cola and Capital Cities/ABC. His good-guy reputation was tapped recently when he was named interim chairman of Salomon Brothers, charged with guiding the firm through its government bond-trading scandal.
--Henry Lea Hillman, 72, of Pittsburgh captured the No. 9 ranking; son of energy, coke and chemical tycoon; diversified into real estate, light industry, biotechnology; estimated worth $3.3 billion.
--Richard Marvin DeVos, 65, in the No. 10 slot and Jay Van Andel, 67, ranked 11th, partners in Amway Corp., of Ada, Mich.; high-school buddies share company worth more than $6 billion. Each has a net worth estimated at $2.9 billion.
The minimum fortune needed to make the list was about $275 million.
