Harvard Tops Forbes 400 List

Although Bill Gates, the richest member of this year’s Forbes 400, is Harvard College’s most famous dropout, 42 people on the elite list actually did complete a Harvard degree.

Of all the universities in the U.S., Harvard currently has the highest number of alumni recognized by Forbes magazine’s annual compilation of the wealthiest men and women in the nation. Stanford ranks second with 30 alumni, and the University of Pennsylvania ranks third with 24.

Harvard Business School is the most well-represented division of the university, with 28 graduates on the list, including Fidelity President Abigail P. Johnson ’88 and New York mayor Michael R. Bloomberg ’66. Both are ranked in the top 25.

The College has 13 alumni who made it onto the list, which places it second behind the undergraduate divisions of both Yale and Penn. Seven people on the list received their undergraduate degrees from Harvard’s neighbor, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Harvard Law School and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences are also represented on the list, and four Harvard alumni on the list attended more than one of Harvard’s schools.

The highest ranked Harvard graduate on the list is Steven A. Ballmer ’77—Gates’ business partner at Microsoft.

Gates and Ballmer—who are worth $59 billion and $15 billion respectively—donated $25 million in 1996 to build Maxwell Dworkin, the computer science building near the Law School campus.