Three Indian Origin Women on Forbes List of America’s Richest Self-Made Women
June 07, 2019 10:51
Forbes ranking of America’s 80 richest self-made women has been released and three Indian origin women made their way into the esteemed list.
President and Chief Executive Officer of computer networking firm, Arista Networks Jayshree Ullal; co-founder of IT consulting and outsourcing firm Syntel Neerja Sethi; and Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of streaming data technology company Confluent Neha Narkhede, are named in the Forbes list of 'America’s Richest Self-Made Women 2019'.
The list has been topped by Diane Hendricks, who chairs ABC Supply, one of the largest wholesale distributors of roofing, siding, and windows in America. The 72-year old has a net worth of USD 7 billion.
Born in London and raised in India, Ullal, who has been ranked 18th in the list, has a net worth of USD 1.4 billion. The 58-year-old owns about 5 percent of Arista's stock. "She is now one of America's wealthiest female executives," Forbes said.
(Image source from: Facebook/jullal)
Sethi ranked 23rd, co-founded Syntel with her husband, Bharat Desai in 1980 in their apartment in Troy, Michigan with an initial investment of just USD 2,000.
Her current net worth is one billion dollars. French IT firm Atos SE bought Syntel for USD 3.4 billion in October 2018 and Sethi, 64, got an estimated USD 510 million for her stake.
(Image source from: Facebook/neerja.sethi.376)
Narkhede is ranked 60th on the list with a net worth of USD 360 million. Confluent, which is currently valued at USD 2.5 billion, counts Goldman Sachs, Netflix, and Uber as customers.
As a LinkedIn software engineer, Narkhede, 34, helped develop Apache Kafka to handle the networking site's huge influx of data, and in 2014, she and two LinkedIn colleagues founded Confluent to build tools for companies using Apache Kafka, which became open source in 2011, Forbes said.
(Image source from: Facebook/neha.narkhede)
The list also includes media mogul Oprah Winfrey ranked 10, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer (12), reality TV star Kylie Jenner (23), fashion designer Tory Burch (29), pop stars Rihanna (37) and Madonna (39), singer Beyonce (51), author Danielle Steel (56), TV show Ellen DeGeneres (63) and tennis star Serena Williams on the 80th spot.
Forbes said more women are creating new businesses and amassing fortunes than ever before, leading it to expand its ranking of the nation’s wealthiest self-made women to 80 ceiling crashers, one third more than a year ago.
"Each of these overachievers has blazed her own trail," it said.
List members range in age from 21 to 92 and are worth a combined USD 81.3 billion. The minimum net worth to make Forbes' fifth annual ranking of these women is USD 225 million. A record 25 are billionaires, one more than last year. Nearly half, or 38, live in California, followed by New York with 9. Nineteen were born outside of the United States, in countries spanning Burma to Barbados.
By Sowmya Sangam