Armenian American entrepreneur, inventor and philanthropist Noubat Afeyan has been listed 212th on the Forbes list of 400 richest Americans.
“It has been a terrible year for many, but the good times keep on rolling for the nation’s richest. The 400 wealthiest Americans saw their collective fortune increase 40% over the last year, to $4.5 trillion. Nearly all are richer than they were a year ago,” Forbes says.
There are 44 new names on the list, which now requires a minimum net worth of $2.9 billion, up $800 million from a year ago.
Noubar Afeyan is the founder and CEO of Cambridge, Mass. life sciences innovation firm Flagship Pioneering.
Read also
He’s also the chairman and cofounder of biotech firm Moderna, known for its Covid-19 vaccine which was authorized by the U.S. FDA in December 2020.
Afeyan has helped start more than 70 public and private healthcare and life sciences companies over the course of his career.
Born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1962 to Armenian parents, he and his family fled the Lebanese Civil War to move to Montreal in 1975.
Beyond his stake in Moderna, he also owns shares in more than a dozen publicly traded biotech companies in the U.S.
Afeyan is a lecturer at Harvard Business School and also taught at MIT’s Sloan School of Management from 2000 to 2016.
The richest person in America, for the fourth year in a row, is Jeff Bezos. The founder and, since July, chairman of online retailer and cloud computing juggernaut Amazon is worth $201 billion—$22 billion more than last year’s list. This marks the first time anyone on The Forbes 400 has been worth $200 billion or more.
Close behind at number two is Elon Musk, worth $190.5 billion—almost triple what he was worth on the 2020 list, due to the huge runup in the price of electric car company Tesla’s shares.
Mark Zuckerberg took the third spot, thanks to a 63% jump in Facebook stock since last year’s list. Bill Gates clocks in at number four, the first time he hasn’t been in one of the top two spots in three decades.