A definitive list of the 13 richest tech billionaires in the world

It was a wild year for the Tesla CEO, with numerous scandals and Tesla's stock zooming up and down in tune with his erratic behaviour. Both Tesla and his rocket company SpaceX laid off significant chunks of their staff in January of this year. Musk remains lavishly wealthy, however.

Premji, sometimes referred to as the "Bill Gates of India" is the founder of IT company Wipro.

The CEO of Dell Technologies, most of Michael Dell's fortune is tied up in his private investment firm MSD Capital, according to Forbes.

Ma is the richest man in China. He announced in September 2018 that in one year he would step down as the chairman of Alibaba — the largest e-commerce site in China — and be succeeded by CEO Daniel Zhang.

Ma is chair of the Chinese tech giant Tencent. Tencent owns messenger service Wechat, which is more or less ubiquitous in China.

Read more: Mark Zuckerberg's vision for Facebook sounds a lot like China, where I couldn't buy a cup of coffee without the app that dominates people's lives there

Ballmer left as CEO of Microsoft in 2014, but he still ranks highly on Forbes' list at number 19. Ballmer and his wife Connie gave away $295 million to philanthropic causes in 2018.

Google cofounder and current president of Google's parent company Alphabet, Sergey Brin, still takes an active role in company all-hands meetings, according to reports which surfaced last year.

Larry Page, the other Google cofounder, outranks Sergey Brin by a narrow $1 billion.

Facebook's year of scandal took a toll on CEO Mark Zuckerberg's fortune. It sunk nearly $9 billion since last year and he fell three places down the ranking. He was also usurped as the youngest self-made billionaire this year by Kylie Jenner.

Ellison is the founder and CTO of Silicon Valley major player Oracle. A two-time college dropout, Ellison was also appointed to Tesla's board of directors late last year.

Read more: The rise of Larry Ellison, the jet-setting 74-year-old billionaire founder of Oracle who joined Tesla's board of directors

Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates remains a board member at the company, but Forbes notes that he has sold or given away much of his stock, and owns just over 1% of shares.

Known for his philanthropy, Forbes reports that Gates has donated $35.8 billion worth of Microsoft stock to his charitable organization, the Gates Foundation.

At the top of the list sits Amazon CEO, owner of the Washington Post, and richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos.

Bezos was recently caught up in a firestorm after he announced his divorce from wife MacKenzie and texts from him to his reported lover Lauren Sanchez were leaked to the National Enquirer.

Bezos mounted his own investigation into how the paper got hold of the texts, and subsequently published a blog claiming that the Enquirer was blackmailing him with sensitive photographs.

Read more: Behind on Jeff Bezos' beef with the National Enquirer? Here's the complete timeline of the feud to catch you up

Bezos also donated $2 billion to charity this year, pumping it into a fund to support underserved communities and education programs.