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Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos playing tennis years ago
Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates has definitively been the richest guy in Silicon Valley since "Friends" first aired on television. But leave it to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to dethrone the king and blow the rankings out of the water with a fortune that now tops $150 billion.
Although you can be sure that Forbes' annual list of the 400 wealthiest Americans will be loaded with hedge fund execs and investment firm founders, tech executives have steadily infiltrated the ranks and made their way up the chart.
The 400 Americans who made Forbes' list this year averaged a net worth of $7.2 billion - an estimated half a billion more than last year. To simply make the list, these billionaires needed a net worth of at least $2.1 billion. That still left more than 200 billionaires out of the rankings, according to Forbes.
The 2018 list, released Wednesday, has the seasoned founders of well-established tech companies, but also features some new names. Included in the rankings are the founders of file-sharing platform Dropbox, e-commerce site Wayfair, blockchain-based company Ripple, and e-mail provider MailChimp.
Here are the 25 wealthiest tech executives in the U.S. in 2018: