Rich Dude Who Backed New York Times Bumps Tech's Gates as World's Wealthiest Man

Microsoft bigwig Bill Gates got hip-checked off the top perch as the richest man in the world by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim (pictured here), on the annual Forbes list of the world’s Richie Riches.

Slim came to the rescue of the New York Times (NYT) a year ago, forking over $250 million to help the cash-strapped media company.

Often in the No. 1 spot, Gates actually got shoved off in 2008 by megainvestor Warren Buffett (now No. 3), with whom he is good friends.

Gates returned to the top rank in 2009, and now Slim–a telecom-and-more tycoon–has surpassed Gates’s net worth of $53 billion slightly with a $53.5 billion kitty.

Here are some of the other U.S. tech dudes–mostly based in Silicon Valley–on the list, in the Top 100:

No. 6: Oracle (ORCL) CEO and founder Larry Ellison ($28 billion)
No. 24: Google (GOOG) co-founder Sergey Brin ($17.5 billion)
No. 24: Google co-founder Larry Page ($17.5 billion)
No. 33: Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer ($14.5 billion)
No. 37: Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen ($13.5 billion)
No. 37: Dell (DELL) CEO and founder Michael Dell ($13.5 billion)
No. 43: Amazon (AMZN) CEO and founder Jeff Bezos ($12.3 billion)

Both Apple (AAPL) CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs (No. 136 with $5.5 billion) and Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg (No. 212 with $4 billion) rank in the longer list.