Forbes released its Billionaires List today. Ranking the world’s 1,226 richest persons in the world, Mexican telecom mogul Carlos Slim topped the list at $69-bln, followed by household names Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, netting $61-bln and $44-bln, respectively. The collective wealth of the list is pegged at $4.6-trln.

Included are 25 Canadians, with Thomson family of Thomson Reuters fame ranking no. 1 ($17.5-bln), followed by Loblaw’s Galen Weston and family ($7.6-bln), and Frank Stronach of Magna International ($1.2-bln). (Former billionaires of Research in Motion — joint-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis — were presumably booted off after their departure from BlackBerry.)

It turns out quantifying wealth is a lucrative enterprise. The Forbes list is compiled by 50 staffers in 16 countries and serves as a “cash cow” for the magazine, according to Kevin Roose of Dealbook. To cash in, Bloomberg has released its own last week. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index ranks the wealth of the world’s top 20 richest daily.

The Forbes list and Bloomberg index marks a return to the mean, coming less than a year after the Occupy movements popularized the term “one percent.” Critics argue that the listings fetishize wealth and are hampering efforts to alleviate the burden of income disparity.

(Source: Forbes: The World’s Billionaires.)

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