On the other hand, if the measure is in Norwegian Kroner there are quite a few billionaires.
From Fortune:
Fred Olsen is both the owner of Timex and its most successful watch designer. He’s also a world-class sailor and an oil industry pioneer, and was rumored to have inspired a Simpsons character. Now he’s leading a revolution in offshore wind.
Fred Olsen is reliving the day he ran off to sea. The 86-year-old Norwegian billionaire is showing me around the museum-like headquarters of his business empire when he pauses next to a glass-encased model of the Bruno, the fruit ship he boarded in January 1949, just days after his 20th birthday. As the scion of a Norwegian shipping empire co-founded by his great-grandfather and named for his great-granduncle, the original Fred Olsen, he could have taken the predictable path of the privileged. His own father, Thomas, had attended Cambridge and run the family business despite never having worked on a ship. But Olsen decided to chart his own course. Instead of attending college, he spent more than two years touring the world aboard the Bruno and other vessels, shipping bananas from the Canary Islands to Scandinavia and cognac from Bordeaux to the Mediterranean. He labored in lowly positions, as a deck hand and a “greaser,” the sailor who fixes the auxiliary engine that generates electricity. Along the way he studied the boats’ mechanical systems and observed how cargo was managed. “It was better than an MBA, better than an engineering degree,” says Olsen, his pale-blue eyes, framed with rimless glasses, twinkling as he recalls life on the Bruno. “No diploma could come close to that education.”The world of business is not populated with many truly unconventional thinkers—except, of course, at the top of some of its most revolutionary companies. Think of other non–college grads who took a radical approach and stuck to it fearlessly: Steve Jobs created world-changing products at Apple. Bill Gates followed his passion for programming to build Microsoft, the world’s largest software company. And Sir Richard Branson has battled the establishment in everything from music to airlines.Like them, Olsen is a dreamer who acts—and rarely follows the expected script. Heir to a shipping fortune, Olsen steered the family businesses in a new direction, first leading the North Sea oil revolution, then becoming one of the world’s foremost pioneers in wind power. But that’s just the beginning of his story. Given his over-the-top life experiences, maybe it’s Olsen, not the bearded adventurer from the Dos Equis beer commercials, who is really “The Most Interesting Man in the World.”In the late 1960s, Olsen led the first Norwegian group to drill for oil in the North Sea. Shortly thereafter, his company’s rig made the first discovery in Ekofisk, one of the largest deepwater oilfields ever developed. Olsen also co-founded Norway’s first private oil company, Saga Petroleum, and rallied the Norwegian industry to build expertise in oilfield products and services, a course that helped make his homeland one of the richest nations on earth.Since he branched out into renewable energy in the 1990s, Olsen’s companies have invested more than $1 billion in wind power. Olsen is now the biggest independent, meaning non-utility, provider of wind electricity in Britain. Today he’s focusing on the fastest-growing market in renewables: offshore wind. His companies installed one in five new offshore turbines last year in Europe, the world’s largest market. He’s also installing the first sea-based wind farm in the U.S., located off the coast of Rhode Island.When he’s not disrupting the energy industry, Olsen doubles as one of history’s most successful watch designers. He and his daughter Anette, 58, control and run Timex Group, which has struggled a bit lately but still ranks as the No. 2 seller of watches in the U.S., behind Fossil. It was Olsen himself who practically created the sports watch category when he dreamed up the best-selling Ironman Triathlon in the mid-1980s. A few years later he brought illumination to watches with the Indiglo night-light. And in 1994 he launched a groundbreaking “smart watch,” the Data Link, co-developed with Microsoft....MUCH MORE
