Gates, the down-but-far-from-out chairman of Microsoft Corp, once again ranks No 1 on the annual Forbes list of the world's top 200 billionaires. Oracle Corp's flamboyant chairman, Larry Ellison, took second place, with third place going to Paul Allen, a Microsoft co-founder, who has gone on to make his own name as an investor and entrepreneur.

While Gates could hardly be described as a casualty of the recent swoon in tech share prices around the world, he certainly took his lumps.

In 1999, Gates had a brief reign as the world's first $100 billion man. Since then, Microsoft's stock price has fallen about 45 per cent in part because the uncertainties arising from the government's antitrust case against the world's largest software company. As a result, Gates' net worth has toppled to a meagre $60 billion.

Shares of Oracle, on the other hand, have surged more than 500 per cent in the past year, boosting Ellison's net worth to $47 billion, good for No 2 on the list, which appears in the Forbes issue dated July 3.

Eventhough many of the world's richest lost fortunes as tech stocks dropped this spring, overall it was a decent year for the super-rich. The combined net worth of the world's top 200 billionaires rose $100 billion to a cool $1.1 trillion - twice the gross national product of Mexico.

Rounding off the list of the top 10 of the world's top 200 billionaires are: No 4 Warren Buffet, the billionaire investor who runs Berkshire Hathaway Inc ($28 billion), No 5 German retailing tycoons Theo and Karl Albrecht ($20 billion), No 6 Saudi Arabian billionaire investor Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud ($20 billion), No 7 Wal-Mart Stores Inc chairman S Robson Walton ($20 billion), No 8 Softbank Corp's Masayoshi Son ($19.4 billion), No 9 Dell Computer Corp founder, chairman and CEO Michael Dell ($17.8 billion) and No 10 Canadian media mogul Kenneth Thomson, chairman of Thomson Corp ($16.1 billion).

Masayoshi Son of Softbank, which has invested billions of dollars in technology start-ups, was one of those whose felt the pinch this year as tech stocks began to wobble. He was worth $68.5 billion as of February 18 and was hot on the heels of Microsoft's Gates. But after Softbank's profits plummeted 77 per cent, his net worth tumbled to $19.4 billion.

The net worth of Yasumitsu Shigeta, the mobile phone titan at the helm of Japan's Hikari Tsushin Inc, dropped to a paltry $1.7 billion from $39 billion, bumping him right off the list.

Wipro Ltd chairman Azim Premji was worth $35 billion as of February 18, but now he's down to a mere $6.9 billion, while Hong Kong Internet tycoon Richard Li's worth was $8.5 billion in February but more recently dropped to about half as much.