Houston: Four Indian Americans, Acoustics pioneer Amar Bose, Google founder director Kavitark Shriram, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and Bharat Desai CEO of an info-tech outsourcing firm, have made it to the Forbes list of richest Americans.
The 77-year-old Sultan of sound, Amar Bose, shares the 271st place in the list, released on Friday, with the founder director of Google Kavitark Shriram with a net worth of $1.8 billion.
Both Bose and Shriram, shared 242nd spot last year, went down the list but their personal fortunes have gone up from $1.5 billion to $1.8 billion.
Bose, an acoustics pioneer, formed his firm 43 years ago, which today thrives on the latest in iPod speaker docks, home theatre systems, noise-killing headphones, with a sale of $2 billion.
While 51-year-old Kavitark Shriram, an India-born financier, is an early investor and a board member of Google who owns 1.7 million shares worth $870 million despite selling over 3 million shares in 2004, when it went public.
Another NRI Bharat Desai and his wife Neerja Sethi, founders of an info-tech outsourcing firm Syntel, have been ranked 286th with a fortune of $1.7 billion in the list.
While Indian-American venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, who had made his presence in the list almost continuously, this time figured at 317th place with a net worth of $1.5 billion.
The 54-year-old Desai, who was born in Kenya but moved to India at the age of 11, studied engineering at Indian Institute of Technology, took programming job in US at Tata Consultancy Services in 1976.
Desai earned MBA from University of Michigan and founded info-tech outsourcing firm Syntel with his wife Neerja Sethi, while in school.
Desai, also a card player, represented India in bridge world championship 1995.
Bose, who started repairing radios in high school to help family after his father's import business was hurt due to World War II, earned PhD in electrical engineering from MIT and began research in hi-fi sound.
He founded Bose Corp in 1964 and contracted with NASA and US military to improve radio communications. He built brand on groundbreaking loudspeaker design and presently owns 60 per cent stake in the company.
While Khosla, 52, studied engineering at Indian Institute of Technology, earned a biomedical Master's at Carnegie Mellon and MBA at Stanford.
He co-founded electronic design automation company Daisy Systems in early 1980s then joined Andy von Bechtolsheim, Scott McNealy, Bill Joy to form Sun Microsystems.
After being the chief executive for short stint, he became full-time investor in 1986. Later, he joined fellow Sun-backer Doerr and in 2004 formed Khosla Ventures to fund 'science experiments.'
The price of admission to America's most exclusive club is now $1.3 billion, instead of a billion. There are a record 313 billionaires in the country, up from 262 last year, says Forbes magazine.
The combined net worth of the 400 rose $45 billion and reached $1 trillion for the first time since 2000, before the dot-com bust wiped out billions of dollars in wealth.
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