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This article was first published 10 years ago

The top 5 ugliest billionaire websites

Last updated on: November 27, 2013 15:42 IST

Image: US President Barack Obama awards the Medal of Freedom to recipient Warren Buffett during a ceremony to present the awards at the White House in Washington.
Photographs: Larry Downing/Reuters

Businesspersons spend huge sum on image management. They usually have armies of experts who make sure that every communication from the company is well designed, polished, sharp, and error free.

In today’s wired world, website is the key tool of communication that is used by customers, stakeholders, job seekers, and many others. Sometimes it is the first communication a company makes with people.

Many, therefore, hire best designers and use the latest technology to develop their websites. However, there are billionaires who have all the money at their disposal but have websites that are outdated, amateurish, or simply jarring. If you look at these, you may feel that some don’t serve any purpose at all.

Source: Forbes

Click NEXT to see such billionaires’ websites…

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The top 5 ugliest billionaire websites


Warren Buffett

Net worth: $58.5 billion

Source of wealth: Investment firm Berkshire Hathaway. He is presently the CEO.

Website: berkshirehathaway.com

The website is a simple page with just 13 links. These links take you to investor related information, Buffett’s letters to shareholders and Berkshire’s subsidiaries.

But one can argue that it reflect the style of the investment wizard, who doesn’t spend an extra dollar when not needed.

The top 5 ugliest billionaire websites


Elon Musk

Net worth: $6.7 billion

Source of wealth: Tesla Motors. He is the co-founder, CEO and product architect at the company. He is also founder, CEO, Space Exploration Technologies Corp.

Website: muskfoundation.org

The website has exactly six lines of information and that’s it. It mentioned the areas where the foundation gives grants.

Forbes wonders if this simplicity is deliberate - if this is ‘ironic commentary on the state of philanthropy?’

The top 5 ugliest billionaire websites


David Cheriton

Net worth: $1.7 billion

Source of wealth: Investment in technology companies such as Google. He is a Canadian-born computer science professor at StanfordUniversity.

Website: gregorio.stanford.edu/DavidCheriton.html

This website has just three sentences about the billionaire. Once sentence says who is he, the second one mentions his interest and the third talks about Granite Systems, a firm he co-founded.

Cheriton was one of the first investors in Google when Sergey Brin and Larry Page were students at Stanford.

He has a reputation for a frugal lifestyle, avoiding expensive cars or large houses, according to Wikipedia.

The top 5 ugliest billionaire websites


Nadhmi Auchi

Net Worth: $2.2 billion

Source of wealth: He founder and chairman of General Mediterranean Holding (GMH), a conglomerate of 120 companies worldwide.

Website: www.gmhsa.com

At the top of the page, there are overlapping photos that scroll in the opposite directions horizontally. It’s up to the visitors to figure out what are these photos about.

For the rest, visit the website to look at the unbelievable colour scheme and the way information is provided. Just a word of caution, you may feel that you are visiting the same page repeatedly.

The top 5 ugliest billionaire websites


Carl Berg

Net worth: $1.1 billion

Source of wealth: He is a real estate investor and venture capitalist

Website: www.missionwest.com

The billionaire has sold assets in his publicly traded Mission West in December 2012 to realty developer Divco West. Consequently, the website does not exist any longer.

The billionaire, however, had this website for a long time. The entire site was jarring, especially the maroon background. The logo seemed pixelated. On the main page there were photos of ‘available properties’ that seemed to have been used haphazardly.