Billionaire Bachelors: Few Are Truly Eligible? ~ MAKE MONEY BLOG$

3/27/11

Billionaire Bachelors: Few Are Truly Eligible?

5:58 AM

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Make money Blog$;More than a decade ago, a young Forbes reporter, Natasha Bacigalupo, started dating billionaire publishing scionDirk Ziff. She quit her job and ended up marrying Ziff.

The two are apparently still happily married. Their story proves that it’s possible to meet a billionaire, fall in love and live happily ever after, but it’s not all that likely. Especially for those who haven’t started dating their tycoon yet.

In this year’s record class of 1,210 billionaires, just 36 or 3% have never been married. Another 81 are divorced, 6 are separated. Of these 123 who are technically up for grabs, 33 are under 50 while 34 are over 70. Just 16are women. (Addendum: there are also 52 who are widowed, only 1 of whom is under 50).

Scouring the ranks we came up with a list of some of the most eligible but many of these supposed bachelors have steady girlfriends.

Click here to view a gallery of 10 billionaire bachelors.

Mark Zuckerberg has apparently been dating his girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, since college, despite the fictionalized account of his loveless personal life in the movie “The Social Network.” They supposedly met at a Harvard party while waiting in line for the bathroom, and they live together in a rented house near to Facebook’s headquarters.

The world’s youngest billionaire Dustin Moskovitz seems pretty smitten with his live-in girlfriend Cari Tuna, a Wall Street Journal reporter. When Moskovitz signed onto Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s giving pledge last year, he referenced his partner Cari in the pledge letter and included a photo of the two of them together.

As for the other young Facebook billionaires, Sean Parker and Eduardo Saverin are both single, though Parker definitely has a steady girlfriend. Not sure about Saverin, who now lives in Singapore.

Other single billionaires who have been snagged by high profile women include divorced hedge fund tycoon Noam Gottesman, who dates actress Lucy Liu, and IMG’s Teddy Forstmann, who is in a relationship with Padma Lakshmi.

Some billionaires likely have commitment problems. Longtime bachelor Richard Li looked like he was finally ready to settle down. He and his beautiful, much younger girlfriend, Isabella Leong, the actress who starred in The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, have three sons together, including twins born just last year. But she was apparently living in San Francisco and he in Hong Kong. They have recently split.

Two bachelors about town, Nicolas Berggruen and New Jersey Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov are often spotted in the company of beautiful woman but neither has bothered to tie the knot. Prokhorov told a reporter from the New York Times last year that he’d had a steady girlfriend in his thirties but had no desire to get married. It doesn’t seem as if he’s found one yet.

One who might be ready: new Israeli billionaire Teddy Sagi reportedly dated Israeli model Bar Refaeli when she and Leonardo DiCaprio were taking a break in 2009. She apparently went back to the movie star more than a year ago, making Sagi available again.

Here is a full list of all supposedly eligible billionaires under the age of 50.

Dustin Moskovitz, 26, single

Mark Zuckerberg, 26, single

Albert von Thurn und Taxis, 27, single

Scott Duncan, 28, single

Eduardo Saverin, 29, single

Fahd Hariri, 30, single

Sean Parker, 31, single

Yoshikazu Tanaka, 34, single

Yusaku Maezawa, 35, divorced

Serra Sabanci, 37, single

Teddy Sagi, 39, single