Mexican telecoms magnate Carlos Slim has been named the richest person on the planet for the third year in a row, with a net worth of $69 billion, according to Forbes’ latest rich list.

The Mexican was also considered to be the world’s wealthiest individual by the new Bloomberg Billionaire Index, which was released earlier this week.

Slim was followed by two US citizens: Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates with $61 billion and Warren Buffett, the investment guru, with $44 billion.

Larry Ellison, co-founder of the software company Oracle, also made it into the top 10 with a fortune of $36 billion, according to Forbes. South America was represented by Brazilian Eike Batista with $30 billion.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was ranked thirty-fifth with $17.5 billion. He is likely to climb considerably in the future when the internet company goes public.

The top three were identical to Bloomberg’s estimate, both in terms of the people and the size of their fortunes. However, while Bloomberg sees Ingvar Kamprad, the Swedish founder of IKEA, as the richest person in Europe with a fortune of $42.5 billion, he is not even in the top 300 according to Forbes, which estimates his and his family’s net worth at $3 billion. Europe’s richest person according to Forbes was Bernard Arnault of France with $41 billion.

Although tantalizing reading, some commentators have called into question the accuracy of the various billionaire indices. For example, Wealth-X, the Singapore-based research house, said it has identified nearly 2,500 billionaires - more than double the number featuring on the Forbes global billionaires list.

It is also worth noting that just around 10 per cent of people on the Forbes list were women. The richest women in the world were Christy Walton, the American widow of the son of the founder of Wal-Mart, with a net worth of $25.3 billion, and Liliane Bettencourt, the French entrepreneur who is the main shareholder in L'Oréal and has a $24 billion fortune.