Terry Matthews surrenders title of richest person in Wales to former Google board member

Canadian-made tech legend Sir Terry Matthews was the first billionaire in the history of his home country of Wales, but he is no longer the richest man there.

This is according to the The Sunday Times Rich List, which has been published as a supplement in the British newspaper The Sunday Times since 1989, and is a list of the 1,000 wealthiest people or families in the United Kingdom. The list is updated annually in April.

This year’s list was topped by Russian-born billionaire Alisher Usmanov, who owns a nearly 30% stake in Arsenal Football Club and is worth £13.3 billion. Other notables on the list include The Duke of Westminster, whose £7.8-billion fortune places him eighth, Galen and George Weston and family, who were at 11th with £6.65-billion, and Sir Richard Branson and family, who placed 19th with £3.51-billion.

Matthews fortune, which the paper estimates at £1.122 billion, earned him a ranking of 71st overall in the UK.

He fell to second place, just £3-million behind Michael Moritz, a Cardiff-born former member of Google’s board of directors. Moritz’s figure was the sum of both he and his wife’s fortune, which is estimated at £1.125 billion.

Other notable Welsh natives further down the list include Catherine Zeta-Jones and Tom Jones, who were worth £185 million and £145 million respectively.

Terry Matthews, who has since become known as Sir Terry, served an apprenticeship at a British Telecom’s research lab in England before he joined MicroSystems International, a chipmaker affiliated with Northern Telecom in Ottawa. Matthews met another U.K. immigrant -Michael Cowpland- at Bell Northern Lands and formed Mitel, which made Matthews a billionaire in 1985 when British Telecom took a controlling interest.

Matthews has been involved with scores of tech companies in the time since, and recently took Magor Inc., a next-gen provider of video conferencing tools, public on the TSX Venture Exchange.