YOUNGEST BILLIONARES

At the age of 26, most people will have scraped together enough money to buy a car, maybe put a deposit down on a modest flat and will be climbing the rungs of the career ladder. That is unless you're Dustin Moskovitz, the youngest billionaire in the world.

The 26-year-old from Washington DC has a net worth of $2.7bn, mainly through his co-founding stake in Facebook. This makes him the youngest member of the annualForbes billionaires list, published today.

Eight days the junior of his former Harvard peer and chief executive of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, made most of his wealth through his stake in the social networking site, according to Forbes. Moscovitz co-founded Facebook and was the firm's first chief technology officer.

Moskovitz parted ways with Zuckerberg in 2008 to set up his own networking firm, Asana. He did this with Justin Rosenstein, an engineering manager at Facebook who had formerly worked at Google.

Last month Moskovitz and Rosenstein launched Asana, a software application designed to improve the way people collaborate in groups and manage projects.

Most of the1,210 billionaires on Forbes Rich List are in their sixties. Billionaires in the US are the oldest with an average age of 66, followed by the Americas, 65, and the Middle East and Africa, 60. The average age is 59 in the Europe and Asia Pacific regions.

But billionaires are getting younger. This year there are 20 billionaires under the age of 40, compared with just eight in last year's list.

The second youngest is Moscovitz' former colleague Zuckerberg, who was 2010's biggest percentage gainer. His net worth jumped to $13.5bn, up from $6.9bn, making him worth nearly five times as much as Moskovitz.

The world's oldest billionaire is Swiss tech entrepreneur Walter Haefner, who is 100 and worth $4bn.