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New Orleans Saints owner Tom Benson is the only Louisiana resident to make the Forbes list of the world's 1,426 billionaires, unveiled on Monday. With an estimated net worth of $1.2 billion, Benson, who also now owns the Hornets, soon-to-be Pelicans National Basketball Association team along with car dealerships, real estate including the Benson Tower next to the Mercedes-Benz Superdome and the Fox television affiliate WVUE-Channel 8, ranks 1,175 in the world and 377 of the 442 billionaires in the United States.

The Forbes article said the United States has the most billionaires, although the richest man in the world for the fourth consecutive year is Mexico's Carlos Slim Helu and his family, worth $73 billion. Helu owns telecommunications, industrial, retail, finance and real estate companies. Microsoft founder Bill Gates is second with $67 billion. Forbes says famed investor Warren Buffet dropped out of the top three for the first time since 2000, despite increasing wealth totaling $53.5 billion, with Spanish retail owner Amancio Ortega moving into third place at $57 billion.

The brief profile of Benson in the magazine's annual billionaires list notes that in addition to his other local holdings, Benson, as a "loyal New Orleans resident," offered last year to buy The Times-Picayune in the wake of the decision by the newspaper's ownership to reduce the print edition to three days a week and reorganize into a more Internet-oriented company.

Two members of the Newhouse family business that owns the newspaper and NOLA.com also made the billionaire list: Samuel "S.I." Newhouse Jr. with $8.1 billion and Donald Newhouse with $7.3 billion. Donald Newhouse leads the Advance Publications newspaper division, and New Orleans played a role in the Forbes profile of him, which said, "In the face of continued pressures on the newspaper industry Advance began to reduce the number of print editions published each week for a number of their papers. In October 2012 the Times-Picayune reduced its schedule to three printed issues a week, making New Orleans the largest American city without a daily paper."

Forbes also noted that Benson, 85, has a 122-foot yacht, a 2,500-acre ranch in Texas and charitable causes including the $20 million Tom and Gayle Benson Cancer Center at Ochsner Medical Center.

Benson makes Forbes billionaire list with $1.2 billion fortune | NOLA.com

"A Veteran is someone who, at one point in his life, wrote a blank check made payable to "The United States of America" for an amount of "up to and including my life."