Forbes has included four Indian Americans in its list of richest Americans this year. The elite list includes acoustics pioneer Amar Bose, Google founder director Ram Shriram, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, and Bharat Desai, CEO of an info-tech outsourcing firm.
The 77-year-old, Amar Bose, referred to as the sultan of the sounds, shares the 271st place in the list with Ram Shriram with a net worth of $1.8 billion. Both Bose and Ram Shriram shared the 242nd spot last year, and went down the list this year though their personal fortunes have gone up from $1.5 billion to $1.8 billion.

Bose, an acoustics pioneer, formed his company Bose Corporation 43 years ago, which today thrives on the latest iPod speaker docks, home theatre systems, noise-killing headphones, with a sale of $2 billion.

While 51-year-old Ram Shriram, an India-born financier, is an early investor and a board member of Google and owns 1.7 million shares worth $870 million despite selling over three million shares in 2004, when it went public.

Another NRI Bharat Desai, and his wife Neerja Sethi, founders of the info-tech outsourcing firm Syntel, have been ranked 286th with a fortune of $1.7 billion in the list. While Indian-American venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, who had made his presence in the list almost continuously, this time figured at 317th place with a net worth of $1.5 billion.

The 54-year-old Desai, who was born in Kenya but moved to India at the age of 11, studied engineering at Indian Institute of Technology and took a programming job in the U.S. at Tata Consultancy Services in 1976.

The price of admission to America’s most exclusive club, courtesy Forbes, is now $1.3 billion, instead of one billion.