The planet added roughly one new billionaire per day over the past year, as AI mania, sizzling markets and a pro-billionaire American president helped propel the three-comma club to unprecedented heights. There are now records throughout: We found 3,428 billionaires across the globe this year, a record and 400 more than last year. As a group, they’re worth $20.1 trillion, another record, $4 trillion more than in 2025. The world’s richest person’s fortune is also a record, having amassed more wealth in a single year than anyone else has in a lifetime. There’s the youngest self-made billionaire ever (a 22-year-old AI whiz) and a new youngest self-made woman billionaire (a 29-year-old former ballerina turned prediction-markets pioneer). The US has the most 10-figure (or more) fortunes at a record 989, followed by China (including Hong Kong) with 674 and India with 229. The average billionaire’s net worth is now $5.3 billion, up from $5.3 billion in 2025. Forbes used stock prices and exchange rates from March 1.
A record 20 people now boast dozen-digit fortunes, up from 15 last year. Five of them, up from three, are worth more than $200 billion. In all, these 20 centibillionaires are worth $3.8 trillion, more than the world’s 2,082 “poorest” billionaires combined.
The richest person in history may have failed to contain government waste as America’s short-lived DOGE chief, but he has managed to make his wallet a lot fatter over the past year. Musk raced through a series of net worth milestones, hitting $500 billion in October, $600 billion and then $700 billion within four days in December, before peaking at $857 billion in February. Tesla stock soared 53 percent over the past year, and he merged SpaceX with his AI and social media outfit xAI at a $1.3 trillion valuation. In all, he added an unprecedented $497 billion to his fortune in 12 months. With plans to take SpaceX public later this year, Musk could become the world’s first trillionaire.
2. Larry Page
$257 bn • Google • US
3. Sergey Brin
$237 bn • Google • US
Thanks to the success of Gemini 3 AI chatbot and an antitrust ruling that parent company Alphabet doesn’t have to sell its Chrome browser or Android operating system, the Google guys are wealthier than ever, up a combined $212 billion this year. Page, who is reportedly working on a new AI startup called Dynatomics, spent $174 million on two Florida homes in December and January, likely to escape California’s proposed billionaire tax. Brin, who is back helping Alphabet with AI strategy after retiring as company president in 2019, also purchased several new homes in recent months, including one in Miami Beach and another on Lake Tahoe.
4. Jeff Bezos
$224 bn • Amazon • US
The Amazon founder tied the knot with Lauren Sánchez in an extravagant three-day ceremony in Venice last June that cost an estimated $20 million. Guests included Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Tom Brady and the Kardashians. Meanwhile, Bezos’ aerospace company, Blue Origin, conducted two successful launches of its New Glenn rocket in 2025, marking a step forward in its battle to catch up to Musk’s SpaceX. Amid all this spending, Bezos cut about 30 percent of the Washington Post’s workforce in February, significantly reducing his newspaper’s sports and international coverage.
5. Mark Zuckerberg
$222 bn • Facebook • US
In March, the longtime Californian became the latest billionaire to buy in Florida, purchasing a mansion on Miami’s Indian Creek Island for $170 million. That same month, Zuckerberg posted a selfie with Facebook parent company Meta’s new chief AI officer, Alex Wang (estimated net worth $3.2 billion), in an apparent effort to quash reports that Meta’s relationship has become strained since Meta acquired 49 percent of Wang’s Scale AI for about $14 billion last June. Meta spent some $70 billion on servers, data centres and network infrastructure related to AI last year and announced plans to spend up to $135 billion on similar efforts in 2026.
6. Larry Ellison
$190 bn • Oracle • US
Ellison briefly became the world’s second-richest person, worth $400 billion, in September, as Oracle shareholders celebrated and then soured on the company’s debt-fuelled AI spending plans. After the dust settled, the stock closed 0 percent lower than last year, pushing Ellison down two spots this year. In January, Oracle took a 15 percent stake in TikTok’s US operations and signed on to be social media spin-off’s tech provider. Meanwhile, the Trump ally, who is now a Florida resident, is using his fortune to back his son David’s media ambitions. First he bankrolled the $28 billion merger of David’s Skydance Media with Paramount in August. Now the Ellison-controlled Paramount Skydance is set to acquire Warner Bros for $110 billion after winning a bidding war against Netflix.
7. Bernard Arnault & Family
$171 bn • LVMH • France
The chairman, CEO and largest shareholder of luxury goods conglomerate LVMH is the biggest loser among the top 20 this year, as his fortune fell by $7 billion amid a global slump in demand for the finer things in life. At least the 77-year-old has time to right the ship. In April, more than 99 percent of LVMH shareholders voted to raise Arnault’s mandatory retirement age by five years, to 85. In September, he tapped a pair of LVMH executives to run soccer club Paris FC, which he took over as controlling owner in 2024.
8. Jensen Huang
$154 bn • Nvidia • US
Huang joins the list’s $100 billion club, and the world’s top 10, for the first time thanks to a 57 percent run-up in shares of AI darling Nvidia, which he dreamt up in a California Denny’s restaurant in 1993. The chipmaking giant became the first company to boast a $5 trillion market cap in October, before giving back some of its gains, and has been on a dealmaking spree over the past several months, investing $30 billion in OpenAI, up to $10 billion in Anthropic and around $20 billion to effectively acquire AI chip startup Groq.
9. Warren Buffett
$149 bn • Berkshire Hathaway • US
The 95-year-old Oracle of Omaha retired as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway at the end of 2025, with the company’s stock trading near all-time highs. Over his legendary six-decade career, Buffett turned a small, struggling textile firm trading at less than $15 per share into a sprawling conglomerate with a stock price north of $750,000, a return of roughly 6,000,000 percent, trouncing the S&P’s 46,000 percent gain over the same period. Buffett remains chairman of the company that owns Geico, Duracell and Dairy Queen, which is now run by his hand-picked successor, Greg Abel, also now a billionaire. Buffett continues to donate billions worth of Berkshire shares to the Gates Foundation and Buffett family charities every year.
10. Amancio Ortega
$148 bn • Zara • Spain
The big dividend cheques just keep coming for the founder and majority shareholder of Inditex, parent company of fast-fashion giant Zara. Ortega brought home his largest haul to date in 2025, raking in $3 billion before taxes. He’s also one of the biggest real estate barons on Earth, ploughing his profits into a sprawling property empire, acquiring Miami’s Sabadell Financial Centre for $274 million in September and Vancouver’s iconic Canada Post office building for $860 million in November.
11. Rob Walton & Family
$146 bn • Walmart • US
12. Jim Walton & Family
$143 bn • Walmart • US
Walmart became the first brick-and-mortar retailer to hit a $1 trillion market cap in February, as its shares soared by 40 percent over the past 12 months, helping boost the fortunes of the sons of founder Sam Walton. Jim chairs the family’s $26 billion asset management group. Rob owns the NFL’s Denver Broncos alongside his daughter and son-in-law, and is reported to have bought a 10 percent stake in MLB’s Arizona Diamondbacks two years ago. Rob also announced a $15 million gift in September to help establish a school of conservation science at Arizona State University.
13. Michael Dell
$141 bn • Dell Technologies • US
Dell got $42.3 billion richer over the year as shares of Dell Technologies and Broadcom (which acquired Dell Technologies’ cloud software arm, VMware, in 2023) increased by 62 percent and 64 percent, respectively. In December, Dell and his wife committed more than $6 billion to seed 25 million investment accounts with $250 dubbed “Trump Accounts” for lower-income children as part of the president’s Invest America initiative, which kicks off July 4.
14. Alice Walton
$134 bn • Walmart • US
The only daughter of Walmart’s founder, and the world’s richest woman, used at least $250 million of her fortune to fund the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine in her family’s hometown, Bentonville, Arkansas. The school welcomed its inaugural class of 48 four-year MD students in July. In December, she agreed to lend the city of Bentonville $239 million to upgrade its sewers.
15. Steve Ballmer
$126 bn • Microsoft • US
Microsoft’s tepid stock performance has been the past year’s bane, at least from its former CEO’s worries. Ballmer has come under scrutiny for his $60 million investment in Aspiration, a failed fintech startup which proceeded to sign a $28 million endorsement deal with Kawhi Leonard, the star of Ballmer’s Los Angeles Clippers. The NBA is investigating allegations of salary-cap circumvention by Ballmer and the franchise, who have denied any wrongdoing. Meanwhile, the team is worth $7.4 billion net of debt, according to Forbes’ estimates, up $2 billion from last year and nearly four times the $2 billion Ballmer paid for it in 2014.
16. Carlos Slim Helú & Family
$125 bn • Telecom • Mexico
The Mexican mogul is $42.5 billion wealthier this year, as shares of his telecom giant, América Móvil, rose by 78 percent. Slim’s Grupo Carso conglomerate also inked several big deals, including a $2 billion contract with the Mexican state-owned oil company, Pemex, in September and the $600 million acquisition of Russian oil giant Lukoil’s Mexican assets in January.
17. Changpeng Zhao
$110 bn • Binance • Canada
A year and a half ago, CZ, as he’s known, had just finished serving a four-month federal prison sentence for failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering programme at Binance, the cryptocurrency exchange giant he founded and ran as CEO until November 2023. Then, last March, Abu Dhabi state-backed investment firm MGX invested $2 billion in Binance, funded with USD1, a dollar-pegged stablecoin issued by a company partly owned by Donald Trump. Seven months later, Trump granted CZ a full pardon, despite claiming to have “no idea who he is”. Forbes estimates CZ owns around 90 percent of Binance and the vast majority of its $83 billion market cap BNB tokens, making him the first crypto mogul to crack the top 20.
18. Michael Bloomberg
$109 bn • Bloomberg LP • US
The co-founder of financial information and media giant Bloomberg LP and former mayor of New York City donated more than $500 million to the country’s four historically Black medical schools in 2025 and earmarked another $10 million to establish charter schools in partnership with HBCUs. In November, he announced a $100 million effort to monitor and cut methane emissions. In January, he penned an opinion piece saying “the White House’s latest escalation of pressure on the Federal Reserve is new and dangerous overreach”.
19. Bill Gates
$108 bn • Microsoft • US
Gates donated $12.5 billion to women’s empowerment groups set up by his ex-wife, Melinda French Gates, after she resigned from their Gates Foundation in 2024. In May, he announced that the Gates Foundation will spend $200 billion and shut down by 2045. Meanwhile, he has been embroiled in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, denying that he did or saw anything illicit but reportedly apologising to the staff of his foundation in February for what he called the “mistake” of associating with the late convicted sex offender.
20. Françoise Bettencourt Meyers & Family
$100 bn • L’Oréal • France
After briefly becoming the first female centibillionaire in 2024, the granddaughter of L’Oréal’s founder returns to the $100 billion club, as the cosmetics conglomerate’s stock climbed by 11 percent this past year. Revenue grew 1 percent, to nearly $52 billion, powered by strong sales in its two largest markets, the US and China. Bettencourt Meyers retired from L’Oréal’s board last April after 28 years as a director, including five as vice chair. Her son Jean-Victor Meyers assumed the latter role.
