Elon Musk is the planet’s richest person by far, worth $839 billion as of Forbes’ annual World’s Billionaires list. He also ranks among the least philanthropic billionaires. Sure, Musk has transferred $8.5 billion of Tesla stock to his charitable foundations (1% of his net worth)—but nearly all of it is still sitting there idle. Only an estimated $500 million, or 0.06% of Musk’s vast fortune, has ever been disbursed to those in need.
His lack of giving raises a question: What would our billionaires ranking look like if the world’s most generous people—such as Warren Buffett (who has donated more than half of his Berkshire Hathaway stock so far) and Bill Gates (who has moved, alongside his ex-wife Melinda French Gates, more than $60 billion into the Gates Foundation)—had never donated a dollar to charity? To find the answer, we adjusted the net worths of the planet’s most generous billionaires, assuming they kept any shares they’ve given away and that cash gifts were instead invested at market rates of return.
The result: our True Net Worth ranking, detailed by Forbes chief content officer Randall Lane in a recent TED Talk.
Musk, by the simple virtue of being so much richer than everyone else, still holds the No. 1 spot when measured by True Net Worth. But he loses serious ground to his more charitable contemporaries. Gates has given away an estimated 731 million shares of Microsoft. If he had instead held onto the stock, which has soared nearly sevenfold since the Gates Foundation launched in 2000, and if he kept all his cash donations for himself, he would be four times richer than he is today—and would rank as the world’s second-richest person, instead of No. 19. Buffett would similarly leap into the top five, from No. 9 to No. 3, if he never parted with any of his Berkshire Hathaway shares, which have risen by 700% since he started donating major blocks of them in 2006.
Others would jump even more ranks up the billionaires list—including MacKenzie Scott, who climbs 58 rungs when adding back her immense charitable giving, to No. 26. Meanwhile, her ex-husband Jeff Bezos, who has given far less to charity, drops out of the planet’s top five in our rerank.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
#1. Elon Musk
ADJUSTED NET WORTH: $858 bil (+$19 bil from current net worth)
GIVING FOCUS: STEM, health
Musk made nearly all of his $8.5 billion of Tesla stock donations to his Musk Foundation during the 13 months through December 2024. Those tax-deductible gifts likely helped reduce the amount he owed the IRS after selling $39 billion of Tesla stock around that time, mostly to finance his $44 billion Twitter acquisition. The Musk Foundation is still sitting on much of that money, failing in several years to pay out even 5% of its assets annually as required by federal law. The foundation has transferred at least $600 million to another foundation Musk set up in 2022, called The X Foundation, with a stated mission to fund a new STEM-focused “independent primary and secondary school and, ultimately, a university” near SpaceX’s manufacturing facility in Bastrop, Texas.
Todd Owyoung/NBC/Getty Images
#2. Bill Gates
ADJUSTED NET WORTH: $464 bil (+$356 bil)
GIVING FOCUS: Health, poverty alleviation
Gates and his billionaire ex-wife Melinda French Gates have poured $60 billion into the Gates Foundation since its founding in 2000, including Microsoft stock that would be worth an estimated $287 billion today. Counting those shares, and other cash gifts he has made, adds more wealth to his fortune than any other billionaire besides Musk has amassed, even in True Net Worth terms. Gates donated $12.5 billion to women’s empowerment groups set up by 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. Bill and Melinda famously teamed up with Warren Buffett in 2010 to found the Giving Pledge, encouraging signers to publicly commit to donating the bulk of their fortunes to charity. In March, billionaire Peter Thiel told the New York Times he’s been counseling billionaires not to participate or to remove their names.
#3. Warren Buffett
ADJUSTED NET WORTH: $363 bil (+$214 bil)
GIVING FOCUS: Health, poverty alleviation
In 2006, the legendary investor announced he would give away nearly all of his fortune. In the two decades since, he has donated more than 278,000 class A shares of his conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway—worth some $200 billion if he still held them. The stock has mainly gone to the Gates Foundation, three charities run by Buffett’s three children and a foundation named for his late wife. His will stipulates that virtually all of what’s left when he dies must be given away within ten years.
#4. Larry Page
ADJUSTED NET WORTH: $284 bil (+$27 bil)
GIVING FOCUS: Climate change, health
The Google cofounder has stuffed stock into his Carl Victor Page Memorial Foundation that would be worth more than $23 billion today if he still held it. The organization, which is named for his father, is sitting on more than $7 billion in assets after doling out nearly $2 billion, almost entirely through opaque donor-advised funds that don’t have minimum distribution requirements or report how much they have actually given to those in need, keeping Page off Forbes’ list of America’s largest philanthropists.
Taylor Hill/FilmMagic/Getty Images
#5. Sergey Brin
ADJUSTED NET WORTH: $278 bil (+$41 bil)
GIVING FOCUS: Parkinson’s, climate change
Brin has moved an estimated 131 million shares of Google parent-company Alphabet into charitable vehicles, including his Sergey Brin Foundation. Some $5 billion has already gone out the door, including more than $2 billion to support research into Parkinson’s disease, which his late mother had. He also gave $345 million to climate change nonprofits last year and is taking on autism in his latest effort to direct most of his giving to conditions affecting the central nervous system.
Dias Dipasupil/Getty Images
MacKenzie Scott
ADJUSTED NET WORTH: $82.8 bil (+$28.6 bil)
RANK: #26 (vs. #84)
No one has ever given away money as quickly as Scott. Instead of sitting on the 4% stake in Amazon she got in her 2019 divorce from Jeff Bezos, she has already dispensed more than three-quarters of it. In all, she has given over $26 billion to 2,500-plus groups—and she vows to “keep at it until the safe is empty.” Had she held onto it, she’d be among the world’s 30 richest people.
Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images
Dustin Moskovitz
ADJUSTED NET WORTH: $35.9 bil (+$10.3 bil)
RANK: #64 (vs. #316)
The Asana and Facebook cofounder has been dumping shares into philanthropy for years to help fund causes such as malaria prevention and AI safety. Last year he donated his early investment in AI giant Anthropic: an estimated stake of less than 0.8% that has already skyrocketed in value amid the AI boom.
Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP
Reed Hastings
ADJUSTED NET WORTH: $20.5 bil (+$5.3 bil)
RANK: #131 (vs. #806)
A teacher while serving in the Peace Corps, the Netflix cofounder has gifted more than a quarter of his stock in the streaming service. A longtime education supporter, he has donated an estimated $2.2 billion to nonprofits, including $120 million to HBCUs in 2020 and $50 million to his alma mater, Bowdoin College, in 2025. He announced last week that he will step down from Netflix’s board in June, partly to focus on philanthropy.
Lynn Schusterman
ADJUSTED NET WORTH: $15.8 bil (+$4.4 bil)
RANK: #188 (vs. #972)
The widow of oil-and-gas magnate Charles Schusterman (d. 2000) and her family stashed $2.3 billion in their foundation in 2011, upon the sale of their Samson Resources to KKR. Now they dole out more than $300 million per year to Jewish causes, criminal justice reform and supporting their hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
John Arnold
ADJUSTED NET WORTH: $12.8 bil (+$2.8 bil)
RANK: #239 (vs. #1504)
The former hedge funder quit managing money for others in 2012 to become a full- time philanthropist. He and his wife Laura’s Arnold Ventures, which employs 100 subject-matter experts, has pumped more than $2.3 billion into reforms of the criminal justice, health care and higher education systems.
