Published on
June 1, 2026
Two notable faces rejoin the planet’s top 10 as the richest person in history nears an incredible wealth record.
Elon Musk is the richest person in the world, a title he’s held since May 2024.
Larry Page Is now worth more than $300 billion, and is only the third person, including Musk and Larry Ellison, ever to be worth that much.
Steve Ballmer rejoins the top ten after jumping from No. 15 in May to No. 10 as of June 1.
Bill Gates dropped out of the top 10 richest in October 2024 after Forbes obtained new information that led to a significant contraction in his fortune.
9 of the 10 richest people in the world are Americans. The one non-U.S. citizen: France’s Bernard Arnault.
All of the top ten richest people as of June 1 are men. Each of them is worth $141 billion or more, down from $147 billion last month.
May was a good month to be a billionaire, as the S&P 500 and Nasdaq climbed by 5% and 8%, respectively, boosting the fortunes of the world’s ten richest people to $2.9 trillion combined as of June 1 at 12 a.m. Eastern time. As a group, they’re $220 billion richer than they were a month ago.
No one had a better May than Larry Ellison, who is back in the top five after adding a staggering $71 billion to his fortune (which is now an estimated $276 billion). For that, Ellison can thank red-hot demand for AI. The software giant he cofounded and runs as chairman and chief technology officer is building multiple gigawatt-scale data centers across the U.S. and, on May 1, announced an agreement with the U.S. Department of War to deploy its AI tools on classified networks for government warfighting, intelligence and enterprise operations. Oracle stock, of which Ellison owns around 40%, climbed 40% in May.
Hot on Ellison’s heels is Michael Dell, the month’s second-biggest gainer after adding $67 billion as the AI boom continues to lift his Dell Technologies, too. The tech giant reported banner earnings on May 28, smashing expectations and disclosing a 757% year-over-year surge in annual AI server revenue—helping drive the stock up 33%, its best trading day ever. In all, Dell stock jumped more than 100% in May. Both Ellison and Dell edge past Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, who drops to No. 7—despite getting $7 billion richer, as shares of the Facebook parent company climbed just 3%, underperforming the broader market and Zuck’s billionaire competitors amid huge AI capital expenditures and employee layoffs at Meta.
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Elon Musk, meanwhile, added $53 billion to his already-historic fortune in May, third best among billionaires. Musk is now worth an estimated $835 billion. Shares of his electric vehicle giant Tesla rose 14% last month, but it’s his rocket and satellite business SpaceX that has really caught investor attention. The company filed paperwork to go public last month, setting up what may become the biggest IPO of all time. The company is said to be targeting a $1.8 trillion valuation, slightly lower than what was initially sought but enough to break Saudi Aramco’s 2019 record—and likely push Musk’s personal fortune into 13 figures. Shares are expected to begin trading as early as June 12, meaning June 2026 could become the month the world gains its first trillionaire.
The Waltons’ fall made way for two others to return to the top ten in May. Bernard Arnault, the French tycoon (who fell out of the top ten for the first time in three years in April) moves up to number nine after a 4% rebound in shares of luxury goods giant LVMH. Steve Ballmer, meanwhile, elbows his way back into the ranks after dropping out in February, taking the No. 10 spot amid a 10% jump in Microsoft stock.
Forbes has been tracking the world’s billionaires since 1987. In March 2026, we found 3,428 of them for our annual list. Below are the 10 richest people on earth as of June 1, 2026 at 12 a.m. Eastern time, according to Forbes. Stock prices fluctuate routinely, so these net worths typically change on a daily basis. Forbes tracks the daily changes on our Real-Time Billionaires list.
Who are the top 10 richest people in the world?*
1. Elon Musk
2. Larry Page
3. Sergey Brin
4. Jeff Bezos
5. Larry Ellison (up from No. 6)
6. Michael Dell (up from No. 7)
7. Mark Zuckerberg (down from No. 5)
8. Jensen Huang
9. Bernard Arnault (up from No. 11) 10. Steve Ballmer (up from No. 15)
*As of June 1, 2026 at 12 a.m. ET. Ranking changes since last month are in parenthesis.
1. Elon Musk
Net worth: $835 billion (up $53 billion since last month)
Source: SpaceX, Tesla
Age: 54
Residence: Austin, Texas
Citizenship: U.S.
On February 3, Elon Musk became the first person ever worth $800 billion or more after his rocket maker SpaceX acquired his artificial intelligence and social media company xAI, in a deal that valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion. Forbes estimates that Musk now owns a 40% stake in the combined company worth $500 billion. By far his most valuable asset, SpaceX, which he heads as CEO, is planning an IPO as soon as mid June.
On November 6, Tesla shareholders approved a record-breaking pay package that could give Musk up to $1 trillion in additional stock (before taxes and the cost of unlocking the restricted shares) if Tesla achieves “Mars shot” performance milestones like growing its market cap more than eightfold over the next 10 years. Musk owns about 12% of Tesla’s stock (excluding options) and has pledged some of his shares as collateral for loans. On December 19, the Delaware Supreme Court restored Musk’s Tesla stock options, which were voided by a lower court in 2024.
Originally from South Africa, Musk moved to Canada before his 18th birthday, worked a variety of jobs, enrolled at Queen’s University in Ontario and then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics.
In 2000, he merged an online bank he cofounded, X.com, with a similar outfit cofounded by Peter Thiel to form PayPal, which eBay bought in 2002 for $1.4 billion. He founded SpaceX in 2002 in El Segundo, near Los Angeles. In 2004 he joined Tesla as an investor and chairman, a year after it was founded; he was later granted the cofounder title. Musk, who became CEO of Tesla in 2008, took the company public in 2010. Musk famously cofounded OpenAI with Sam Altman as a nonprofit in 2015 but he left the organization’s board three years later following a failed power grab. More recently, Musk and OpenAI have been battling in court over whether Musk is entitled to compensation for his contributions to OpenAI when it was still a nonprofit. The suit was thrown out on procedural grounds in May, though Musk is likely to appeal.
Musk first became the world’s richest person in September 2021 and was the world’s richest person for most of 2022—before falling from the top spot in December 2022. Musk became the world’s richest person again on June 8, 2023 and held onto the number one spot for the remainder of 2023. He fell to No. 2 on January 31, 2024. Musk became the world’s richest person yet again in late May 2024 and has held onto the top spot ever since. In October, he became the first person ever worth $500 billion. In December, he crossed both the $600 billion and $700 billion marks. In February, his net worth passed $800 billion.
2. Larry Page
Net worth: $309 billion (down $4 billion since last month)
Source: Google
Age: 53
Residence: Palo Alto, California
Citizenship: U.S.
Page has come a long way to take the titles of the second-richest person on the planet and the third ever person worth at least $300 billion. When Forbes locked in the 2025 World’s Billionaires List last March, he ranked No. 7, with an estimated $144 billion fortune. A decade ago, he ranked No. 19.
Page cofounded search engine Google with fellow Stanford Ph.D student Sergey Brin in 1998 and served as CEO until 2001 and from 2011 to 2015. Page now serves as a board member of Google’s parent company Alphabet and continues to be a controlling shareholder. He is reportedly working on a new AI startup called Dynatomics that is focused on product manufacturing.
In late 2024, the Department of Justice said Google should sell its Chrome browser in order to reduce the company’s dominance online. In response, Google said in a statement that such a move would hurt consumers and America’s technological leadership. The decision may have been one reason that Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai attended Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2025. In the biggest antitrust case in decades, a federal judge ruled in September 2025 that Google does not have to sell Chrome.
Page was a founding investor in asteroid mining company Planetary Resources, which was acquired by blockchain firm ConsenSys in 2018. He recently bought a home in Florida, apparently in response to California’s threat to tax billionaires’ wealth.
3. Sergey Brin
Net worth: $285 billion (down $4 billion since last month)
Source: Google
Age: 52
Residence: Los Altos, California
Citizenship: U.S.
While Page keeps a notoriously low profile, Brin is back helping Alphabet with AI strategy. He first came out of semi-retirement to submit changes to Google’s Gemini AI chatbot in 2024 and was listed as a “core contributor” when the model was released in December of that year. Like his cofounder, Brin currently serves as a board member of Google’s parent company Alphabet and is a controlling shareholder. In late November, Brin reported gifting $1.1 billion of Alphabet stock, almost all of it to his nonprofit Catalyst4, which focuses on conditions of the central nervous system and climate change. Brin, who reportedly bought homes in Malibu and on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe, is apparently backing a California nonprofit that’s working to make housing more affordable, as the state weighs the idea of a new wealth tax on the uber-rich.
4. Jeff Bezos
Net worth: $277 billion (up $5 billion since last month)
Source: Amazon
Age: 62
Residence: Miami, Florida
Citizenship: U.S.
In a wide-ranging interview in May, the Amazon founder sounded off on taxes, including arguing that the bottom half of wage earners should not pay taxes at all, and unveiled scant details of a new AI startup called Project Prometheus. Bezos is co-CEO of the company, an “artificial general engineer” that will “make it much easier for engineers to design physical objects.” It reportedly closed a funding round at a $38 billion valuation earlier this year. It’s his first operational role since retiring as Amazon’s CEO in July 2021.
Bezos created the e-commerce giant in 1994 and remains executive chairman. The same month he retired as chief executive, he traveled to space on a rocket built by private rocket company Blue Origin, which he founded and has funded with billions of dollars. (Blue Origin briefly sent an all-female crew to space in the spring of 2025—including pop star Katy Perry, CBS Mornings co-host Gayle King and Bezos’ second wife, Lauren Sanchez.)
Before founding Amazon.com in his Seattle garage, Bezos worked at McDonald’s as a teen, graduated from Princeton and took a job in New York at hedge fund D.E. Shaw. Amazon began as an online bookseller at a time when few people bought goods online. The company also grew to dominate cloud storage and moved into movie and series production to feed Amazon Prime Video.
Bezos was the world’s richest person on Forbes’ annual World’s Billionaires list from 2018 through 2021; he dropped to second richest on the 2022 ranking, No. 3 on the list from 2023 through 2025, and No. 4 on the 2026 ranking.
In 2019, Bezos and his wife MacKenzie divorced; as part of the settlement, she got 4% of Amazon’s shares and he kept 12%. He has since sold and given away more of his stake and owns 8% of the company. Since Amazon went public in 1997, Forbes calculates that Bezos has sold more than $49 billion worth of his stock. Through his Bezos Expeditions, he has invested in an array of companies, including Airbnb and software firm Workday.
5. Larry Ellison
Net worth: $276 billion (up $71 billion since last month)
Source: Oracle
Age: 81
Residence: Manalapan, Florida
Citizenship: U.S.
Last August, Larry Ellison teamed up with his son David to help pull off the merger of Paramount and David’s Skydance Media. Now the father-son team are making a much bigger gamble with Paramount’s $111 billion offer to buy media giant Warner Bros Discovery. If regulators clear the deal, one of the largest mergers in history will hand the Ellisons unprecedented sway over American media—CBS and CNN under one roof, HBO Max and Paramount+ fused, and Warner Bros. and Paramount Pictures sharing a parent. That’s on top of the tech and real estate empire the elder Ellison—Oracle’s cofounder, chairman and chief technology officer, and President Donald Trump’s new neighbor—already controls.
A longtime California resident who also owns the Hawaiian island Lanai (assessed at more than $1 billion), Ellison is now an official resident of Manalapan, Florida, roughly a 20-minute drive from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago.
Despite all the hype around his dealmaking and Trump ties, Ellison still gets a huge part of his fortune from Oracle, the software company he cofounded in 1977. Oracle was part of a consortium that bought TikTok’s U.S. business in a deal valuing the company at $14 billion in January. In mid-September, Ellison was briefly the second ever person worth $400 billion, and was within $40 billion of Musk, thanks to Oracle’s rosy revenue projections for its cloud infrastructure business (mostly to power AI) that pushed shares up 36% in a single day. Oracle shares have since slid by more than 30%, even with the recent runup.
6. Michael Dell
Net worth: $244 billion (up $67 billion since last month)
Source: Dell Technologies
Age: 61
Residence: Austin, Texas
Citizenship: United States
Dell got his start at 19 selling computers out of his University of Texas dorm room, grossing $80,000 by the end of his freshman year. Today, he is chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, which was formed in 2016 via Dell’s $60 billion merger with computer storage giant EMC.
He took his namesake company public in 1988, then private (with private equity firm Silver Lake Partners) in 2013, then public again in late 2018, through a complicated financial restructuring. Dell’s cloud software arm, VMware, was spun off in 2021; Microchip firm Broadcom bought it in 2023 for $69 billion, 39% of which went to Dell.
7. Mark Zuckerberg
Net worth: $217 billion (up $7 billion since last month)
Source: Meta (Facebook)
Age: 41
Residence: Palo Alto, California
Citizenship: U.S.
Zuckerberg cofounded Facebook when he was a student at Harvard University in 2004. Now called Meta, it has grown to be the world’s largest social network, with several billion users globally. The company also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, both of which it acquired and greatly expanded. Zuckerberg, who remains CEO, took the company public in 2012 and still owns about 13% of it.
In October, Zuckerberg was in the audience at the Wall Street Journal’s Innovator of the Year Awards, when his wife Priscilla Chan took home the top prize for her role in the couple’s philanthropy focused on curing and presenting diseases–and the singer Billie Eilish asked the crowd, “If you’re a billionaire, why are you a billionaire?” In February, he and Priscilla were pictured in the front row at Prada fashion show in Milan. Meta and Prada are reportedly collaborating to make high-end smart glasses.
8. Jensen Huang
Net worth: $182 billion (up $9 billion since last month)
Source: Semiconductors
Age: 63
Residence: Los Altos, California
Citizenship: U.S.
Huang cofounded Nvidia in 1993 and has served as its CEO and president ever since. He owns approximately 3% of the company, which he took public in 1999. Under Huang, Nvidia’s GPUs became dominant first in computer gaming and now in AI, helping it become the first ever company worth $5 trillion in October.
Born in Taiwan, Huang moved to Thailand as a child, but his family sent him and his brother to the U.S as civil unrest mounted in the Asian nation.
9. Bernard Arnault
Net worth: $148 billion (up $5 billion since last month)
Source: LVMH
Age: 77
Residence: Paris, France
Citizenship: France
Arnault is CEO and chairman of luxury goods group LVMH. His father made millions in the construction business; to get his start, Arnault used $15 million of that fortune to buy Christian Dior. He has since built the largest luxury goods company in the world with some 75 fashion and cosmetics brands, including Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Moet & Chandon, Sephora and jeweler Tiffany & Co.
All five of Arnault’s children work in parts of the LVMH empire. In 2024, Arnault nominated two of his sons—Alexandre and Frédéric—to the board of LVMH; Alexandre was named deputy CEO of LVMH’s wine and spirits division. His daughter Delphine, who runs Dior, and son Antoine, already sit on the board. In 2024, he named son Frédéric as head of LVMH’s family holding group. His youngest son, Jean, is director of watches at Louis Vuitton.
Arnault was the world’s richest person for most of the first half of 2023 and again from February through late May 2024.
10. Steve Ballmer
Net worth: $141 billion (up $11 billion since last month)
Source: Microsoft
Age: 70
Residence: Hunts Point, Washington
Citizenship: United States
A classmate of Bill Gates at Harvard University, Ballmer joined Microsoft as employee number 30 in 1980 after dropping out of the MBA program at Stanford University. He ran Microsoft as its CEO from 2000 to 2014.
When Ballmer retired from Microsoft, he made a couple smart bets. First, he purchased the Los Angeles Clippers for $2 billion—a record high for an NBA team at the time. Forbes now values the franchise at $7.5 billion. (An investigation is currently underway following a report that accused the Clippers of circumventing NBA salary cap rules with a no-show marketing deal between star Kawhi Leonard and a Ballmer-backed company. Ballmer has publicly denied wrongdoing.) His second smart bet: He decided to hold on to the vast majority of his Microsoft stock. Shares have skyrocketed more than 1,000% percent since then.
Who is the richest man in the world?
As of June 1, 2026, the planet’s wealthiest man is Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. He’s worth $835 billion. He moved into the number one spot in late May 2024, overtaking Bernard Arnault of France.
Who is the richest woman in the world?
The planet’s wealthiest woman is Alice Walton, daughter of Walmart founder Sam Walton. As of June 1, 2026, she is worth an estimated $123 billion and is the world’s 15th-richest person, down from No. 13 in May. Her fortune lies in her ownership stake in Walmart, which she inherited from her late father. Her late brother John Walton’s (d. 2005) widow Christy Walton and their son Lukas Walton inherited John’s shares and both rank on Forbes’ billionaires list.
This story was originally published on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
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