TRILLIONS UPON TRILLIONS
THE SUPER-RICH KEEP GETTING SUPER-RICHER. THE COMBINED NET WORTH OF THE PLANET’S BILLIONAIRES HAS SKYROCKETED BY 545% OVER THE PAST TWO DECADES, TO $14.2 TRILLION— QUADRUPLE THE 111% RISE IN WORLD GDP.
There are some things that only money can buy, such as membership in the $100 Billion Club—the elite class of billionaires who have 12-figure fortunes. This year, a record 14 people worldwide qualify. That’s up from six last year and just one in 2020. Many of them struck it rich by starting tech companies.
As a group, the planet’s billionaires are 120% richer than they were a decade ago. But these 14, whose wealth is up 255% over the same stretch, have done much better than the average billionaire. Their net worths have far outpaced inflation (up 32%) and the broader stock market (S&P 500 up 182%), placing them in the company of NFL franchises (up 257%) in terms of skyrocketing value. These 14 are worth $2 trillion in all, meaning just 0.5% of the world’s 2,781 billionaires hold 14% of all billionaire wealth.
It wasn’t long ago that $100,000,000,000 seemed out of reach, even for the billionaire set. In 1987, when Forbes published its first global wealth ranking, we found just two people, both Japanese tycoons, worth more than $10 billion (about $27 billion in today’s dollars, a sum that would rank 69th on the 2024 list).
It took the dot-com bubble to create the first centibillionaire, Bill Gates, whose Microsoft shares briefly pushed him beyond 11 figures in 1999 before the crash chopped his net worth nearly in half. No one would come close for almost two decades, even as markets soared before and after the Great Recession. Jeff Bezos finally cracked the code anew in late 2017, becoming the second $100 billionaire when Amazon rocketed toward $1 trillion in market capitalization. Still, it took until 2021 for the $100 Billion Club to expand beyond Bezos, when Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault and Bill Gates made the grade.
Now, with megawealth surging around the globe, membership is getting more common by the day. A 15th person, L’Oréal heiress Françoise Bettencourt Meyers (worth $99.5 billion), is knocking on the door, with tech mogul Michael Dell ($91 billion) not far behind her. But for the moment, here is the full roster of Earth’s most exclusive club.
1. Bernard Arnault $233 BIL • LVMH • France
The richest person in the world for the second year in a row. Arnault’s wealth grew by 10% in 2023 thanks to another record year for his luxury conglomerate, LVMH, which owns Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior and Sephora. Last year, the fashion giant announced $16.5 billion in net profit on $94 billion in revenue. Arnault cemented his succession plan to keep family control in January, when he proposed adding his sons Alexandre and Frédéric to LVMH’s board, where they would join his two eldest children, Antoine and Delphine.
2. Elon Musk
$195 BIL • Tesla, SpaceX • U.S.
Musk is a long way from November 2021, when he became the first person ever worth $300 billion. Since then, he has gained and lost the “world’s richest” title several times over as his bold bets have either taken flight (SpaceX’s valuation has soared 80% to $180 billion) or fizzled (X, née Twitter, is worth some 70% less than when he bought it in October 2022, and shares of Tesla
have slipped 57% since late 2021). In January, a Delaware judge voided his 2018 award of Tesla stock options, worth $46 billion today. Forbes has discounted the shares by 50% pending Musk’s appeal.
3. Jeff Bezos $194 BIL • Amazon • U.S.
The Amazon founder struck gold this year, in terms of both wealth and sunshine. He’s $80 billion richer, thanks to a 93% jump in his e-commerce leviathan’s stock. Meanwhile, he spent $150 million buying homes on Miami’s “billionaire bunker” island as part of a move to sunny, tax-friendly Florida after three decades in drizzly Seattle.
4. Mark Zuckerberg
$177 BIL • Facebook • U.S.
What a run it’s been for the Meta CEO. After the social media giant’s stock plunged 75% from its 2021 peak, Zuckerberg laid off almost a quarter of its staff while maintaining huge bets on AI and the metaverse. Shares nearly tripled over the past year, making Zuck, at 39, the wealthiest he has ever been.
5. Larry Ellison
$141 BIL • Oracle • U.S.
A decade after stepping down as Oracle’s CEO, Ellison is still chairman, CTO and its largest shareholder, with 40% of the company. Oracle stock is up 34%, and it threw off more than $1 billion (pretax) in dividends to Ellison over the last 12 months, helping make him $34 billion wealthier. His other ventures aren’t faring as well: His stake in X is worth less than a third of the $1 billion he paid for it, and Project Ronin, a cancer software startup he cofounded in 2018, is set to shut down.
6. Warren Buffett
$133 BIL • Berkshire Hathaway • U.S.
Buffett, whose longtime business partner Charlie Munger died at 99 in November, found himself in a rare feud over the past year, locking horns with fellow billionaire Jimmy Haslam over the price of Berkshire Hathaway’s acquisition of Haslam’s truck stop chain, Pilot Travel Centers. The parties settled in January, and Berkshire bought the last 20% of Pilot for $2.6 billion. Shares of Berkshire are at record highs, up 30% from last year.
7. Bill Gates
$128 BIL • Microsoft • U.S.
Despite being nearly the wealthiest he’s ever been, Gates ranks the lowest he has since 1992 thanks to stiff competition at the top, a costly 2021 divorce and the $59 billion he has given to charity. The Microsoft cofounder was the world’s richest person for 18 of the 23 years from 1995 to 2017.
8. Steve Ballmer
$121 BIL • Microsoft • U.S.
The Los Angeles Clippers owner will move his team—the NBA’s fifth-most valuable—to a new stadium this summer: the (privately financed) $2 billion Intuit Dome, near LAX airport. Ballmer’s fortune surged by $40 billion since last year, due in part to the Clippers’ higher value but mostly thanks to soaring Microsoft shares.
9. Mukesh Ambani
$116 BIL • Diversified • India
Ambani became the first Asian member of the $100 Billion Club this year, thanks to the booming shares of his conglomerate, Reliance Industries. In March, he hosted a star-studded three-day gala at a Reliance refining complex to celebrate his youngest son Anant’s upcoming July wedding. Rihanna performed for 1,600 guests, including Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Ivanka Trump.
10. Larry Page
$114 BIL • Google • U.S. 11. Sergey Brin
$110 BIL • Google • U.S.
The Google cofounders are now four years removed from day-to-day operations but remain the tech giant’s biggest individual shareholders. Page has mostly shied from public view, spending time on his five reported private islands, including one in Fiji and another in Puerto Rico. Brin came out of semi-retirement to submit changes to Google’s AI chatbot models last year and was listed as a “core contributor” when Gemini was released in December.
12. Michael Bloomberg
$106 BIL • Bloomberg LP • U.S.
In August, Bloomberg LP appointed Vlad Kliatchko as CEO, its first chief executive since 2014, when Bloomberg returned after three terms as mayor of New York. He is also making long-term plans for his money. Last April, the 82-year-old cofounder of the financial technology and media giant committed to donating his 88% stake to Bloomberg Philanthropies, which funds causes like climate change prevention and public health, before he dies.
13. Amancio Ortega $103 BIL • Zara • Spain
Ortega’s fortune has swelled by $26 billion since last year, pushing his net worth to 12 digits on the back of a 43% jump in shares of his clothing retailer, Inditex, which runs the Zara fast fashion chain. Ortega’s real estate portfolio, which includes logistics, residential and office properties mostly in Europe and North America, is now worth $20 billion and rents to tenants including Apple, Amazon and Walmart.
14. Carlos Slim Helú $102 BIL • Telecom • Mexico
Slim ranked as the richest person in the world from 2010 to 2013, worth $74 billion at his peak. Though there are now 13 others ahead of him, he’s still wealthier than he’s ever been thanks to a surge in the Mexican peso and a 60% jump in share price for his industrial conglomerate, Grupo Carso.