The wealth of the worlds five richest men more than doubled since 2020 CNN Business

In the Middle East, the top 1% holds 48% of the financial wealth, while in Europe, it’s 47%. Elon Musk, who runs several companies, including Tesla and SpaceX, was the big winner in recent years. His wealth soared to $245.5 billion at the end of November, up 737% from March 2020, after accounting for inflation. At the same time, nearly 5 billion people globally have become poorer, as they contend with inflation, war and the climate crisis. It would take nearly 230 years to eliminate poverty based on the current trajectory. Larry Ellison currently has a personal fortune of $134.9 billion, according to Forbes, down from $145.5 in November 2023.

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Buffett created the Giving Pledge with Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates in 2010, asking billionaires to commit to give away at least half their fortune to charitable groups. So far he’s give more than $60 billion of Berkshire Hathaway stock to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and foundations run by his children and one started by his late first wife. Page cofounded search engine Google with fellow Stanford accounting PhD student Sergey Brin in 1998 and served as CEO until 2001 and from 2011 to 2015.

Annual rankings

• Musk was also the world’s richest person for most of 2022—until December 2022, when a drop in Tesla’s share price pushed down the value of his fortune.
• Their combined worth equals $14.2 trillion — up by $2 trillion in 2023.
• The wealth of the top ten on the rich list grew more than $500 billion in 2024, with their combined net worth just over $2 trillion at the end of the year.
• Oracle has acquired numerous large companies over its history, such as Sun Microsystems and Cerner.
• The SpaceX founder’s property portfolio is a picture of restraint and thriftiness – unlike the other men in the top five, from LVMH boss Bernard Arnault to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

For many, though, the hope of improving their financial position appears to be slipping further away, with 4.8 billion people poorer than they were in 2019 before the pandemic, according to Oxfam. The U.S. appears to be making some headway in improving workers’ wages. In the third quarter of 2023, weekly wages rose 4.5% compared to the Accounting for Churches same time the year before, while inflation only rose 3.5%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest available data.

• Overall, billionaires have seen their wealth grow by $3.3 trillion, or 34%, since 2020, with their fortunes expanding three times faster than the rate of inflation, according to Oxfam.
• Often, these billionaires are founders of enterprise giants and multinational companies, with much of their wealth coming from the companies that they started.
• An engineer by training, Arnault first showed his business acumen while working for his father’s construction firm, Ferret-Savinel, taking charge of the company in 1971.
• It has grown to be the world’s largest social network, with several billion users globally.
• Sergey Brin was born in Moscow, Russia, moving to the U.S. with his family when he was six in 1979.
• In late November the Department of Justice said Google should sell its Chrome browser in order to reduce the company’s dominance online.

The world’s leading billionaires as of July 2024, based on net worth

More recently, Berkshire Hathaway has invested in large, well-known companies. Its portfolio of wholly owned subsidiaries includes interests in insurance, energy distribution, and railroads as well as consumer products. Sergey Brin was born in Moscow, Russia, moving to the U.S. with his family when he was six in 1979. After co-founding Google with Larry Page in 1998, Brin became Google’s president of technology when Eric Schmidt took over as CEO in 2001. He held who are the five richest people in the world the same post at the Alphabet holding company after it was established in 2015, stepping down in 2019 when Sundar Pichai took over as CEO.

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Here are the 10 richest people on earth as of January 1, 2025 at 12 a.m. Stock prices fluctuate routinely, so these net worths may change on a daily basis. Forbes tracks the daily changes on our Real Time list of billionaires. Gates became the first American to take the top spot of the world’s billionaires in 1995 with a net worth of $12.5 billion, and he remained there during the dot-com bubble’s height in 1999 when his fortune peaked at $90 billion. After the dot-com bubble started to collapse in 2000, his wealth dropped to $60 billion, although he remained at the top of the list. The French businessman has served as CEO of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the world’s largest luxury group, since becoming the majority shareholder in 1989.