These are the top 100 richest people in the world as of . Below you will find a dynamically updated, real time listing of the 100 richest people in the world today. Bill Gates dominated this list for much of the last two decades, but in recent years he has been overtaken by Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Other perennial top billionaires include Warren Buffett, Bernard Arnault and Amancio Ortega.
1. Elon Musk Net Worth
$240 Billion
Tech mogul Elon Musk is the world’s richest person, with an estimated net worth of $240 billion. His estimated fortune peaked at around $340 billion in November 2021 as Tesla shares soared. Musk is currently $38 million richer than LVMH’s Bernard Arnault, the world’s second-wealthiest person.
As of this writing Elon Musk owns roughly 24% of Tesla’s outstanding shares and 43% of the privately-held SpaceX. In October 2021 Tesla’s market cap broke $1 trillion for the first time. That same month SpaceX raided money at a $100 billion valuation. At this point Elon’s net worth teetered around $300 billion for the first time.
2. Bernard Arnault Net Worth
$195 Billion
Bernard Arnault is a French billionaire entrepreneur who has a net worth of $195 billion. Bernard Arnault earned his fortune as the chairman and chief executive of the world’s largest luxury goods company, LVMH. For most of his adult life, Bernard’s net worth has made him one of the richest people in the world, within the ranks of people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. On December 13, 2022 Bernard Arnault overtook Elon Musk to become the richest person on the planet. In April 2023, with LVMH’s stock soaring, Bernard Arnault’s net worth topped $200 billion for the first time. At that point Bernard became only the third person in history to have a net worth north of $200 billion (without having to adjust for inflation).
Bernard Arnault earned his fortune as the CEO of LVMH. In the 1980s, Arnault bought Christian Dior out of bankruptcy. He then used the profits and increased valuation of Dior to put together a conglomerate of luxury brands, notably Louis Vuitton, Moet, Hennessy (hence “LVMH”), Marc Jacobs, Givenchy, Tag Heuer, Bulgari and Tiffany & Co. Today LVMH is home to around 60 brands and generates $70 billion in revenue per year. As of this writing, LVMH’s market cap is $384 billion.
3. Jeff Bezos Net Worth
$154 Billion
Jeff Bezos is an American philanthropist, businessman and space explorer who has a net worth of $154 billion. Jeff Bezos earned his fortune as the founder of Amazon.com. Jeff Bezos is the former CEO and current president and chairman of the board of Amazon. He first surpassed Bill Gates in terms of wealth in July 2017. He was the richest person in the world without interruption between October 2017 and January 2021.
According to the company’s most recent SEC filing, Jeff owns 55 million shares of Amazon, roughly 12% of the total shares outstanding. At his peak he owned 80 million shares of Amazon. As part of his April 2019 divorce settlement with MacKenzie Bezos, Jeff transferred 19.7 million shares to his ex-wife. The value of the shares at the time of the transfer was $36 billion. The settlement temporarily reduced Jeff’s net worth from $150 billion to $114 billion. Jeff was also an early pre-IPO investor in Google.com and owns at least $1 billion shares in what is now known as Alphabet Inc.
For much of the 2000s, Jeff was not even in the top 10 or top 20 of the wealthiest people on the planet. Amazon stock began to sky rocket in late 2014. In July 2015, Jeff’s net worth was $50 billion. In under two years, his net worth (and the stock) had doubled. On July 27, 2017, Bezos took over Bill Gates as the richest person on the planet. In September 2018, Amazon’s market cap topped $1 trillion. This was prior to his divorce so he still owned 80 million shares. At that valuation, Jeff’s net worth topped an then-all-time high of $170 billion.
4. Bill Gates Net Worth
$131 Billion
Bill Gates is an American billionaire entrepreneur, author and philanthropist who has a net worth of $131 billion. Bill Gates earned his first fortune as the co-founder and former chairman and CEO of Microsoft. Today he owns less than 1.3% of Microsoft. He has sold tens of billions of dollars worth of Microsoft shares over the years. The proceeds of his sales have funded Cascade Investment LLC, the vehicle Gates uses to invest in hundreds of other companies. For much of the period between 1997 and 2008, Bill was the richest person in the world uninterrupted. He traded spots with Carlos Slim for a few years before regaining the crown uninterrupted again until July 2017 when he was overtaken by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. In the last decade Bill has consistently been one of the five richest people on the planet.
Microsoft began as a conversation between two young men who had been friends since elementary school, Bill Gates and Paul Allen. After basically lying their way into an interview with MITS, the corporation behind the Altair 8800 computer, the two men convinced the company to build and sell their interpreter, and in 1975, MITS launched the Altair BASIC. This initial success allowed the pair to develop their own company, which they named Microsoft. By 1977, they had their first international office in Japan, and relocated their domestic office to the state of Washington. In 1980, they won a bid to develop an operating system for IBM, and MS-DOS was born. From the mid-80s to the mid-90s, the company established itself as a technological powerhouse, and not long after it went public in 1986, 12,000 of its employees became millionaires, and another four became billionaires. They were also hit with a number of anti-trust lawsuits around this time, due to business practices that appeared to monopolize the computer market. The mid-90s brought an expansion in products, including networking and World Wide Web applications, such as the popular browser, Internet Explorer. In 2000, Bill Gates retired from the position of CEO, and Steve Ballmer, a long time employee took over. Today Satya Nadella is the CEO.
5. Larry Ellison Net Worth
$130 Billion
Larry Ellison is an American billionaire entrepreneur who has a net worth of $130 billion. Larry Ellison earned his enormous fortune as the founder of software giant Oracle. He also served as CEO until September 2014.
Larry Ellison owns around 42% of Oracle. He has pledged around 1/4 of his shares as collateral against lines of credit and personal debt. Since 2003, he has earned around $12 billion from Oracle stock sales and dividends.
Larry also owns roughly 1.5% of Tesla. A we detail in the next section below, Larry spent about $1 billion buying his Tesla stake over the course of 2018. At various points in recent years when Tesla has had a market cap of $1 trillion, that 1.5% stake was worth $15 billion.
Larry Ellison’s net worth makes him one of the richest people in the world behind other tycoons like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Bernard Arnault. For a brief period in the 1990s, Larry was the richest person on the planet when his net worth topped Bill Gates’, as Microsoft stock slumped due to to the Department of Justice’s antitrust investigation. During his years as CEO, Larry was consistently one of, if not the, highest paid executive in the world, regularly earning north of $90 million in some years as basic comp, not even including dividends or stock sales.
6. Mark Zuckerberg Net Worth
$120 Billion
Mark Zuckerberg is an American technology entrepreneur and philanthropist who has a net worth of $120 billion. Mark Zuckerberg has spent much of the last decade as one of the richest people in the world. Out of the top 100 richest people in the world, Mark is the youngest. Out of the top 30, he’s the youngest by more than a decade. Perhaps not surprisingly, The vast majority of Mark’s fortune is attributable to his shares in Facebook. Mark currently owns around 400 million total shares of Facebook, broken up into various classes that have different voting privileges. He owns around 12 million Class A shares of Facebook and 365 million of Class B shares, roughly 81% of all the B shares. Through those Class B super voting shares, Mark has 53% voting rights over the company. Technically Mark also controls co-founder Dustin Moskovitz’s Class B voting rights, so Mark has around 58% of the company’s total voting power.
7. Larry Page Net Worth
$117 Billion
Larry Page is an American billionaire entrepreneur who has a net worth of $117 billion. Larry Page earned his fortune as the founder of Google, which is today known by its umbrella parent company Alphabet. Larry Page was CEO of Google twice. He initially served as CEO from the company’s founding in September 1998 until August 2001 when he ceded the position to Eric Schmidt. He then resumed the position of CEO from April 4, 2011, to October 2, 2015, when the company was restructured, and Alphabet Inc. was created as Google’s parent company. Upon stepping aside in 2015, Larry ceded the CEO position the Sundar Pichai. Larry Page created Google with Sergey Brin while they were both graduate students at Stanford.
Larry Page owns roughly 6% of Alphabet. With super-voting shares, Larry and Sergey control 51% of the company’s voting rights. Larry has sold about $9 billion worth of shares of both Alphabet and Google since the company’s IPO in 2004. Page owns Class A, Class B, and Class C shares of Alphabet, including 20 million shares of Class C Alphabet stock. Larry’s family foundation, the Carl Victor Page Memorial Fund controls more than $1 billion worth of assets that have been donated by Larry.
8. Steve Ballmer Net Worth
$115 Billion
Steve Ballmer is an American businessman and sports team owner who has a net worth of $115 billion. Steve Ballmer earned his fortune thanks to his long career Microsoft, where he was the company’s second CEO after co-founder Bill Gates stepped down in 2000. Today Ballmer is also known for owning the Los Angeles Clippers. His extremely high net worth makes him one of the wealthiest individuals on the planet. Most of his wealth is the result of his shares in Microsoft.
The vast majority of Steve Ballmer’s net worth is derived from his 333.3 million shares of Microsoft stock. Over the years he has sold $3.4 billion worth of stock and collected roughly $4.5 billion from dividends. Despite being a multi-multi-billionaire, Ballmer still drives a Ford in honor of his father who was a Ford manager.
In 2000, Ballmer replaced company founder Bill Gates as CEO. As CEO he earned a base salary of $1.35 million. In August 2013, Ballmer announced that he would be retiring as CEO within 12 months. On February 4, 2014, Ballmer was replaced by Satya Nadella.
9. Warren Buffett Net Worth
$115 Billion
Warren Buffett is an American investor and philanthropist who has a net worth of $115 billion. Warren Buffett is widely considered the greatest investor of the 20th century. If you bought $1,000 worth of Warren’s holding company Berkshire Hathaway in 1965, today your shares would be worth over $25 million, not including dividends issued by the companies it owns (Berkshire itself does not pay a dividend). Buffett’s interest in the stock market dated back to childhood. On a trip to New York City at the age of ten, he made a point to visit the New York Stock Exchange in the way others might visit the Statue of Liberty. It was a must see attraction for the young Buffett. At the age of 11, he bought three shares of Cities Service Preferred for himself. Today his investment conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway owns hundreds of companies outright, has enormous investments in hundreds of other companies and has a market cap of roughly $700 billion. Around 99% of Buffett’s net worth was made after he turned 50 years old.
Warren Buffett has pledged to give away 99% of his net worth to charity before he dies. A large portion of that money will go to Bill Gates’ foundation. Warren and Bill are the co-founders of The Giving Pledge, an effort to inspire other billionaires to pledge at least 50% of their net worth to charity in their lifetimes as well.
10. Sergey Brin Net Worth
$111 Billion
Sergey Brin is a Russian-born American computer scientist and internet entrepreneur who has a net worth of $111 billion. Sergey Brin earned his net worth as the co-founder of Google, which today is known by umbrella parent company Alphabet. He co-founded the company with Larry Page, a classmate at Standford’s computer science graduate program. Sergey served as Google’s head of technology for 10 years, from 2001 until 2011, at which point he appointed himself “director of special projects.” Both Larry and Sergey own around 6% of Alphabet’s outstanding equity. Through super-voting shares, they control the majority of the company’s voting.
11. Carlos Slim Helu Net Worth
$95 Billion
Carlos Slim Helu is a Mexican businessman who has a net worth of $95 billion. Carlos Slim Helu is the richest person in Mexico and one of the richest people in the world. In August 2007 Carlos was actually the richest person on the planet, a title he maintained for roughly three years until Bill Gates re-claimed the title. Between 2010 and 2013, Carlos and Bill traded back and forth as the richest human on earth. For the next 10 years Carlos was regularly one of the 10 richest people in the world. Carlos Slim earned his fortune thanks to his roughly 57% stake in the mobile phone giant America Movil. He also holds large stakes in the banking and insurance company Grupo Financiero Inbursa and holding company Grupo Carso, and other stakes in companies including Minera Frisco and the New York Times. Even though he has transferred stakes to his six children, Slim is the patriarch of the family fortune and gets the credit for their billions. Over the past decade he has earned more than $9 billion in dividends alone.
12. Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers Net Worth
$90 Billion
Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers is a French author and heiress who has a net worth of $90 billion. Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers is the richest woman in the world. Françoise inherited her fortune from her mother, the late Liliane Bettencourt. Liliane was one of the principal shareholders of L’Oreal. To this day, Françoise’s family still retains a 33% stake in L’Oreal.
Despite the fact that she inherited her fortune, Bettencourt-Meyers has pursued her own career as an author. She mostly focuses on writing Bible commentaries and books on Jewish-Christian relations. Bettencourt-Meyers herself was raised as a strict Catholic, but later married the grandson of an Auschwitz survivor and raise her own children Jewish.
Over the course of her life, Bettencourt-Meyers has been involved with a number of controversies. Her grandfather was a known Nazi sympathizer, and this certainly raised a few eyebrows when she decided to marry a Jewish person. She was also known for her rocky relationship with her mother, and she once tried to have Liliane declared mentally incompetent. This was part of a larger lawsuit in which she accused François-Marie Banier of taking money from her mother. In turn, these revelations led to the Woerth-Bettencourt scandal, which involved allegations that Liliane had been illegally giving money to the government of Nicolas Sarkozy in France.
13. Mukesh Ambani Net Worth
$81 Billion
Mukesh Ambani is an Indian businessman who has a net worth of $81 billion. Mukesh Ambani earned his net worth through his career at Reliance Industries, a Fortune 500 company, where he is chairman, managing director, and largest shareholder.
In 1980, the Indian government had opened up polyester filament yarn (PFY) manufacturing to the private sector, and Ambani’s father applied for a license to set up a PFY manufacturing plant, beating out competition from over forty other enterprises to receive the license. Ambani, the eldest son of the family, was pulled out of his MBA program at Stanford by his father—who valued real-life experience over classroom learning—to help build the PFY plant. Following executive director Rasikbhai Meswani’s death, and his father’s stroke in 1986, responsibility for the company shifted to Ambani and his brother Anil.
14. Jim Walton Net Worth
$70 Billion
Jim Walton is an American billionaire businessman who has a net worth of $70 billion. Jim Walton is the youngest son of Walmart founder Sam Walton. Upon Sam’s death, Jim and his siblings split a roughly 40% stake in their father’s company. Today the siblings split $2-3 billion in annual dividend payments, depending on the frequency and dividend amount.
As of this writing, Wal-Mart operates more than 11,000 stores worldwide and generates nearly $600 billion in annual revenue.
As of this writing, Jim Walton owns roughly 13% of Wal-Mart through the Walton Family Holdings Trust and Walton Enterprises. He also owns a 44% stake in the largest bank in Arkansas, Arvest Bank. Since 1992, Jim Walton has earned at least $10 billion from stock sales and dividends.
14. Amancio Ortega Gaona Net Worth
$70 Billion
Amancio Ortega Gaona is a Spanish fashion executive and entrepreneur who has a net worth of $70 billion. Amancio Ortega Gaona earned his fortune as the founder of Inditex, which is the parent company of fashion empire Zara. Amancio has spent the last several decades quietly being one of the wealthiest people in the world. He keeps a famously low profile and likely wouldn’t be recognized dining in a random American restaurant.
Also known simply as Amancio Ortega, this entrepreneur makes every effort to keep his private life firmly hidden behind closed doors. Because of this, very little is known about Ortega aside from his business dealings. That being said, it’s difficult to avoid media attention when you’re one of the richest individuals on the planet. At one point, Ortega was the richest person on the planet.
14. Michael Bloomberg Net Worth
$70 Billion
Michael Bloomberg is an American politician and entrepreneur who has a net worth of $70 billion. Michael Bloomberg earned his fortune through his financial news and information services media company Bloomberg LP. He owns 88% of the privately held company. Michael is also notable for being the former Mayor of New York City. He is one of the wealthiest people in America and the world. As of this writing, he is the 12th wealthiest person on the planet, the 8th richest American. In November 2019, Michael Bloomberg officially entered the 2020 Presidential race.
14. Vladimir Putin Net Worth
$70 Billion
Vladimir Putin is a Russian politician who has a net worth of $70 billion dollars. During his career, which includes stints serving as both President and Prime Minister of Russia, he has earned a very controversial international reputation. He is currently serving his second term as the President of Russia, which began in 2012. After a referendum in April of 2021, Putin signed into law constitutional amendments including one that would allow him to run for reelection two more times, potentially extending his presidency into 2036.
