The 10 Richest People in the World by Net Worth

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Elon Musk is the richest man in the world. In the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires ranking (snapshot dated Nov. 9, 2026), his net worth is $891.6 billion, which is more than twice the $385.7 billion credited to Jeff Bezos in second place. The rest of the top 10 are Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Dell, Steve Ballmer, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison and Jensen Huang. All ten are American, and nine of them built their fortunes in technology.

The order is a snapshot. It measures estimated net worth, and most of each fortune is stock in a single company. A few percentage points of movement in one share price can reshuffle the middle of the list, while the top spot is far harder to change.

What the Ranking Measures

Net worth is the value of what a person owns minus what they owe. For the people on this list, “what they own” is mostly equity: shares in a company they founded, run or inherited. Billionaire indexes generally value those holdings in three ways:

• Public stock is valued at its market price, which is why a real-time index can move every trading day.
• Private companies (SpaceX before its listing, Blue Origin, family holding companies) have no daily market price. Their value has to be estimated, often from funding rounds, comparable public companies or recent transactions.
• Cash, real estate, art, sports teams and other assets are added, and known debts, including loans secured by shares, are subtracted.

Because the inputs are estimates, two reputable trackers can produce different numbers and even a different order on the same day. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes do not use identical methods for valuing private stakes, family holdings or pledged shares. One example: in a Bloomberg ranking from early November 2026, Jim Walton held 10th place. In the Forbes snapshot of Nov. 9, Jensen Huang is 10th and the Walton entries fall from 12th to 14th.

A few practical consequences follow from this:

1. The figure is not cash. A person whose fortune is 90% founder stock cannot turn it into spendable money at that price. Selling a large block would push the share price down, trigger capital gains tax and, for a founder, possibly require public disclosure and weaken voting control.
2. “& family” entries are grouped differently. Forbes lists Rob Walton & family, Jim Walton & family, Carlos Slim Helu & family and others as combined units. Their figures are not directly comparable with a single individual’s wealth.
3. Rank changes are often price changes. When a name moves up or down a place, the cause is usually a share price move, not a purchase, sale or business event.

How Far Apart the Entries Are

How stable each position is depends on the gap to the neighboring entries and on how concentrated each fortune is.

The rough percentages assume each person’s fortune moves in line with their main company’s stock. That is a simplification, because Dell, Ellison and Bezos hold large assets outside their primary companies.

Page and Brin are an unusual pair. Both hold Alphabet stock, so a rise or fall in Alphabet moves them together and rarely changes their order relative to each other. Brin against Zuckerberg is different: two different stocks, a $1 billion gap, and positions that can flip on an ordinary trading day.

At the bottom of the top 10, the boundary is crowded. Huang’s lead over Ortega in 11th is $1.9 billion, and Rob Walton & family sit just $5.9 billion behind Huang. Nvidia, Inditex and Walmart are three very different businesses, so their share prices often move independently, and the 10th spot changes hands more easily than any position above it.

The Fortunes Behind the Top 10

1. Elon Musk: Two Giant Stakes, One Public and One Newly Public

Musk was born in South Africa and earned degrees in physics and economics at the University of Pennsylvania. His first company, Zip2, was an early online city-guide and mapping business. Part of the proceeds went into X.com, an online payments company that merged into what became PayPal, later bought by eBay.

He became Tesla’s major early funder in 2004 and later its CEO. He also founded SpaceX, the rocket and satellite company. Tesla joined the S&P 500 in December 2020 as the largest company ever added at the time. By January 2021 Musk was ranked the world’s richest person, a title he has lost and regained since.

His more recent deals have reshaped the fortune:

• Twitter (2022): a $44 billion buyout that Musk tried to abandon, was sued over, and then completed in October 2022. He sold billions of dollars of Tesla stock around the deal.
• xAI (2023 onward): Musk founded the AI company in 2023. X and xAI merged in March 2025, and SpaceX acquired xAI in February 2026.
• SpaceX listing (June 2026): SpaceX went public on June 12, 2026, so a holding that once had to be estimated from private funding rounds now has a market price.

Musk also owns stakes in The Boring Company and Neuralink. What separates his fortune from the others is that it rests on two very large holdings, so a sharp move in either Tesla or SpaceX shares can change his net worth by tens of billions in a day. Born in June 1971, he is 55.

2. Jeff Bezos: Amazon Plus a Large Private Portfolio

Bezos left the hedge fund D.E. Shaw and founded Amazon in a Seattle garage in 1994 as an online bookstore. He took the company public in 1997. Over time it expanded into general retail, cloud computing through AWS, Whole Foods (acquired in 2017) and pharmacy. In 2020, pandemic-era online shopping lifted Amazon’s share price by 76%.

Bezos once owned about 16% of Amazon. Roughly a quarter of that stake went to MacKenzie Scott in their 2019 divorce, and he has sold shares regularly since. He stepped down as CEO on July 5, 2021, and became executive chair. Two weeks later he flew to space on Blue Origin’s first crewed flight.

Outside Amazon, his holdings include Blue Origin, The Washington Post (bought in 2013), the superyacht Koru and the AI startup Prometheus, which he co-founded in 2025. Blue Origin is private and capital-intensive, so its contribution to his net worth is an estimate. That gives his figure more estimation uncertainty than a fortune held almost entirely in listed shares.

3 and 4. Larry Page and Sergey Brin: The Same Company, Slightly Different Stakes

Page and Brin met at Stanford, where in the mid-1990s they built a search engine called BackRub that ranked pages by the links pointing to them. They founded Google in 1998. Page served as CEO until 2001 and again from 2011 to 2019. Brin, born in Moscow in 1973 and brought to the U.S. at age six, was president of technology while Eric Schmidt was CEO.

In 2015 Google reorganized under a new holding company, Alphabet. That is why Forbes lists “Google” as their source of wealth while the stock they own is Alphabet’s. Both stepped back from executive roles in 2019, when Sundar Pichai became CEO of Alphabet, and both remain on the board as controlling shareholders.

Alphabet’s businesses include Google Search, YouTube (acquired in 2006), Android (acquired in 2005, launched as a phone OS in 2008), Google Cloud and Workspace. Page has invested in space and flying-car ventures, including Planetary Resources and Kitty Hawk, and Brin has given heavily to Parkinson’s disease research with The Michael J. Fox Foundation.

5. Mark Zuckerberg: Founder Control at Meta

Zuckerberg launched Facebook at Harvard in 2004 with Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, then dropped out to run it. The company, renamed Meta Platforms in 2021, bought Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp and Oculus in 2014. Most of its revenue still comes from advertising.

Nearly all of Zuckerberg’s net worth is Meta stock, and his share class gives him voting control of the company. With Priscilla Chan, he founded the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in 2015 to fund work in science, education and other areas. At 42 (born May 1984), he is the youngest person in the top 10.

6. Michael Dell: Founder Stock Plus a Second Fortune in Broadcom

Dell started selling upgraded PC kits from his University of Texas dorm room in 1984. The business grew into Dell Technologies, which today sells servers, storage and other infrastructure alongside PCs, and he still owns a large share of it.

His fortune is less concentrated than most on this list. Dell Technologies spun off VMware in 2021. When Broadcom acquired VMware in 2023, Dell’s VMware shares became Broadcom shares, so a large part of his wealth now moves with a semiconductor company he does not run. He also holds substantial cash and investments through his family office.

7. Steve Ballmer: An Employee, Not a Founder

Ballmer is the only person in the top 10 who did not found or inherit the company behind his fortune. Bill Gates persuaded him to leave Stanford’s MBA program in 1980, and he joined Microsoft as roughly its 30th employee. He succeeded Gates as CEO in 2000 and held the role until 2014. During his tenure Microsoft bought Skype for $8.5 billion in 2011.

He kept his shares, and he is reported to be Microsoft’s largest individual shareholder, with a stake of around 4%. Shortly after leaving Microsoft, he bought the Los Angeles Clippers for $2 billion. He has since added the Intuit Dome and The Forum. Ballmer ranks well above Gates (16th, $122.4B) because Gates has spent decades selling and donating Microsoft stock, while Ballmer has largely held his.

8. Warren Buffett: The Only Investor, and the Only Fortune Built Outside Tech

Buffett began buying Berkshire Hathaway, then a struggling textile maker, in 1962, gained control by 1965 and moved it into insurance in 1967. Over time he turned it into a conglomerate that owns businesses in insurance, railroads, energy and consumer products, along with a large stock portfolio.

He built his fortune as a buy-and-hold value investor. He gave away about $41 billion between 2006 and 2020, much of it to the Gates Foundation and his children’s foundations, and co-founded the Giving Pledge with Bill Gates in 2010. His annual share donations are one reason his net worth has not grown as fast as Berkshire’s stock. He stepped down as CEO in January 2026, with Greg Abel succeeding him, and remains chairman. At 96, he is the oldest person on the list.

9. Larry Ellison: Oracle, Tesla and Media

Ellison was born in New York and dropped out of the University of Chicago in 1966. He moved to California to work as a programmer, and in 1977 he co-founded Software Development Laboratories with Bob Miner and Ed Oates. The company released Oracle, the first commercial relational database built around SQL, and later took the product’s name. Ellison was CEO for 37 years before stepping aside in 2014. He remains chairman and chief technology officer.

He owns a very large share of Oracle, and he also holds Tesla stock (he sat on Tesla’s board from 2018 to 2022) and a stake in Skydance. In September 2025 he was named among the U.S. investors in a consortium to take over TikTok’s U.S. operations, with Oracle expected to oversee the app’s algorithm and data security. His philanthropy has centered on medical research, including a $200 million gift to the University of Southern California in 2016.

10. Jensen Huang: The Newest Arrival

Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and has been its CEO ever since. The company’s graphics processors, first built for gaming, became the main hardware for training and running AI models, and that demand made Nvidia one of the largest companies by market cap.

His fortune comes almost entirely from an Nvidia stake of roughly 3.3%. He owns a smaller percentage of his company than most of the founders above him, and Nvidia’s valuation is what puts him in the top 10. That structure ties his rank closely to one volatile stock, and with $1.9 billion separating him from 11th place, he is the entry most likely to drop out after a weak stretch for Nvidia.

Patterns Across the Top 10

Founder equity dominates. Eight of the ten founded or co-founded the company behind their wealth. Ballmer was an early employee, and Buffett acquired control of an existing business. No one in the top 10 inherited the bulk of their fortune. Heirs appear just below, led by the Waltons.

Concentration cuts both ways. Holding most of your wealth in one company is what makes these fortunes so large, and it is also what makes them volatile. Dell and Bezos hold large outside assets, while Zuckerberg, Huang, Page and Brin are tied mostly to one stock each.

The list is entirely American. All ten are from the United States. Non-U.S. names begin at 11th with Amancio Ortega of Spain, followed further down by Carlos Slim Helu (Mexico), Bernard Arnault (France), Changpeng Zhao (Canada), Francoise Bettencourt Meyers (France), Giancarlo Devasini (Italy), and Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani (India).

Technology is the common source. Nine of the ten are classified under Technology. Beyond 10th, the industries widen: fashion and retail (Ortega, the Waltons, Arnault, Bettencourt Meyers), telecom (Slim), cryptocurrency (Zhao, Devasini), brokerage (Thomas Peterffy) and diversified conglomerates (Ambani, Adani, Julia Koch & family).

Just Outside the Top 10

The entries ranked 11th to 16th explain a lot about how the boundary works:

• Amancio Ortega ($152.1B) co-founded Inditex, the owner of Zara. He is the richest person on the list outside the United States and the closest challenger for 10th.
• The Waltons appear three times: Rob Walton & family ($148.1B), Jim Walton & family ($144.9B) and Alice Walton ($134.4B). Their wealth comes from Walmart, founded by their father, Sam Walton, and much of it is held through the family holding company Walton Enterprises. Taken at face value, the three entries total about $427.4 billion, more than Bezos. Forbes ranks them as separate fortunes, though, so none of them reaches the top 10 alone.
• Carlos Slim Helu & family ($125.2B) built a telecom empire centered on Mexico.
• Bill Gates ($122.4B), who held the top spot for much of the 1990s and 2000s, now ranks 16th.

Who Is the Richest Woman in the World?

In this Forbes snapshot, Alice Walton is the richest woman ranked as an individual, with $134.4 billion from her Walmart holdings, 14th overall. Francoise Bettencourt Meyers & family ($104.8B, L’Oréal) and Julia Koch & family ($84.6B, Koch, Inc.) also appear in the top 25. Their figures include relatives, so they are not directly comparable with Alice Walton’s.

The richest woman can also differ by tracker. A Bloomberg ranking from early November 2026 likewise named Alice Walton, while at other times Bettencourt Meyers has held the title. As with the top 10 overall, the difference comes from how each index counts family and trust holdings.

How These Fortunes Are Held, Taxed and Spent

Most of the fortunes on this list are unrealized gains: stock that has risen in value but has never been sold. In the United States, capital gains are taxed only when an asset is sold, so the very wealthy often borrow against their shares instead of selling them. Those loans are not income, no tax is due, and the shares keep their voting rights and upside. Heirs generally receive inherited assets at a “stepped-up” cost basis equal to their value at the date of death, so the lifetime gain is never taxed as income, although estate tax may apply. Investigative reporting based on leaked IRS data found that several people on lists like this one paid no federal income tax in some years. For the ranking, share-backed loans are a liability that good estimates subtract, and large sales and donations, as in the cases of Gates and Buffett, reduce net worth and can push someone down the list even while their company thrives.

How to Read and Compare the Entries

When you compare two people on the list, these points do more work than the headline number:

• Check whether sources of wealth overlap. Page and Brin both depend on Alphabet. The Walton entries all depend on Walmart. Ballmer and Gates both trace to Microsoft but hold very different amounts of it.
• Look at the gap before you treat the rank as settled. A $1 billion gap (Brin and Zuckerberg) is noise. A $500 billion gap (Musk and Bezos) is structural.
• Ask how much of the fortune is private. Valuations of private companies such as Blue Origin, or of any stake without a daily market price, are estimates that can be revised in large steps. Public stakes move daily but are priced by the market.
• Compare like with like. Forbes and Bloomberg figures for the same person on the same day can differ. Mixing them can create an apparent rank change that is just a methodology difference.

For a sense of scale, the combined $2.81 trillion held by these ten people is comparable to the annual output of some of the world’s largest economies. The comparison has limits, though: net worth is a stock of assets measured at one moment, while GDP is a flow of production over a year.

The Bottom Line

Anyone comparing the world's richest people should treat the Forbes order as a snapshot of estimated net worth, made up mostly of stock in a single company. Musk's lead over Bezos is structural, while close calls such as Brin against Zuckerberg or the race for 10th place can flip on an ordinary trading day. Before reading meaning into a rank change, check the size of the gap, how much of the fortune is private, and whether both figures come from the same tracker.