Elon Musk kicks off 2025 as the world’s richest person—and the only billionaire to date worth more than $400 billion.
Musk begins the new year worth $421.2 billion, per Forbes’ estimates, a $91 billion increase since December 1. The big jump in his fortune came after SpaceX agreed to buy back insiders’ shares in a deal valuing the rocket company at $350 billion–a deal first reported by Bloomberg. The company had previously been worth $210 billion. Musk founded SpaceX in 2002, runs it as the CEO, and owns an estimated 42% stake in the company. The new valuation made SpaceX the most valuable private company in the world, more than TikTok parent ByteDance, payments firm Stripe or ChatGPT creator OpenAI. Musk also runs EV maker Tesla, and owns stakes in social media firm X, AI firm xAI and tunnel company Boring Co.
Musk, who started 2024 worth an estimated $251 billion, has gained extra media attention since Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election in November. Trump named Musk the co-head of a new advisory body, the Department of Government Efficiency (or DOGE), set to reduce government spending and increase efficiency.
Jeff Bezos comes in as the world’s No. 2 richest, up from No. 3 at the start of December 2024. The Amazon founder and chairman, who owns about 9% of the company, got about $10 billion richer in the past month as shares of the e-commerce giant rose about 5%. He starts off 2025 worth an estimated $233.5 billion— about $188 billion less than Musk.
Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Huang joins the top 10 richest for the first time at the start of the month. He’s ranked No. 10 and worth an estimated $118 billion, mostly due to his stake in the chip designer, whose shares rose 171% in 2024. Nvidia ended the year with a market capitalization of $3.28 trillion, making it more valuable than Microsoft (but not as valuable as Apple). Huang overtook Spain’s Amancio Ortega, founder of clothing retailer Zara and its publicly traded parent company, Inditex; shares of Inditex weakened in the past month.
Together, the world’s 10 richest people are worth $1.9 trillion, up from $1.8 trillion on December 1. Seven of the ten are richer than they were a month ago.
The biggest loser of this group was Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison, whose fortune fell by $17.2 billion during the month to an estimated nearly $210 billion. Ellison fell to No. 3 richest in the world from No. 2 at the start of December.
Forbes has been keeping track of the world’s billionaires since 1987. In April 2024 we found 2,781 of them for our annual list.
Here are the 10 richest people on earth as of January 1, 2025 at 12 a.m. Eastern time, according to Forbes. 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.
Key Takeaways
- Elon Musk is the richest person in the world, a title he reclaimed in late May 2024. His fortune rocketed up by $91 billion over the past month.
- Jeff Bezos became the world’s No. 2 richest, overtaking Larry Ellison, who was the second richest at the start of December.
- Bill Gates dropped out of the top 10 richest on October 1 after Forbes obtained new information about a significant contraction in his fortune.
- 9/10 of the richest people in the world are Americans, including Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Steve Ballmer.
- All of the top ten richest people as of January 1 are men. Each of them is worth $120 billion or more.
Who are the top 10 richest people in the world?*
1. Elon Musk
2. Jeff Bezos
3. Larry Ellison
4. Mark Zuckerberg
5. Bernard Arnault
6. Larry Page
7. Sergey Brin
8. Warren Buffett
9. Steve Ballmer
10. Jensen Huang
*As of January 1, 2025 at 12 a.m. ET
1. Elon Musk
Net worth: $421.2 billion
Source: Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, X
Age: 53
Residence: Austin, Texas
Citizenship: U.S.
Musk is CEO of electric car company Tesla and rocket firm SpaceX; chairman and chief technology officer of social media company X, formerly known as Twitter; and founder of artificial intelligence firm xAI. He owns 13% of Tesla stock and has pledged some of his stock as collateral for loans. The electric car maker’s shareholders voted in June in favor of Musk keeping nearly $50 billion of performance based stock options in what a Delaware judge had earlier called “the largest potential compensation opportunity ever observed in public markets,” when she voided the award this January and affirmed the ruling in December. But the matter won’t be resolved anytime soon. A lengthy appeal of the Delaware ruling is likely to follow. Until Musk receives those options, Forbes will continue to discount the Tesla options from the pay package by 50%.
A big increase in the value of SpaceX in December was the main reason for the $91 billion increase in Musk’s fortune in the past month.
Musk, who donated more than $100 million to support Donald Trump in the November 5 presidential election, was named by Trump as co-head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an advisory group that will recommend cuts to government jobs, programs and spending. There are potentially significant conflicts of interest at play, given Musk’s companies’ ties to the federal government, including SpaceX (a customer of the Department of Defense) and Tesla (regulated by the Department of Transportation).
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 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. In September 2021, Musk became the world’s richest person. 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. 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, after his startup xAI raised $6 billion from private investors at a $24 billion valuation. xAI raised an additional $5 billion from investors in November, valuing the startup at $50 billion. He owns an estimated 54% of the company.
2. Jeff Bezos
Net worth: $233.5 billion
Source: Amazon
Age: 60
Residence: Miami, Florida
Citizenship: U.S.
Jeff Bezos created e-commerce giant Amazon in 1994 and ran it as CEO until July 2021 (he remains chairman); that same month he went to space on a rocket built by private rocket company Blue Origin, which he founded and has funded with billions of dollars.
Amazon shares rose by about 5% in the month of December, adding about $10 billion to Bezos’ fortune.
Before founding Amazon.com in his garage in Seattle, he worked 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’ list of the World’s Billionaires from 2018 through 2021; he dropped to second richest on the 2022 billionaires list and No. 3 on the 2024 list.
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 just under 10% of the company. Since Amazon went public in 1997, Forbes calculates that he has sold more than $38 billion worth of his stock. Through his Bezos Expeditions he has invested in an array of companies, including Airbnb and software firm Workday.
3. Larry Ellison
Net worth: $209.7 billion
Source: Oracle
Age: 80
Residence: Woodside, California
Citizenship: U.S.
Ellison cofounded software firm Oracle in 1977 and ran it as CEO until 2014; he now serves as chairman and chief technology officer of the company. Shares of Oracle fell more than 9% in December, erasing some $17 billion from Ellison’s fortune. That resulted in him dropping to the world’s No. 2 richest from No. 3 richest at the start of December.
In 2012, Ellison bought 98% of the Hawaiian island of Lanai for $300 million. He also owns homes in California, Nevada and Florida. Ellison invested in Tesla and served on the board of the electric vehicle company from 2018 through August 2022.
4. Mark Zuckerberg
Net worth: $202.5 billion
Source: Meta (Facebook)
Age: 40
Residence: Palo Alto, California
Citizenship: U.S.
Zuckerberg cofounded Facebook—now called Meta Platforms—when he was a student at Harvard University in 2004. 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, the CEO of Meta, took the company public in 2012 and still owns about 13% of it.
Zuckerberg’s net worth rose by $3.8 billion in the past month, the result of a gain of about 1.9% in Meta shares during December.
5. Bernard Arnault
Net worth: $168.8 billion
Source: LVMH/ luxury goods
Age: 75
Residence: Paris
Citizenship: France
Bernard Arnault, CEO and chairman of luxury goods group LVMH, got $8.5 billion richer in the past month due to a roughly 7% increase in the price of the company shares. Last year posed some challenges for the company; in October it reported quarterly earnings that were depressed by ongoing weak demand in China.
Arnault’s 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 70 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. Earlier this year, Arnault nominated two of his sons—Alexandre and Frédéric—to the board of LVMH and in November 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 June 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.
6. Larry Page
Net worth: $156 billion
Source: Google
Age: 51
Residence: Palo Alto, California
Citizenship: U.S.
Page moved up one rank from last month, supported by an 11% rise Google-parent Alphabet’s shares. That pushed his fortune up by $14 billion for the month. In late November 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.
Page cofounded search engine Google with fellow Stanford PhD student Sergey Brin in 1998 and served as CEO until 2001 and from 2011 to 2015. He now serves as a board member of Google’s parent Alphabet and continues to be a controlling shareholder.
Page was a founding investor in asteroid mining company Planetary Resources, which was acquired by blockchain firm ConsenSys in 2018.
7. Sergey Brin
Net worth: $149 billion
Source: Google
Age: 51
Residence: Los Altos, California
Citizenship: U.S.
Like his Google cofounder Larry Page, Brin’s fortune also rose in the past month as Alphabet shares rallied. The $14.7 billion rise in his fortune lifted Brin up a notch to No. 7 from No. 8 at that start of December.
Brin cofounded search engine Google with fellow Stanford computer science PhD candidate Larry Page. Like Page, he currently serves as a board member of Google’s parent company Alphabet and is a controlling shareholder.
Brin came out of semi-retirement to submit changes to Google’s Gemini AI chatbot last year and was listed as a “core contributor” when the model was released in December.
8. Warren Buffett
Net worth: $141.7 billion
Source: Berkshire Hathaway
Age: 94
Residence:
Omaha, Nebraska
Citizenship: U.S.
Buffett’s fortune fell $8.9 billion during December, which pushed his rank down from No. 6 to No. 8. The reason for the decline: Berkshire Hathaway’s A shares fell nearly 6% over the past month.
Known as the “Oracle of Omaha,” Buffett is one of the most successful investors of all time. He runs investing conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway, which owns dozens of companies, including insurer Geico, battery maker Duracell and restaurant chain Dairy Queen. The son of a U.S. congressman, he first bought stock at age 11 and first filed taxes at age 13.
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. Buffett has said he would donate 99% of his fortune. 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. That includes $5.3 billion in June 2024.
9. Steve Ballmer
Net worth: $124.3 billion
Source: Microsoft, Clippers, investments
Age: 68
Residence: Hunts Point, Washington
Citizenship: U.S.
Ballmer, a classmate of Bill Gates’ at Harvard University, 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 purchased the Los Angeles Clippers team for $2 billion—a record high for an NBA team at the time. Forbes now values the team at $5.5 billion. The new home for the Clippers, the Intuit Dome in Inglewood—not far from Los Angeles International Airport—opened in August 2024.
Ballmer’s fortune fell by an estimated $500 million in December—a tiny move for someone worth more than $100 billion.
10. Jensen Huang
Net worth: $117.2 billion
Source: Nvidia
Age: 61
Residence: Los Altos, California
Citizenship: U.S.
Huang has made brief appearances in the world’s top 10 richest over the past year but this is the first time he’s among this group at the start of a month. Huang, who cofounded chip design firm Nvidia in 1993 and runs it as CEO, has overseen a huge runup in the price of the company’s stock as its chips have gained popularity among the burgeoning AI sector. He has become a rockstar in the tech world, known for sporting a signature black leather jacket.
Huang joins the top 10 richest despite a slight decline in Nvidia shares over the past month. That’s because the fortune of the prior No. 10, Spain’s Amancio Ortega, fell by about $7 billion over the month on weaker Inditex shares. But Ortega is close behind at No. 11, worth just $400 million less than Huang at the start of the new year.
Who is the richest man in the world?
As of January 1, 2025, the richest person in the world is Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. He’s worth $421.1 billion. He moved into the number one spot in late May 2024, overtaking Bernard Arnault of France.
