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He held 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. The bulk of Bill Gates’s wealth is in Cascade Investment LLC, a privately held investment vehicle that owns a variety of stocks. Mark Zuckerberg first developed Facebook (now Meta) alongside fellow students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes while attending 5 wealthiest people in the world Harvard University in 2004. As Facebook began to be used at other universities, Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to focus entirely on his growing business. 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. He converted Ferret-Savinel to a real estate company named Férinel Inc. in 1979.

• The biggest loser of this elite cohort in the past month was French luxury goods tycoon Bernard Arnault, who was the world’s wealthiest person from February through late May.
• Ballmer’s fortune dropped by an estimated $6.7 billion in the past month amid a 6% drop in the price of Microsoft stock amid the big tech stock selloff.
• At No. 3 and worth $105 billion is Bernard Arnault, CEO of LVMH, who oversees an empire of luxury brands including Louis Vuitton, Moët & Chandon and Bulgari.
• Multi-billionaires can also take advantage of a panoply of tax deductions to offset reported income, leaving some on this list paying no income tax in recent years.
• While the 15 have crossed $100 billion before, this is the first time all of them have held fortunes of that size at the same time.

#12. Larry Page

• Ellison invested in Tesla and served on the board of the car company from 2018 through August 2022.
• Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, took the company public in 2012 and still owns about 13% of it.
• His net worth will likely get a boost soon from SpaceX, which is reportedly set to sell shares in a tender offer valuing the company at $210 billion—up from $180 billion last December (Musk owns an estimated 42% stake).
• Tesla shares are up about 60% this year, and the company hit a $1 trillion market cap for the first time in October.
• He held 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.
• As of July 1, 2024 Arnault is worth about $7.9 billion less than a month ago and nearly $16 billion in the past two months, per Forbes’ estimates.
• Like several of the tech billionaires on this list, Larry Page embarked on his path to fame and fortune in a college dorm room.

Our community is about connecting people through open and thoughtful conversations. We want our readers to share their views and exchange ideas and facts in a safe space. Seat belts were invented in 1955 but it took until 1968 for seat belts to be made a mandatory feature in UK and USA cars.

#5 Warren Buffett

His family office, however, has grown into a large investment and advisory firm. MSD Partners, which manages over $12 billion, merged with fellow billionaire Byron Trott’s BDT & Co. in October. China’s bottled water king remains the country’s richest person for the third year in a row. Gains by Zhong-led beverage producer Nongfu Spring offset a decline in shares of his Covid test supplier Beijing Wantai Biological Pharmacy after the country eased pandemic restrictions at the end of last year.

Larry Ellison: $109 billion (+$29 billion)

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. Musk became the world’s richest person again in late May 2024, after his startup xAI raised $6 billion from private investors at a $24 billion valuation. The richest woman in the world is Francoise Bettencourt Meyers of France. As of August 1, 2024, she is worth an estimated $88.4 billion and is the world’s 17th richest person. Her fortune lies in her ownership stake in cosmetics giant L’Oreal, which she inherited from her late mother.

They’re $200 billion poorer than last year, but still worth $2.1 trillion.

Ballmer owns an estimated 4% of Microsoft, making him the software giant’s largest individual shareholder. The brotherly relationship between the two became strained when Ballmer started pushing the tech company into hardware, such as the Surface tablet and the Windows mobile phone, during his tenure as CEO. As of September 1, 2024, the richest person in the world is Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. Known as the “Oracle of Omaha,” Warren 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.

• Musk is now worth $151 billion—$126.4 billion more than last year.
• That investment is off to a slow start, with the team unexpectedly missing the NFL playoffs.
• As of July 1, 2024, she is worth an estimated $89 billion and is the world’s 17th richest person.
• Two years later, the company released Oracle, the first commercial relational database program to use Structured Query Language.

The AI cameras, part of a 12-month project funded by fines from road offenses, use high-tech imaging to capture clear evidence of seat belt violations, which are then reviewed by humans to confirm the offense. In Devon and Cornwall, in the south-west of England, AI cameras detected over 2,000 seat belt offenses, including 109 involving children, on three major roads between July https://www.bookstime.com/ and August 2024. One of the richest women in the world — and the richest on this list — Bettencourt Meyers, together with her family, owns 33% of the cosmetics company L’Oreal. Unlike many big tech founders, Zuckerberg remains at the CEO helm. It hasn’t been easy, especially amid AI competition and tech layoffs, including 21,000 job cuts at his Meta Platforms since November.

That includes $5.3 billion in June, which helped knock him down in the ranks to No. 10 for the first time in years. 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. After decades of almost religiously holding onto their family retailer’s shares, the children of Walmart cofounder Sam Walton have been among its biggest sellers, unloading another $1.8 billion of stock over the past 12 months. A chunk of the proceeds likely helped fund Rob Walton’s record $4.7 billion purchase of the Denver Broncos last August. That investment is off to a slow start, with the team unexpectedly missing the NFL playoffs.

Here are the wealthiest people on Forbes’ annual rich list.

Bernard Arnault, head of luxury goods giant LVMH, is up $53 billion–more than any billionaire, and enough to vault him into No. 1 spot for the first time. Zhang Yiming, who founded Tik Tok-parent Bytedance, dropped one place, from No. 25 to No. 26, as his embattled company has taken a haircut from investors. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, known as CZ, fell from No. 19 last year all the way to No. 167 amid the crypto winter.