Forbes asked 34 billionaires in early 2025 how they thought the S&P 500 would fare. Turns out, not even billionaires can see the future.
Even market masters can’t predict the future. In early 2025, we polled 34 billionaires, asking how each thought the S&P 500 would fare over the year. More than half of them were way off.
The S&P ended the year up the year up 16%. That’s an above average return for the index, which has returned around 10% annually over the past seven decades, though lower than 23% and 24% in 2024 and 2023, respectively. The billionaires, however, were less bullish. Nearly half thought the market would be flat or down in 2025. Another 35%—the largest group of all—thought the market would be up, but only by single digits. Only 7 billionaires of the 34 polled, or 21%, correctly guessed that the S&P would end the year up between 10% and 20%.
“I’m very optimistic about AI generally–and that’s why I thought that the benefits of AI were going to come much earlier than predicted,” says investor Samir Mane, Albania’s first billionaire, who accurately predicted the range of the S&P’s return this year.Megacap growth stocks like Alphabet and Nvidia, in addition to other AI beneficiaries such as Broadcom and Palantir, have powered the bull market’s boom. AI-related stocks have been responsible for around 75% of S&P 500 total returns, according to J.P. Morgan. Mane says he expects 2026 to be another successful year for the index, thanks again to AI companies.
Others who, like Mane, guessed right include real estate mogul Larry Connor, medical devices tycoon Joe Kiani, and Florida investor and soon-to-be Pittsburgh Penguins owner David Hoffmann.
Ask A Billionaire
Forbes polled 34 billionaires on how the S&P 500 would perform in 2025. Only 7 of them correctly guessed a 10% to 20% return.
On the other side, 35% of billionaires wrongly predicted the market would be down to some degree, including 9% who predicted it would be down more than 20%. Florida homebuilder Pat Neal was among the skeptics.
“I’m surprised to see [the S&P 500] do well, I predicted it would not,” says the 76-year-old, who guessed the market would be down 10% to 20%. “I thought that the S&P would more closely track the economy, and as I’m in the building business and interest rates are high, I did not have an optimistic prediction for the economy as a whole or the [index]…And then if you asked me about 2026, I’m not as optimistic, but I was also wrong in 2025.”
Other doomsayers who called for a negative 2025 return include French logistics billionaire Eric Hémar, Canadian financial services billionaire Stephen Smith and Canadian real estate billionaire Bill Malhotra.
Not that these billionaires did much better than everyday investors—or the pros. As of early December 2024, Bank of America was predicting a 10% return in 2025, while Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were calling for around 7.5%. A survey from Vanguard found that the public thought the market would return 6.4% in 2025.
Where the billionaires fared much better was in their individual stock-picking prowess. Forbes also asked each person to name one stock they’d recommend someone buy or own. Three, including Neal, picked Nvidia (up 39% in 2025). Other picks included Howard Hughes Corporation (up 4%), XP (up 38%), Palantir (135%) and Robinhood (up 200%). Of the 18 specific stock picks offered by billionaires, only two lost value in 2025: Indonesian beverage company Tanobel (down 37%) and the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (down 6%).
The planet’s billionaires are heading into 2026 richer than ever—and poised for another great year, at least according to Mane, who accurately predicted 2025’s market return. Then again, he says to take even a billionaire’s advice with a grain of salt: “If we could perfectly predict the stock market, we would not be billionaires. We would be trillionaires.”
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This story was originally published on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
