Just how difficult is it to make the Forbes 400 list of America’s richest people these days? Consider this: There are now a record 590 American billionaires who are simply not rich enough.
Illustration by Neil Jamieson for Forbes
With the AI and data center boom in full swing and the U.S. stock market near an all-time high, it now takes a record $4.4 billion to rank among the nation’s 400 wealthiest people. That’s $600 million more than last year and $2.7 billion more than a decade ago. In all, this year’s Forbes 400 is richer than ever, worth a combined $8 trillion, up from $6.6 trillion in 2025.
The massive gains start at the top of the list. Elon Musk was already the richest American of all-time last year, with a fortune of $428 billion. Since then, he has more than doubled his wealth over the past 12 months, getting $480 billion richer after taking his rocket maker SpaceX public in the biggest IPO in history in June (and briefly becoming the planet’s first-ever trillionaire).
Musk is now worth an estimated $908 billion—a staggering $530 billion more than the list’s No. 2, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who himself is $137 billion wealthier than a year ago (and ranks two spots higher), thanks to a rise in the ecommerce giant’s stock and a much higher valuation of his own rocket firm, Blue Origin.
The net worth difference between Musk and Bezos now spans more than three and a half Warren Buffetts, or the bottom 105 billionaires on this year’s Forbes 400 combined.
Alphabet cofounder Larry Page ranks third on this year’s list, worth $278 billion, thanks to a nearly 60% rise in shares of the Google parent company amid a strong year for Google Cloud and Google’s Gemini AI tools. His cofounder, the more charitable (and twice divorced) Sergey Brin ranks fifth, worth $256 billion. In between them, at No. 4, is Michael Dell, whose Dell Technologies is seeing a spike in AI server orders. Overall, the 20 very richest people in America have gotten nearly $1 trillion richer over the past year; as a group, they are now worth a record $4 trillion. Fifteen of them are centibillionaires, meaning someone with a net worth of at least $100 billion. Forbes calculated net worths using share prices from September 4, 2026.
Despite the record high bar for entry, 34 newcomers managed to wrest a spot on the list. Among the new faces are more than a dozen artificial intelligence moguls, including the youngest newcomer, 30-year-old Cognition AI cofounder Steven Hao ($5.8 billion); six cofounders of Claude developer Anthropic (estimated net worths: $15.5 billion each), including Daniela Amodei, who is now the second richest self-made woman in the nation; and Greg Brockman, the cofounder of ChatGPT giant OpenAI, who is the richest newcomer of all this year, worth an estimated $25.5 billion. But AI is far from the only path to super-riches these days. Other newcomers include David MacNeil ($5 billion), whose WeatherTech sells floormats, sunshades and other car accessories; Robert Low ($5.6 billion), who amassed a fortune in trucking and logistics; and U.S. commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, who steered his Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald into an investment in fast-growing crypto firm Tether before taking office and who is now worth an estimated $7.3 billion.
The biggest gainer in sheer dollars was Musk, but the biggest gainer in percentage terms was Josh Kushner, the venture capitalist son of real estate mogul Charles Kushner (and brother-in-law of Ivanka Trump), whose net worth has shot up by more than 220%, to $16.7 billion, this year thanks to his VC firm Thrive Capital nearly tripling its assets under management with smart bets on OpenAI and SpaceX.
There are 62 women on the 2026 Forbes 400 (or around 16% of the list), the same number as last year. The richest woman in America remains Alice Walton, the only daughter of Walmart cofounder Sam Walton (d. 1992). Shares of the retailing giant are up more than 10% since last year, helping Walton widen her lead over the nation’s second-wealthiest woman, Julia Koch (estimated net worth: $84.6 billion), an heir to the Koch, Inc. conglomerate fortune. The richest self-made woman is still Diane Hendricks ($23.6 billion), who cofounded Wisconsin-based roofing supply company ABC Supply. She is one of just 13 self-made women on this year’s list, flat from last year.
This year, there are ten members of The Forbes 400 who are under 40, up from just four last year, as the AI boom has propelled seven young new billionaires into the ranks. Among the ten youngest: Hao, Brockman, four Anthropic cofounders and Palmer Luckey, who created the Oculus virtual reality headset in his teens, sold his company to Facebook and has since gone on to multiply his fortune with AI-powered defense tech startup Anduril. The oldest listee is timber baron Archie Aldis Emmerson, who is 97. The average age is 70. Overall, 71% of listees are self-made, meaning they built their fortune rather than inheriting it, the same as in 2025.
Of the 360 billionaires who made both the 2025 and 2026 lists, three-quarters of them are richer than they were a year ago. Just 81 of them are poorer than last year, including biggest dollar-loser Larry Ellison ($204 billion), who is down by $72 billion as Oracle investors have cooled on his software firm’s debt-fueled AI investment spree, and biggest percentage-loser Michael Saylor ($4.6 billion), whose big bet on Bitcoin has sent shares of his publicly traded firm Strategy down 57% over the past year as the crypto token has slumped.
President Donald Trump has fallen 44 spots this year, from No. 201 last year to No. 245, amid declines in the value of his publicly traded $TRUMP meme coin and Truth Social parent company Trump Media & Technology Group. Trump is now worth an estimated $7 billion, down from $7.3 billion a year ago.
Trump is part of the 44% of Forbes 400 members who have donated less than 1% of their fortune, according to Forbes’ annual investigation into the lifetime charitable giving of every member of the ranking. Last year, 39% of the list had given less than 1%—meaning that, as the richest Americans’ net worths have shot up, their generosity has not increased. In all, nearly 80% of the list has given away less than 5% of their riches, though the number of super-high givers is growing. This year, Forbes found 13 billionaires who have given at least 20% of their wealth, earning a rare 5 giving score.
Thirty four members of last year’s ranking dropped off this year’s list, including legendary corporate raider and longtime listee Carl Icahn, whose publicly traded Icahn Enterprises stock continued its yearslong decline over the past 12 months; David Baszucki, cofounder and CEO of publicly traded Roblox, which is seeing fewer users spending less on the kids gaming platform, helping send the stock down 65%; and Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, whose crypto exchange Gemini, which went public in September 2025, pushed them onto the 2025 list but has since shed 85% of its value amid big losses and trading volume declines, wiping them from the 2026 ranking. A further six members of the 2025 ranking passed away, including nonagenarian media tycoon Donald Newhouse and OnlyFans owner Leonid Radvinsky, who died of cancer in March at age 43.
For more information on how Forbes compiles The Forbes 400, see here.
For the full 2026 Forbes 400 list, see here.
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