Only two of the world’s ten wealthiest people got richer over the past month amid a broad sell-off of tech stocks. One of them is the world’s first trillionaire.
Key Facts
- Elon Musk is the richest person in the world, a title he’s held since May 2024. He became the first trillionaire in June.
- Larry Page became only the third person, including Musk and Larry Ellison, ever to be worth more than $300 billion in April. His fortune dipped to an estimated $291 billion in June.
- Warren Buffett rejoins the top ten after a three-month absence as his ranking jumped from No. 11 in June to No. 10 as of July 1.
- Bill Gates dropped out of the top 10 richest in October 2024 after Forbes obtained new information that led to a significant contraction in his fortune.
- 9 of the 10 richest people in the world are Americans. The one non-U.S. citizen: France’s Bernard Arnault.
- All of the top ten richest people as of July 1 are men. Each of them is worth $148 billion or more, up from $141 billion last month.
Elon Musk became the first trillionaire in world history in June after SpaceX went public during the month, helping boost the fortune of the rocketmaker’s founder by an estimated $218 billion over the past 30 days, to an estimated $1.053 trillion as of July 1 at 12 a.m. Eastern time. The rest of the top 10 richest people on the planet didn’t fare so well, as their net worths fell by $181 billion combined, amid a broad sell-off of technology stocks that saw the tech-heavy Nasdaq drop by nearly 3% (or almost three times the S&P 500’s nearly 1% decline).
Musk is now more than three-and-a-half times richer than the world’s second wealthiest person, Google cofounder Larry Page, whose fortune fell by an estimated $18 billion, to $291 billion, as shares of Google’s parent company Alphabet fell by 6%. The fortune of his cofounder Sergey Brin, meanwhile, declined by an estimated $16 billion, to $269 billion. Despite their losses, Page’s and Brin’s ranks remained unchanged at No. 2 and No. 3 richest, respectively. The second biggest loser of the month, Jeff Bezos, also held onto the No. 4 spot, even though his fortune fell by an estimated $28 billion, to $249 billion, as Amazon’s stock sank by 12%.
June’s biggest loser was May’s biggest winner. After adding an estimated $71 billion to his fortune the previous month as Oracle’s stock soared by 40%, Larry Ellison saw his net worth fall by an estimated $84 billion, to $192 billion, in June as shares of his software and cloud computing giant sank by 35%. That dropped Ellison, who briefly became the world’s second richest person in early June, from No. 5 richest on last month’s top 10 to No. 7 this month.
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The decline of Ellison’s fortune made room for Michael Dell and Mark Zuckerberg to each move up one ranking, to No. 5 and No. 6, respectively, despite seeing their own net worths fall. Zuckerberg was the month’s third biggest loser, as his fortune shrank by an estimated $24 billion, to $194 billion, as shares of Facebook’s parent company Meta dropped by 11%. Dell’s net worth, meanwhile, dipped by a relatively modest $9 billion, to an estimated $235 billion, as Dell Technologies’ stock rose by only 3% and shares of Broadcom (which acquired Dell Technologies’ cloud software spinoff VMware in 2023) fell by 15%.
Frenchman Bernard Arnault of luxury goods conglomerate LVMH remained in the No. 9 spot, despite being the only member of last month’s top 10 other than Musk who didn’t get poorer; his fortune remained unchanged at an estimated $147.9 billion. Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, meanwhile, dropped out of the top 10 this month, after his fortune fell by an estimated $20 billion, to $121 billion, as shares of the company the world’s 19th richest person, Bill Gates (estimated fortune: $106 billion) cofounded slid by 17%. That dropped Ballmer from No. 10 to No. 15 richest. Warren Buffett, whose net worth increased by an estimated $8 billion, to $147.8 billion, as Berkshire Hathaway’s stock rose by 5%, took his place at No. 10. On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Buffett won’t be making his annual midyear donation of Berkshire stock to the Gates Foundation until a review of the nonprofit’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein is completed.
Forbes has been tracking the world’s billionaires since 1987. In March 2026, we found 3,428 of them for our annual list. Below are the 10 richest people on earth as of July 1, 2026 at 12 a.m. Eastern time, according to Forbes. They’re worth $2.951 trillion combined, up $37 billion since last month’s top 10. Stock prices fluctuate routinely, so these net worths typically change on a daily basis. Forbes tracks the daily changes on our Real-Time Billionaires list.
Who are the top 10 richest people in the world?*
1. Elon Musk
2. Larry Page
3. Sergey Brin
4. Jeff Bezos
5. Michael Dell (up from No. 6)
6. Mark Zuckerberg (up from No. 7)
7. Larry Ellison (down from No. 5)
8. Jensen Huang
9. Bernard Arnault
10. Warren Buffett (up from No. 11)
*As of July 1, 2026 at 12 a.m. ET. Ranking changes since last month are in parenthesis.
1. Elon Musk
Net worth: $1.053 trillion (up $218 billion since last month)
Source: SpaceX, Tesla
Age: 55
Residence: Austin, Texas
Citizenship: U.S.
On June 12, Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire, after his rocketmaker SpaceX went public on the Nasdaq and closed its first trading day with a nearly $2.2 trillion market cap. Musk, who serves as chairman, CEO and chief technical officer of SpaceX, owns 4.8 billion shares of the rocketmaker, worth $814 billion as of July 1 at 12 a.m. Eastern time. He has another 350 million stock options with an exercise price of $8.40 per share, worth $57 billion, giving him a 38% stake in the company, worth $871 billion. Before SpaceX’s IPO, Forbes had been valuing Musk’s estimated 40% stake (before dilution from the offering) at around $500 billion, based on the $1.25 trillion valuation of SpaceX’s merger with Musk’s artificial intelligence and social media company xAI in February. (xAI previously merged with X–formerly Twitter–in March 2025.)
Musk also owns a nearly 11% stake in $1.6 trillion (market cap) Tesla, worth $166 billion, plus restricted stock that could give him another 8% upon vesting. The restricted shares were previously vested stock options that Musk received as part of his 2018 CEO performance award, which was voided by a Delaware judge in 2024 and restored by the Delaware Supreme Court in 2025. Tesla and Musk entered into a new agreement in April that turned the options upon exercise (which Musk did on June 16) into restricted stock that Musk will forfeit unless he remains at Tesla through January 2028 as CEO or “an executive officer responsible for the Company’s product development or operations.” To be consistent with how we treat other billionaires’ unvested restricted stock, Forbes then removed the restricted shares, currently worth $128 billion, from our calculation of Musk’s fortune..
Also not included in Forbes’ estimate of Musk’s net worth: huge sets of performance-based restricted shares that could boost his stakes in SpaceX and Tesla to as much as 47% and 29%, respectively, before taxes and the cost of unlocking the restricted shares. To earn all that stock, Musk will have to achieve lofty goals like growing SpaceX and Tesla’s market caps to $7.5 trillion and $8.5 trillion, respectively, and establishing a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants.
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 the 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 famously cofounded OpenAI with Sam Altman as a nonprofit in 2015 but he left the organization’s board three years later following a failed power grab. More recently, Musk sued OpenAI arguing that he was entitled to compensation for his contributions to the firm. The suit was thrown out on procedural grounds in May, though Musk is likely to appeal.
Musk first became the world’s richest person in September 2021 and was the world’s richest person for most of 2022—before falling from the top spot in December 2022. 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 and has held onto the top spot ever since. In October, he became the first person ever worth $500 billion. In December, he crossed both the $600 billion and $700 billion marks. In February, his net worth passed $800 billion.
2. Larry Page
Net worth: $291 billion (down $18 billion since last month)
Source: Google
Age: 53
Residence: Palo Alto, California
Citizenship: U.S.
Page has come a long way to take the titles of the second-richest person on the planet and the third ever person worth at least $300 billion. He achieved the latter feat in April, before falling just below the $300 billion mark in June. When Forbes locked in the 2025 World’s Billionaires List in March of last year, Page ranked No. 7, with an estimated $144 billion fortune. A decade ago, he ranked No. 19.
Page cofounded search engine Google with fellow Stanford Ph.D student Sergey Brin in 1998 and served as CEO until 2001 and from 2011 to 2015. Page now serves as a board member of Google’s parent company Alphabet and continues to be a controlling shareholder. He is reportedly working on a new AI startup called Dynatomics that is focused on product manufacturing.
In late 2024, 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. The decision may have been one reason that Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai attended Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2025. In the biggest antitrust case in decades, a federal judge ruled in September 2025 that Google does not have to sell Chrome.
Page was a founding investor in asteroid mining company Planetary Resources, which was acquired by blockchain firm ConsenSys in 2018. He recently bought a home in Florida, apparently in response to California’s threat to tax billionaires’ wealth.
3. Sergey Brin
Net worth: $269 billion (down $16 billion since last month)
Source: Google
Age: 52
Residence: Los Altos, California
Citizenship: U.S.
While Page keeps a notoriously low profile, Brin is back helping Alphabet with AI strategy. He first came out of semi-retirement to submit changes to Google’s Gemini AI chatbot in 2024 and was listed as a “core contributor” when the model was released in December of that year. Like his cofounder, Brin currently serves as a board member of Google’s parent company Alphabet and is a controlling shareholder. In late November, Brin reported gifting $1.1 billion of Alphabet stock, almost all of it to his nonprofit Catalyst4, which focuses on conditions of the central nervous system and climate change. Brin, who reportedly bought homes in Malibu and on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe, is apparently backing a California nonprofit that’s working to make housing more affordable, as the state weighs the idea of a new wealth tax on the uber-rich.
4. Jeff Bezos
Net worth: $249 billion (down $28 billion since last month)
Source: Amazon
Age: 62
Residence: Miami, Florida
Citizenship: U.S.
In a wide-ranging interview in May, the Amazon founder sounded off on taxes, including arguing that the bottom half of wage earners should not pay taxes at all, and unveiled scant details of a new AI startup called Prometheus. Bezos is co-CEO of the company, an “artificial general engineer” that will “make it much easier for engineers to design physical objects.” It announced that it closed a funding round at a $41 billion valuation in June, though Forbes has not yet been able to verify Bezos’ stake in the company or how much he has personally invested in it. It’s his first operational role since retiring as Amazon’s CEO in July 2021.
Bezos created the e-commerce giant in 1994 and remains executive chairman. The same month he retired as chief executive, he traveled to space on a rocket built by private rocket company Blue Origin, which he founded and has funded with billions of dollars.
Before founding Amazon.com in his Seattle garage, Bezos worked at McDonald’s as a teen, graduated from Princeton and took a job in New York at hedge fund D.E. Shaw where he met his first wife MacKenzie Scott. 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’ annual World’s Billionaires list from 2018 through 2021; he dropped to second richest on the 2022 ranking, No. 3 on the list from 2023 through 2025, and No. 4 on the 2026 ranking.
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 8% of the company. Since Amazon’s1997 IPO, Forbes calculates that Bezos has sold more than $49 billion worth of his stock. Through his Bezos Expeditions, he has invested in an array of companies, including Airbnb and software firm Workday.
5. Michael Dell
Net worth: $235 billion (down $9 billion since last month)
Source: Dell Technologies
Age: 61
Residence: Austin, Texas
Citizenship: United States
Dell got his start at 19 selling computers out of his University of Texas dorm room, grossing $80,000 by the end of his freshman year. Today, he is chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, which was formed in 2016 via Dell’s $60 billion merger with computer storage giant EMC.
He took his namesake company public in 1988, then private (with private equity firm Silver Lake Partners) in 2013, then public again in late 2018, through a complicated financial restructuring. Dell’s cloud software arm, VMware, was spun off in 2021; Microchip firm Broadcom bought it in 2023 for $69 billion, 39% of which went to Dell.
6. Mark Zuckerberg
Net worth: $194 billion (down $24 billion since last month)
Source: Meta (Facebook)
Age: 42
Residence: Palo Alto, California
Citizenship: U.S.
Zuckerberg cofounded Facebook when he was a student at Harvard University in 2004. Now called Meta, 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, who remains CEO, took the company public in 2012 and still owns about 13% of it.
In October, Zuckerberg was in the audience at the Wall Street Journal’s Innovator of the Year Awards, when his wife Priscilla Chan took home the top prize for her role in the couple’s philanthropy focused on curing and presenting diseases–and the singer Billie Eilish asked the crowd, “If you’re a billionaire, why are you a billionaire?” In February, he and Priscilla were pictured in the front row at Prada fashion show in Milan. Meta and Prada are reportedly collaborating to make high-end smart glasses.
7. Larry Ellison
Net worth: $192 billion (down $84 billion since last month)
Source: Oracle
Age: 81
Residence: Manalapan, Florida
Citizenship: U.S.
Last August, Larry Ellison teamed up with his son David to help pull off the merger of Paramount and David’s Skydance Media. Now the father-son team are making a much bigger gamble with Paramount’s $111 billion offer to buy media giant Warner Bros Discovery. If regulators clear the deal, one of the largest mergers in history will hand the Ellisons unprecedented sway over American media—CBS and CNN under one roof, HBO Max and Paramount+ fused, and Warner Bros. and Paramount Pictures sharing a parent. That’s on top of the tech and real estate empire the elder Ellison—Oracle’s cofounder, chairman and chief technology officer, and President Donald Trump’s new neighbor—already controls.
A longtime California resident who also owns the Hawaiian island Lanai (assessed at more than $1 billion), Ellison is now an official resident of Manalapan, Florida, roughly a 20-minute drive from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago.
Despite all the hype around his dealmaking and Trump ties, Ellison still gets a huge part of his fortune from Oracle, the software company he cofounded in 1977. Oracle was part of a consortium that bought TikTok’s U.S. business in a deal valuing the company at $14 billion in January. In mid-September, Ellison was briefly the second ever person worth $400 billion, and was within $40 billion of Musk, thanks to Oracle’s rosy revenue projections for its cloud infrastructure business (mostly to power AI) that pushed shares up 36% in a single day. Oracle shares have since slid by more than 50%, even with the recent runup.
8. Jensen Huang
Net worth: $173 billion (down $9 billion since last month)
Source: Semiconductors
Age: 63
Residence: Los Altos, California
Citizenship: U.S.
Huang cofounded Nvidia in 1993 and has served as its CEO and president ever since. He owns approximately 3% of the company, which he took public in 1999. Under Huang, Nvidia’s GPUs became dominant first in computer gaming and now in AI, helping it become the first ever company worth $5 trillion in October before giving up some of its gains.
Born in Taiwan, Huang moved to Thailand as a child, but his family sent him and his brother to the U.S as civil unrest mounted in the Asian nation.
9. Bernard Arnault
Net worth: $147.9 billion (unchanged since last month)
Source: LVMH
Age: 77
Residence: Paris, France
Citizenship: France
Arnault is CEO and chairman of luxury goods group LVMH. His 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 75 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. In 2024, Arnault nominated two of his sons—Alexandre and Frédéric—to the board of LVMH; 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 2024, 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.
10. Warren Buffet
Net worth: $147.8 billion (up $8 billion since last month)
Source: Berkshire Hathaway
Age: 95
Residence: Omaha, Nebraska
Citizenship: U.S.
Known as the “Oracle of Omaha,” Buffett is one of the most successful investors of all time. The son of a U.S. congressman, he first bought stock at age 11 and first filed taxes at age 13. At the end of December, he retired as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, which owns dozens of companies, including insurer Geico, battery maker Duracell and restaurant chain Dairy Queen. He will remain the company’s chairman.
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 given away some $68 billion, mostly through the Gates Foundation (formerly the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), foundations run by his children and one started by his late first wife. On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Buffett won’t be making his annual midyear donation of Berkshire stock to the Gates Foundation until a review of the nonprofit’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein is completed.
Who is the richest man in the world?
As of July 1, 2026, the planet’s wealthiest man is Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. He’s worth $1.053 trillion. He moved into the number one spot in late May 2024, overtaking Bernard Arnault of France. He became the first trillionaire in world history in June.
Who is the richest woman in the world?
The planet’s wealthiest woman is Alice Walton, daughter of Walmart founder Sam Walton. As of July 1, 2026, she is worth an estimated $121 billion and is the world’s 16th-richest person, down from No. 15 in June. Her fortune lies in her ownership stake in Walmart, which she inherited from her late father. Her brothers Rob and Jim Walton also rank on Forbes’ billionaires list, alongside their late brother John Walton’s (d. 2005) widow Christy Walton and their son Lukas Walton.
This story was originally published on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
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