Elon Musk’s net worth has surged past $800 billion, setting yet another record and widening the gap between him and the next richest to more than $500 billion.
Key Facts
- Elon Musk is the richest person in the world, a title he’s held since May 2024.
- Larry Page overtook Larry Ellison to become the world’s second-wealthiest person in November.
- 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.
- 8/10 of the richest people in the world are Americans. The two non-U.S. citizens: France’s Bernard Arnault and Spain’s Amancio Ortega.
- All of the top ten richest people as of March 1 are men. Each of them is worth $148 billion or more, up from $142 billion last month.
After a wild January, the ranks of the world’s top 10 richest were mostly unchanged last month. Only two people swapped places: Warren Buffett moved up to no. 9 while Zara’s cofounder Amancio Ortega slipped to no. 10. Both were among just four of the 10 richest who added to their fortunes in February. The biggest gainer by far was Elon Musk who added $64 billion to his fortune over the past month (and more than $100 billion since the start of the year) and set yet another new wealth record. 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 for the first time ever. He was worth an estimated $839 billion as of 12 a.m. Eastern on March 1. Musk widened his more than half-a-trillion dollar lead over his runner-up, Google cofounder Larry Page, who lost $20 billion and is now worth an estimated $257 billion.
Many are now counting down the weeks or days until Musk becomes the first person on the planet ever to be worth $1 trillion. While markets are unpredictable, one big event that will impact his fortune is the expected IPO of SpaceX later this year.
Page, the world’s second richest person for the fourth straight month, was one of five American tech tycoons in the top 10 to lose $20 billion or more in February, as shares of Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Oracle all slipped. Jeff Bezos was the month’s biggest loser, as shares of Amazon slid 12%, lowering his net worth by $26 billion, to an estimated $224 billion.
Forbes has been tracking the world’s billionaires since 1987. In April 2025, we found 3,028 of them for our annual list.
Below are the 10 richest people on earth as of March 1, 2026 at 12 a.m. Eastern time, according to Forbes. As a group, they’re worth $2.6 trillion combined, roughly the same as last month. Stock prices fluctuate routinely, so these net worths typically change on a daily basis. Forbes tracks the daily changes on our Real Time list of billionaires.
Who are the top 10 richest people in the world?*
1. Elon Musk
2. Larry Page
3. Sergey Brin
4. Jeff Bezos
5. Mark Zuckerberg
6. Larry Ellison
7. Bernard Arnault
8. Jensen Huang
9. Warren Buffett (up from No. 10)
10. Amancio Ortega (down from No. 9)
*As of March 1, 2026 at 12 a.m. ET. Ranking changes since last month are in parenthesis.
1. Elon Musk
Net worth: $839 billion (up $64 billion since last month)
Source: SpaceX, Tesla,
Age: 54
Residence: Austin, Texas
Citizenship: U.S.
On February 3, Elon Musk became the first person ever worth $800 billion or more after his rocket maker SpaceX acquired his artificial intelligence and social media company xAI. Forbes estimates that the deal, which valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion, boosted Musk’s fortune by $84 billion, to a record $852 billion. Before the deal, Musk owned an estimated 42% stake in SpaceX worth $336 billion, based on a tender offer launched in December that valued the privately-held rocket maker at $800 billion. He also owned an estimated 49% stake in xAI worth $122 billion, based on a private fundraising round that valued that company at $250 billion in January. After the merger, which valued SpaceX at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion, Forbes estimates that Musk now owns a 43% stake in the combined company worth $542 billion. By far his most valuable asset, SpaceX, which he heads as CEO, is planning an IPO later this year.
On November 6, Tesla shareholders approved a record-breaking pay package that could give Musk up to $1 trillion in additional stock (before taxes and the cost of unlocking the restricted shares) if Tesla achieves “Mars shot” performance milestones like growing its market cap more than eightfold over the next 10 years. Musk owns about 12% of Tesla’s stock (excluding options) and has pledged some of his shares as collateral for loans. On December 19, the Delaware Supreme Court restored Musk’s Tesla stock options, which were voided by a lower court in 2024.
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, who became CEO of Tesla in 2008, took the company public in 2010. Musk famously cofounded OpenAI with Sam Altman as a non-profit in 2015 but he left the organization’s board three years later following a failed power grab. More recently, Musk and OpenAI have been battling in court over whether Musk is entitled to compensation for his contributions to OpenAI when it was still a nonprofit.
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: $257 billion (down $20 billion since last month)
Source: Google
Age: 52
Residence: Palo Alto, California
Citizenship: U.S.
Page has come a long way to take the title of the second-richest person on the planet. When Forbes locked in the 2025 World’s Billionaires List in March, he 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: $237 billion (down $18 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: $224 billion (down $26 billion since last month)
Source: Amazon
Age: 61
Residence: Miami, Florida
Citizenship: U.S.
Bezos is overseeing a significant, controversial restructuring of the Washington Post that includes laying off one-third of its staff. He is being vilified by many for destroying the paper that he first bought in 2013 to much fanfare. His interest certainly lies elsewhere. Bezos is now reportedly co-CEO of an AI startup called Project Prometheus. Worth a reported $30 billion, the startup, which will focus on engineering and manufacturing, is reportedly in the process of raising tens of billions. It’s his first operational role since retiring as Amazon’s CEO.
Bezos created e-commerce giant Amazon in 1994 and ran it as CEO until July 2021 (he remains executive chairman). That same month he traveled to space on a rocket built by private rocket company Blue Origin, which he founded and has funded with billions of dollars. (Blue Origin briefly sent an all-female crew to space in the spring of 2025—including pop star Katy Perry, CBS Mornings co-host Gayle King and Bezos’ second wife, Lauren Sanchez.)
Before founding Amazon.com in his garage in Seattle, Bezos worked at McDonald’s as a teen, graduated from Princeton and 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’ annual World’s Billionaires list from 2018 through 2021; he dropped to second richest on the 2022 ranking and No. 3 on the list from 2023 through 2025.
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 went public in 1997, 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. Mark Zuckerberg
Net worth: $222 billion (down $23 billion since last month)
Source: Meta (Facebook)
Age: 41
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.
6. Larry Ellison
Net worth: $191 billion (down $21 billion since last month)
Source: Oracle
Age: 81
Residence: Manalapan, Florida
Citizenship: U.S.
In 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 as Warner Bros. Discovery recently accepted Paramount’s $111 billion offer to buy the media giant. 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 chief technology officer and President Donald Trump’s new neighbor—already controls.
The longtime California resident, who told Oracle employees in 2020 that he had moved full-time to his Hawaiian island Lanai (now assessed at $1.2 billion), has officially changed his residency to 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. Ellison Oracle shares currently worth $158 billion after discounting the stock he’s pledged to secure loans. 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. Since then, Oracle’s shares have slid by more than 50% as some analysts have raised questions about an AI bubble, the profit margins on Oracle’s cloud infrastructure sales and their dependence upon a partnership with OpenAI.
7. Bernard Arnault
Net worth: $171 billion (up $2 billion since last month)
Source: LVMH/ luxury goods
Age: 76
Residence: Paris
Citizenship: France
Arnault is CEO and chairman of luxury goods group LVMH. 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. 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.
8. Jensen Huang
Net worth: $154 billion (down $12 billion since last month)
Source: Semiconductors
Age: 62
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.
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. Warren Buffett
Net worth: $149 billion (up $7 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 more than $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.
10. Amancio Ortega
Net worth: $148 billion (up $3 billion since last month)
Source: Zara
Age: 89
Residence: La Coruna, Spain
Citizenship: Spain
A pioneer of fast fashion, Ortega cofounded Inditex, known for its Zara fashion chain, with his ex-wife Rosalia Mera (d. 2013) in 1975. He owns about 60% of Madrid-listed Inditex, which has 8 brands, including Massimo Dutti and Pull & Bear, and 5,000 stores around the world. In 2022, after working at Inditex for 15 years, his daughter Marta Ortega Pérez became chairperson of the company. Ortega earns more than $400 million a year in dividends, which he reinvests primarily in real estate across Europe and North America.
Who is the richest man in the world?
As of March 1, 2026, the planet’s wealthiest man is Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. He’s worth $839 billion. He moved into the number one spot in late May 2024, overtaking Bernard Arnault of France.
Who is the richest woman in the world?
The planet’s wealthiest woman is Alice Walton, daughter of Walmart founder Sam Walton. As of March 1, 2026, she is worth an estimated $134 billion and is the world’s 14th-richest person, up from no. 15 last month. Her fortune lies in her ownership stake in retailer Walmart, which she inherited from her late father. Her brothers Rob, Jim and John (d. 2005) also inherited stakes in Walmart from their father. John’s widow Christy Walton and their son Lukas Walton inherited John’s shares and both rank on Forbes’ billionaires list.
This story was originally published on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
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