There’s a new member of the $300 billion club and a second sibling from America’s richest family among the planet’s ten wealthiest people.
Key Facts
- Elon Musk is the richest person in the world, a title he’s held since May 2024.
- Larry Page Is now worth more than $300 billion, and is only the third person, including Musk and Larry Ellison, ever to be worth that much.
- Sergey Brin overtook Jeff Bezos to become the world’s third-wealthiest person as of May 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.
- All of the richest people in the world are Americans for the first time in more than three years. The one non-U.S. citizen last month, France’s Bernard Arnault, has slipped out of the top 10.
- All of the top ten richest people as of May 1 are men. Each of them is worth $147 billion or more, up from $142 billion last month.
April was a great month to be a billionaire, as the S&P 500 and Nasdaq soared by 9% and 15%, respectively, boosting the fortunes of the world’s ten richest people–all of them Americans–to $2.7 trillion combined as of May 1 at 12 a.m. Eastern time. As a group, they’re $260 billion richer than they were a month ago, but no one fared better than Google cofounder Larry Page, who became the third person ever worth at least $300 billion on Thursday.
Page, who ranks as the world’s second richest person for the sixth straight month, saw his fortune soar by $76 billion, to an estimated $313 billion, as shares of Google’s parent company Alphabet soared by more than 33% over the past month. Page is still $469 billion poorer than Elon Musk, but he’s closed the gap from $580 billion at the start of April.
Musk, whose net worth declined by $35 billion (or 4%), to an estimated $782 billion, is the only person in the top 10 whose fortune fell over the past 30 days. That’s mostly because Forbes lowered its estimate of Musk’s stake in $1.25 trillion SpaceX from 43% to 40%, based on an updated corporate filing in Alaska released in April.
Page’s Google cofounder Sergey Brin was the month’s second biggest gainer and climbed from No. 4 to No. 3 richest, after seeing his net worth skyrocket by $70 billion, to an estimated $289 billion. Brin swapped spots with the third biggest gainer, Jeff Bezos, who fell one spot to No. 4 despite a $49 billion increase in his net worth, as Amazon’s stock jumped by 27%.
The month’s fourth biggest gainer was Michael Dell, whose net worth grew by $34 billion, to an estimated $177 billion, after shares of Dell Technologies and Broadcom (which acquired Dell Technologies spinoff VMWare in 2023) climbed by 27% and 35%, respectively. Dell rose from No. 8 to No. 7 richest and traded ranks with Jensen Huang. The month’s fifth biggest gainer, the Nvidia cofounder is $22 billion richer, thanks to a 14% increase in the chipmaking giant’s stock.
Walmart heir Jim Walton joined the top 10 for the first time in at least three years, climbing two spots to No. 10 richest and landing right behind his brother, Rob Walton, who cracked the top 10 last month and held steady this month at No. 9. Both Waltons saw their fortunes grow by $7 billion, to an estimated $147 billion and $150 billion, respectively, as shares of Walmart rose by 6%. Jim Walton replaced Frenchman Bernard Arnault of luxury goods conglomerate LVMH, who was the only member of last month’s top 10 who dropped out this month. Arnault slid from No. 10 to No. 11 richest, as his fortune inched down by less than $1 billion, to an estimated $142 billion. It’s the first time in more than three years that Arnault has fallen outside the top 10–and that the top 10 has only included Americans at the end of the month.
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 May 1, 2026 at 12 a.m. Eastern time, according to Forbes. 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 (up from No. 4)
4. Jeff Bezos (down from No. 3)
5. Mark Zuckerberg
6. Larry Ellison
7. Michael Dell (up from No. 8)
8. Jensen Huang (down from No. 7)
9. Rob Walton
10. Jim Walton (up from No. 12)
*As of April 1, 2026 at 12 a.m. ET. Ranking changes since last month are in parenthesis.
The World’s 10 Richest People
The combined net worth of the planet’s wealthiest individuals and how their fortunes have shifted this month.
Elon Musk
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, in a deal that valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion. Forbes estimates that Musk now owns a 40% stake in the combined company worth $500 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 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.
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.
Musk first became the world’s richest person in September 2021. He fell to No. 2 on January 31, 2024 and 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.
Larry Page
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. When Forbes locked in the 2025 World’s Billionaires List last 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. 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.
Sergey Brin
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.
Jeff Bezos
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. 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.
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.
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.
Mark Zuckerberg
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. 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.
Larry Ellison
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.
The longtime California resident, who told Oracle employees in 2020 that he had moved full-time to his Hawaiian island Lanai (now assessed at more than $1 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’s Oracle shares are currently worth more than $170 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.
Michael Dell
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.
Jensen Huang
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.
Rob Walton
Rob Walton is the eldest son of Walmart founder Sam Walton, who Rob succeeded as chairman when his father died in 1992. Rob retired as chairman in 2015 and was replaced by his son-in-law, Greg Penner. He retired from Walmart’s board altogether in 2024.
Rob is one of five billionaire heirs of Sam Walton, who share a nearly 45% stake in Walmart alongside charitable trusts in the name of Rob’s brother John Walton (d. 2005). Rob owns the NFL’s Denver Broncos with his daughter and son in-law, and is reported to have quietly bought a 10% stake in the MLB’s Arizona Diamondbacks two years ago.
Jim Walton
Jim Walton is the youngest son of Walmart’s founder. He is chairman of the family’s Arvest Bank Group, which boasts assets of $27 billion. Jim sat on Walmart’s board for more than a decade before yielding the seat to his son, Steuart, in 2016. His daughter Annie Proietti chairs the family’s $8.6 billion (2024 assets) Walton Family Foundation.
Jim joined the top 10 for the first time in at least three years this month, climbing two spots and replacing France’s Bernard Arnault, who slid from No. 10 to No. 11. It’s the first time in more than three years that Arnault has fallen outside the top 10, and that the top 10 has only included Americans at the end of the month.
Who is the richest man in the world?
As of May 1, 2026, the planet’s wealthiest man is Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. He’s worth $782 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 May 1, 2026, she is worth an estimated $138 billion and is the world’s 13th-richest person, just like last month. Her fortune lies in her ownership stake in Walmart, which she inherited from her late father. Her late brother John Walton’s (d. 2005) 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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