U.S. stock markets hit new all-time highs in September. But three of the ten wealthiest people on the planet are still poorer than a month ago.
Key Takeaways
- Elon Musk is the richest person in the world, a title he’s held since May 2024.
- Larry Ellison remains the world’s second wealthiest person for the fourth month in a row.
- Bill Gates dropped out of the top 10 richest in October 2024 after Forbes obtained new information about a significant contraction in his fortune.
- 9/10 of the 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 September 1 are men. Each of them is worth $150 billion or more, up from $143 billion last month.
The world’s top 10 richest people got $201 billion richer in September, as U.S. stock markets hit new all-time highs during the month. As a group, this elite subset of Forbes’ billionaires list is now worth $2.3 trillion combined as of 12 AM Eastern on October 1, and all but three of them are wealthier than they were at the end of August.
The world’s two richest people, Elon Musk and Larry Ellison, were also the two biggest gainers, accounting for nearly three-quarters of the top 10’s total increase in wealth. Musk added $75.2 billion to his fortune as Tesla’s stock soared by 33%, helping Musk secure the No. 1 spot for the 17th straight month. With a $491 billion fortune, Musk is now within spitting distance of becoming the first person ever worth half a trillion dollars. Musk also widened his lead over runner-up Ellison to $149 billion, despite a $70.9 billion boost to the Oracle cofounder’s net worth as shares of his software giant shot up by 24%.
Nvidia cofounder Jensen Huang was the only member of the top 10 who moved up in the ranking—and one of only three whose ranking changed. Huang jumped two spots to No. 7, as shares of his chipmaker climbed by 7% and boosted Huang’s fortune by $10.7 billion. That was enough for Huang to overtake the top 10’s lone non-American, Frenchman Bernard Arnault of LVMH, and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who each dropped a spot to No. 8 and No. 9, respectively, despite both of them getting slightly richer over the past month.
The world’s fourth richest person, Jeff Bezos, was the biggest loser, as shares of Amazon fell by 4%, shaving $8.4 billion off the fortune of the retailer’s founder. Mark Zuckerberg (No. 3) and Warren Buffett (No. 10) also saw their fortunes fall by $1.5 billion and $200 million, respectively.
Forbes has been keeping track of 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 October 1, 2025 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 Ellison
3. Mark Zuckerberg
4. Jeff Bezos
5. Larry Page
6. Sergey Brin
7. Jensen Huang (up from No. 9 last month)
8. Bernard Arnault (down from No. 7 last month)
9. Steve Ballmer (down from No. 8 last month)
10. Warren Buffett
*As of September 1, 2025 at 12 a.m. ET
1. Elon Musk
Net worth: $490.8 billion (up $75.2 billion since last month)
Source: Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, X (formerly Twitter)
Age: 54
Residence: Austin, Texas
Citizenship: U.S.
Tesla investors are bullish about the prospect of a refocused Musk, after the EV maker’s self-proclaimed technoking bought $1 billion of Tesla stock on September 12, a week after the company’s board proposed 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. That plus investor enthusiasm for the company’s AI and robotics plans helped send Tesla’s shares soaring by 33% in September.
Musk is CEO of Tesla and rocket firm SpaceX; chairman and chief technology officer of social media company X, formerly known as Twitter; and founder of artificial intelligence firm xAI. In late March, xAI acquired X at a valuation that Musk stated was $45 billion (including debt); Musk paid $44 billion (including debt) to acquire Twitter in 2022.
He owns about 12% of Tesla’s stock and has pledged some of his stock as collateral for loans. The electric car maker’s shareholders voted in June 2024 in favor of Musk keeping performance based stock options that would be worth nearly $125 billion today in what a Delaware judge had earlier called “the largest potential compensation opportunity ever observed in public markets,” when she voided the award in January 2024 and affirmed the ruling in December. A lengthy appeal of the Delaware ruling is likely ongoing. Until Musk receives those options, Forbes will continue to discount the Tesla options from the pay package by 50%.
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 co-founded 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, the pair have been trading jabs at each other.
In September 2021, Musk became the world’s richest person. Musk was also the world’s richest person for most of 2022—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, after his startup xAI raised $6 billion from private investors at a $24 billion valuation. According to Musk, xAI is now worth $80 billion. SpaceX, meanwhile, is now worth $400 billion based on a private tender offer in August 2025 (up from $350 billion in December 2024).
2. Larry Ellison
Net worth: $341.8 billion (up $70.9 billion since last month)
Source: Oracle
Age: 81
Residence: Woodside, California
Citizenship: U.S.
Oracle’s stock jumped 36% on September 10th, boosting Ellison’s fortune by nearly $100 billion in a single day (a record). The increase came after the company projected on its earnings call that revenue from its cloud infrastructure business will skyrocket by 700% to $144 billion over the next four years–mostly to power AI. The stock has cooled down a little bit since, ending September up “only” 24%.
In January, the day after Donald Trump was inaugurated as president, Ellison was on hand when Trump announced the Stargate Project, a venture with Ellison’s firm Oracle, Chat GPT creator OpenAI, Japan’s Masayoshi Son and his firm Softbank and MGX of the UAE. The group has committed to spending $500 billion over four years to build AI infrastructure—mainly data centers—in the U.S.
Ellison teamed up with his son David to help pull off the August merger of Paramount and David’s Skydance Media. The older Ellison now controls approximately 77.5% of the voting rights of the combined entity.
Ellison cofounded software firm Oracle in 1977 and ran it as CEO until 2014; he now serves as chairman and chief technology officer of the company.
In 2012, Ellison bought 98% of the Hawaiian island of Lanai for $300 million. He also owns homes in California, Nevada and Florida. Ellison invested in Tesla and served on the board of the electric vehicle company from 2018 through August 2022.
3. Mark Zuckerberg
Net worth: $251.5 billion (down $1.5 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.
4. Jeff Bezos
Net worth: $232.5 billion (down $8.4 billion since last month)
Source: Amazon
Age: 61
Residence: Miami, Florida
Citizenship: U.S.
Bezos created e-commerce giant Amazon in 1994 and ran it as CEO until 2021 (he remains executive chairman); that same month he went 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 this summer—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’ list of the World’s Billionaires from 2018 through 2021; he dropped to second richest on the 2022 billionaires list and No. 3 on the list from 2023 through 2025.
In 2019, Bezos and his first wife MacKenzie Scott 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. Larry Page
Net worth: $202.2 billion (up $23.9 billion since last month)
Source: Google
Age: 52
Residence: Palo Alto, California
Citizenship: U.S.
Page cofounded search engine Google with fellow Stanford PhD student Sergey Brin in 1998 and served as CEO until 2001 and from 2011 to 2015. He now serves as a board member of Google’s parent company Alphabet and continues to be a controlling shareholder.
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. In the biggest antitrust case in decades, a federal judge ruled in September that Google does not have to sell Chrome, helping send shares of Alphabet soaring by 14% last month.
Page was a founding investor in asteroid mining company Planetary Resources, which was acquired by blockchain firm ConsenSys in 2018.
6. Sergey Brin
Net worth: $187.6 billion (up $21.7 billion since last month)
Source: Google
Age: 51
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 last year and was listed as a “core contributor” when the model was released in December. Like his cofounder, Brin currently serves as a board member of Google’s parent company Alphabet and is a controlling shareholder.
7. Jensen Huang
Net worth: $162 billion (up $10.7 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, propelling the company’s market capitalization to $4.5 trillion as of September 30.
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.
8. Bernard Arnault
Net worth: $159.4 billion (up $5.3 billion since last month)
Source: LVMH/ luxury goods
Age: 76
Residence: Paris
Citizenship: France
Bernard 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 sons Alexandre and Frédéric to the company’s board, where they joined their sister Delphine, who runs Dior, and brother Antoine as directors. Alexandre was also named deputy CEO of LVMH’s wine and spirits division, while his youngest brother, 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.
9. Steve Ballmer
Net worth: $156 billion (up $2.9 billion since last month)
Source: Microsoft, LA Clippers, investments
Age: 69
Residence: Hunts Point, Washington
Citizenship: U.S.
The former Microsoft CEO spoke on a podcast in June about his commitment to holding onto most of his Microsoft shares since he left the company in 2014. Ballmer, a classmate of Bill Gates at Harvard University, joined Microsoft as employee number 30 in 1980 after dropping out of the MBA program at Stanford University. He ran Microsoft as its CEO from 2000 to 2014.
When Ballmer retired from Microsoft, he purchased the Los Angeles Clippers team for $2 billion—a record high for an NBA team at the time. Forbes now values the team at $5.5 billion. The new home for the Clippers, the Intuit Dome in Inglewood—not far from Los Angeles International Airport—opened in August 2024. An investigation is currently underway following a report that accused the Clippers of circumventing NBA salary cap rules with a no-show marketing deal between star Kawhi Leonard and a Ballmer-backed company. A spokesperson for Ballmer declined to comment.
10. Warren Buffett
Net worth: $150.2 billion (down $200 million 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. He still runs Berkshire Hathaway, which owns dozens of companies, including insurer Geico, battery maker Duracell and restaurant chain Dairy Queen, but announced in May that he will retire as CEO at the end of 2025. On August 30th, Buffett turned 95.
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 nearly $65 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. The Giving Pledge turns 15 years old this year.
Who is the richest man in the world?
As of October 1, 2025, the richest person in the world is Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. He’s worth $490.8 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 richest woman in the world is Alice Walton, daughter of Walmart founder Sam Walton. As of October 1, 2025, she is worth an estimated $111.9 billion and is the world’s 15th richest person. 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.
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