The U.S. stock market continued to sizzle in August but it wasn’t enough to lift all fortunes, as four of the world’s top 10 wealthiest people lost ground.
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 third 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.
In a month when U.S. stock market indices once again hit new highs, the combined net worth of the top 10 richest people on the planet increased by just 1% or $21 billion to $2.13 trillion. Driving the modest gain was the fact that August was a mixed month for the world’s wealthiest, with six becoming richer and four poorer, as several soaring tech stocks retreated.
The biggest gainers were Alphabet’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, whose fortunes popped by $20.3 billion and $15.1 billion, respectively. Shares of the search giant jumped by nearly 9% to a record high. Page held steady as the No. 5 richest person in the world, while Brin moved up one rung to No. 6.
The Google cofounder took the spot of Nvidia’s Jensen Huang who slipped to No. 9 as his fortune fell by $3.5 billion. Shares of Nvidia dropped by more than 3% on the last day of August, likely due to China concerns amid an announcement from Alibaba that it was developing its own chip.
August’s biggest loser was July’s biggest winner. Larry Ellison, cofounder of Oracle, lost nearly $29 billion after having gained $37 billion the previous month. Shares of his software and cloud computing firm fell by nearly 10% last month.
Bernard Arnault, the only non-American among the top 10 richest, moved up to No. 7 from No. 10, thanks to an $11.2 billion increase in his net worth due in part to the resilient margins of his luxury goods powerhouse LVMH.
For the 16th month in a row, Elon Musk holds onto the title of the richest person on the planet. Musk is worth $415.6 billion, $14.4 billion more than last month and enough to widen the gap between him and No. 2 Ellison to a staggering $144.7 billion.
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 September 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. Bernard Arnault
8. Steve Ballmer
9. Jensen Huang
10. Warren Buffett
*As of September 1, 2025 at 12 a.m. ET
1. Elon Musk
Net worth: $415.6 billion
Source: Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, X
Age: 53
Residence: Austin, Texas
Citizenship: U.S.
Musk’s fortune increased by $14.4 billion in the past month largely due to a nearly 8% increase in the price of electric vehicle firm Tesla’s shares. Despite the uptick, the electric vehicle carmaker still faces plenty of challenges including a class action lawsuit by Tesla owners, recently greenlit by a federal judge in San Francisco, that alleges Musk and Tesla exaggerated claims about its cars’ self-driving capability. It was a big blow to his plans to reposition Tesla as a leader in artificial intelligence and autonomous driving amid a dramatic slowdown in its EV sales.
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 October 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 $90 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 having 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 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.
2. Larry Ellison
Net worth: $270.9 billion
Source: Oracle
Age: 80
Residence: Woodside, California
Citizenship: U.S.
Ellison maintains his spot as the world’s No. 2 richest as of September 1, despite his net worth dropping by $28.7 billion. The gap between Ellison and No. 1 Musk widened to $144.7 billion as of midnight on September 1, up from $101.6 billion on August 1.
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 initially said it would spend $500 billion over four years to build AI infrastructure—mainly data centers—in the U.S. The Wall Street Journal reported in July that Stargate has scaled back its goals for 2025 to build one small data center.
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: $253 billion
Source: Meta (Facebook)
Age: 41
Residence: Palo Alto, California
Citizenship: U.S.
The social media CEO ended August down $13.7 billion as shares of Meta Platforms — originally Facebook — fell nearly 5% due partly to concerns about AI costs and yet another AI restructuring.
Zuckerberg cofounded Facebook when he was a student at Harvard University in 2004. 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, the CEO of Meta, took the company public in 2012 and still owns about 13% of it.
4. Jeff Bezos
Net worth: $240.9 billion
Source: Amazon
Age: 61
Residence: Miami, Florida
Citizenship: U.S.
Bezos’ fortune dropped by $5.5 billion August as Amazon shares ended the month down 2.3%.
Bezos created e-commerce giant Amazon in 1994 and ran it as CEO until July 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’ fiancée, Lauren Sanchez.)
Before founding Amazon.com in his garage in Seattle, Bezos worked in 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 2024 list.
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 9% of the company. Since Amazon went public in 1997, Forbes calculates that he has sold more than $38 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: $178.3 billion
Source: Google
Age: 52
Residence: Palo Alto, California
Citizenship: U.S.
The fortune of Google cofounder Larry Page rocketed up a bit more than $20 billion in the past month on the back of a nearly 9% uptick in Alphabet shares. The search-engine and AI giant rode the market higher even as some of its high-tech peers sputtered. Page’s No. 5 rank is unchanged from a month ago.
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.
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: $165.9 billion
Source: Google
Age: 51
Residence: Los Altos, California
Citizenship: U.S.
The fortune of Google cofounder Sergey Brin rose by $15.1 billion, thanks to the increase in Alphabet shares in the past month.
Brin and his cofounder Larry Page launched the search engine Google when they were both Stanford computer science PhD candidates. Like Page, Brin currently serves as a board member of Google’s parent company Alphabet and is a controlling shareholder.
Brin 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.
7. Bernard Arnault
Net worth: $154.1 billion
Source: LVMH/ luxury goods
Age: 76
Residence: Paris
Citizenship: France
The luxury goods tycoon added $11.2 billion to his fortune as investors applauded his luxury goods powerhouse LVMH’s ability to hold margins steady. The increase bumped Arnault up three rungs to No. 7 in the world, up from No. 10 a month ago.
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 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 June 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. Steve Ballmer
Net worth: $151.3 billion
Source: Microsoft, LA Clippers, investments
Age: 69
Residence: Hunts Point, Washington
Citizenship: U.S.
The former Microsoft CEO–who spoke on a podcast in June about his commitment to holding onto most of his Microsoft shares since he left the company in 2014–got an estimated $4.4 billion wealthier in the past month.
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.
9. Jensen Huang
Net worth: $150.4 billion
Source: Semiconductors
Age: 62
Residence: Los Altos, California
Citizenship: U.S.
Huang dropped to No. 9 in the world, down from No. 6 a month ago, amid fears of competition from China and also concerns of too hot valuation. Shares of the graphics-chip maker already nearly doubled in value since their April low earlier this year.
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 $3.9 trillion as of June 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.
10. Warren Buffett
Net worth: $150.4 billion
Source: Berkshire Hathaway
Age: 95
Residence: Omaha, Nebraska
Citizenship: U.S.
Warren Buffett added $7 billion to his fortune in the past month but it wasn’t enough for him to hold onto his spot at No. 9.
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 give more than $66 billion of Berkshire Hathaway stock to 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 September 1, 2025, the richest person in the world is Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. He’s worth $415.6 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 September 1, 2025, she is worth an estimated $106.5 billion and is the world’s 17th 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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