Elon Musk’s fortune jumped more than $200 billion while two other former No. 1 world’s richest both dropped out of the top 10. Below, we break down the top 10 richest people in the world this month.
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. His fortune fell below $700 billion in July for the first time since December but rebounded in August to nearly $900 billion.
- Larry Page became only the third person ever to be worth more than $300 billion in April. (The other two are Musk and Larry Ellison.) Page’s fortune has since dipped to an estimated $292 billion.
- Jeff Bezos overtook Page’s cofounder Sergey Brin to become the world’s third richest person in July. He lost $10 billion in August but still holds onto that lead.
- 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 is Spain’s Amancio Ortega who replaces France’s Bernard Arnault in this month’s ranks.
- All of the top ten richest people as of September 1 are men. Half of them are worth $200 billion or more. The poorest of the 10 richest is worth $148 billion.
The roller coaster ride that has been Elon Musk’s net worth this summer continued in August, as shares of SpaceX and Tesla jumped by 33% and 18%, respectively, and Musk’s fortune soared by $202 billion over the past month, after collapsing by $363 billion in July. Now worth $892 billion, Musk needs just a bit more rocket fuel to reclaim his title as history’s only trillionaire. But he has a long way to go to break his own record net worth of $1.33 trillion, which he achieved at SpaceX’s peak in mid-June. Still, Musk is more than three times richer than the world’s second wealthiest person, Larry Page, who is worth $277 billion. The Google cofounder lost $15 billion in the past month, making him August’s biggest loser. The fortunes of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Page’s cofounder Sergey Brin also slipped, by $10 billion and $13 billion, respectively, but they were able to hold onto their ranks at No. 3 and No. 4, respectively.
In fact, all of the world’s six richest people held onto their spots in August. The same can’t be said for the bottom four, who were shuffled around. Larry Ellison, who briefly became the world’s second richest person in early June, climbed back to No. 7 from No. 8 last month. He was the second biggest net worth gainer after Musk, as shares of Oracle increased by 15%, pushing his fortune up by $25 billion, to $193 billion. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang switched spots with Ellison, landing at No. 8, despite adding $17 billion to his fortune.
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Bernard Arnault and Warren Buffett, who each sat atop the wealth rankings at some point over the course of their careers, slipped out of the top 10, as shares of Arnault’s LVMH and Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway fell. In Berkshire’s case, shares retreated after hitting a 12-month high. For LVMH, the stock was hit by Chinese shoppers cutting back on luxury spending.
Taking their spots were former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, whose net worth increased by $10 billion, boosting his ranking from No. 11 to No. 9, and Amancio Ortega, the retired head of fast fashion giant Zara’s parent company Inditex, whose fortune grew by $5 billion, and propelled him from No. 12 to No. 10.
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 September 1, 2026 at 12 a.m. Eastern time, according to Forbes. They’re worth $2.8 trillion combined, up from $2.6 trillion 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 Billionaires list.
Who are the top 10 richest people in the world?*
1. Elon Musk
2. Larry Page
3. Jeff Bezos
4. Sergey Brin
5. Michael Dell
6. Mark Zuckerberg
7. Larry Ellison (up from No. 8)
8. Jensen Huang (down from No. 7)
9. Steve Ballmer
10. Amancio Ortega
*As of September 1, 2026 at 12 a.m. ET. Ranking changes since last month are in parentheses.
1. Elon Musk
Net worth: $892 billion (up $202 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. In July, Musk’s fortune dropped below $700 billion for the first time since December, as shares of SpaceX and Tesla both sank. In August, his fortune rebounded, as did shares of both his main companies. Musk, who serves as chairman, CEO and chief technical officer of SpaceX, owns a 38% stake in the rocketmaker, which acquired Musk’s artificial intelligence and social media company xAI in February, and now has a market cap of nearly $2 trillion, up from $1.5 trillion last month. (xAI previously merged with X–formerly Twitter–in March 2025.)
Musk also owns a nearly 11% stake in $1.2 trillion (market cap) Tesla, 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, which would be worth $95 billion if he were able to sell them now, 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 remained No. 1 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 the title until January 31, 2024. Musk became the world’s richest person yet again in late May 2024 and has not looked back. In October 2025, he became the first person ever worth $500 billion. In December 2025, he crossed both the $600 billion and $700 billion marks. His net worth first passed $800 billion in February.
2. Larry Page
Net worth: $277 billion (down $15 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 PhD 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. Google also reportedly signed a lease to expand its Miami office earlier this year.
3. Jeff Bezos
Net worth: $268 billion (down $10 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 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. He overtook Google’s Sergey Brin as the world’s third richest person in July.
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’s 1997 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.
4. Sergey Brin
Net worth: $256 billion (down $13 billion since last month)
Source: Google
Age: 53
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 reported to have spent more than $100 million to defeat California’s proposed one-time 5% wealth tax on billionaires (Proposition 40). He is also 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.
5. Michael Dell
Net worth: $241 billion (up $12 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.
In December, Dell and his wife committed $6.25 billion to seed investment accounts known as Trump Accounts for 25 million U.S. children with $250 apiece.
6. Mark Zuckerberg
Net worth: $197 billion (up $6 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. In August, Meta agreed to an $18 billion settlement in a landmark lawsuit brought by 29 U.S. states over allegations its social media sites were designed to addict children and it misled the public about their potential dangers.
7. Larry Ellison
Net worth: $193 billion (up $25 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 it closes, the deal will be one of the largest mergers in history and 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. In July, the Ellisons agreed to put the Warner Bros Discovery deal on hold until June 2027, or until an ongoing legal challenge on antitrust grounds is resolved.
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 are still roughly half as valuable as their 2025 high.
8. Jensen Huang
Net worth: $191 billion (up $17 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. Steve Ballmer
Net worth: $155 billion (up $10 billion since last month)
Source: Microsoft
Age: 70
Residence: Hunts Point, Washington
Citizenship: U.S.
The high-energy former CEO of Microsoft led the company from 2000 to 2014. Ballmer joined the tech giant as employee No. 30 after dropping out of Stanford’s MBA program. He first met Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates when the two were undergrads at Harvard. Ballmer oversaw Microsoft after the first dot-com crash and through efforts to catch up to Google in search capabilities and Apple in mobile phones. The year he retired from Microsoft, he bought the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers for $2 billion; Forbes now values the team at roughly $7.5 billion. He spent another $2 billion building the team’s Intuit Dome stadium. Ballmer, who owned 4% of Microsoft stock when he retired, has held onto much of his stock and has said he’s the company’s largest individual shareholder. He has ramped up his philanthropy since 2014; to date the Ballmers have given away more than $6.5 billion.
10. Amancio Ortega
Net worth: $148 billion (up $5 billion since last month)
Source: Zara
Age: 90
Residence: La Coruna, Spain
Citizenship: Spain
A pioneer in fast fashion, he 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 seven 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 in yearly dividends, which he reinvests primarily in real estate across Europe and North America. His real estate portfolio, which includes logistics, residential and office properties, rents to tenants including Apple, Amazon and Walmart, and is worth more than $20 billion.
Who is the richest man in the world?
As of September 1, 2026, the planet’s wealthiest man is Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. He’s worth $892 billion. He moved into the number one spot in late May 2024, overtaking Bernard Arnault of France. He briefly 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 September 1, 2026, she is worth an estimated $116 billion and is the world’s 16th-richest person, just like last month. 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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