Elon Musk moves up a notch but not enough to reclaim the very top spot, while Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates drops to the lowest rank in decades.
Last update: May 1, 2024, 12 A.M. EDT
Bernard Arnault, the luxury goods tycoon behind Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior and dozens of other brands owned by his LVMH group, currently ranks as the world’s richest person—a spot he’s held since February. Just below Arnault at number two richest is Elon Musk, who switched spots with Jeff Bezos in late April. Tesla stock had its best day since 2021 on April 29, a day after Musk’s surprise visit to China. It rose 15% on Monday, lifting Musk’s fortune up by $14.5 billion.
Not only did Musk overtake Bezos, he narrowed the gap between himself and LVMH’s Arnault. At $209.4 billion, Arnault is now worth just about $10 billion more than No. 2 Musk. A month ago, Arnault’s lead over Bezos was $30 billion, and it was even bigger versus Musk. Part of the reason is a drop in LVMH stock in the past month, which has pushed the European’s fortune down by $17 billion.
Meanwhile, Bill Gates, who reigned as the world’s richest person for most of three decades starting in 1995, is about as rich as he’s ever been, worth nearly $128 billion. But now, Gates now ranks as the world’s ninth richest, down from seventh richest a month ago. He hasn’t been that low in the ranks of the world’s wealthiest since the early 1990s. It’s not that Microsoft and Gates’ other investments aren’t doing great—they’re just not keeping up with stocks like Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta or Larry Page’s Alphabet. For the first time, Google cofounders Page and Sergey Brin are now both richer than Gates. Two other big factors have affected Gates’ fortune in recent years: his nearly $59 billion in charitable donations to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a costly 2021 divorce.
Six of the world’s top 10 richest people have smaller fortunes than a month ago. Together they are worth a combined $1.54 trillion—$50 billion less than a month ago.
Forbes has been keeping track of the world’s billionaires since 1987. Last month we found 2,781 of them for our annual list. Throughout the year, we update their fortunes on a daily basis. Many billionaires hold much of their net worth in the stock of the company they founded or cofounded. As that stock price moves, their fortune moves along with it.
Here are the 10 richest people on Earth as of May 1, 2024 at 12 a.m. Eastern time, according to Forbes.
Stock prices fluctuate routinely, so these net worths may change on a daily basis. Forbes tracks the daily changes on our Real Time list of billionaires.
Key Facts
Bernard Arnault
is the richest person in the world, a position he held for the first half of 2023. His fortune fell by $17 billion during April 2024.
Elon Musk
now ranks No. 2 richest. He started off 2024 as the world’s richest person, but the falling price of Tesla stock dropped him as low as No. 3 before a late April gain pushed him back up.
9/10
of the richest people in the world are Americans, including Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison and Bill Gates.
Bill Gates
of Microsoft fell to No. 9, his lowest rank since the early 1990s, as his diversified holdings couldn’t keep up.
All
of the top ten richest people as of May 1 are men, and each of them is worth $100 billion or more.
Who are the top 10 richest people in the world?*
1. Bernard Arnault
2. Elon Musk
3. Jeff Bezos
4. Mark Zuckerberg
5. Larry Ellison
6. Larry Page
7. Warren Buffett
8. Sergey Brin
9. Bill Gates
10. Steve Ballmer
*As of May 1, 2024 at 12 a.m. ET
Jamel Toppin for Forbes
1. Bernard Arnault
Net worth: $209.4 billion
Source: LVMH/ luxury goods
Age: 75
Residence: Paris
Citizenship: France
Bernard Arnault, CEO and chairman of luxury goods group LVMH, moved back into the No. 1 richest spot on January 31, 2024, overtaking Elon Musk—and Arnault held onto that rank throughout February and March. Arnault 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.
Arnault’s father made millions in the construction business; to get his start, Arnault used $15 million of that fortune to buy Christian Dior.
All five of Arnault’s children work in parts of the LVMH empire. Earlier this year, Arnault nominated two of his sons—Alexandre, 31, and Frédéric, 29—to the board of LVMH. His daughter Delphine, who is 48 and runs Dior, and son Antoine, 46, already sit on the board. 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; he fell to No. 2 in June 2023 but has returned to No. 1 in 2024. As of May 1, 2024 Arnault is worth about $17 billion less than a month ago, per Forbes’ estimates, following a slight decline in the price of LVMH stock.
Marlena Sloss/Bloomberg
2. Elon Musk
Net worth: $199.6 billion
Source: Tesla, SpaceX, X (Twitter)
Age: 52
Residence: Austin, Texas
Citizenship: U.S.
Musk is CEO of electric car company Tesla, rocket firm SpaceX and social media company X, formerly known as Twitter. He owns 13% of Tesla stock and has pledged some of his stock as collateral for loans. He bought X, then known as Twitter, for $44 billion in October 2022 and owns an estimated 74% of the social media company, which is now worth less than half what he paid for it.
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 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. Its market capitalization soared during 2020 and 2021. In September 2021, Musk became the world’s richest person. In November 2021, his fortune peaked at a whopping $320 billion. Musk was also the world’s richest person for most of 2022—until December 2022, when a drop in Tesla’s share price pushed down the value of his fortune.
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 following a Delaware judge’s January 30 ruling that voided Musk’s nearly $51 billion pay package; Forbes discounted the Tesla options from the pay package by 50%. Tesla stock fell 13% during March, landing him at the No. 3 spot on Forbes’ Real Time Billionaire ranking. He’s back up after Tesla stock recovered some ground.
Michael Prince for Forbes
3. Jeff Bezos
Net worth: $193.3 billion
Source: Amazon
Age: 60
Residence: Miami, Florida
Citizenship: U.S.
Jeff Bezos created e-commerce giant Amazon in 1994 and ran it as CEO until July 2021 (he remains 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. His fortune rose by nearly $3 billion during March 2024 as the result of an uptick in Amazon stock.
Before founding Amazon.com in his garage in Seattle, he 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 overtook Bill Gates to become the richest person in the world in July 2017. He and Gates then traded the number one and number two richest spots off and on. 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. For the month, of March he and Musk flip-flopped the No. 2 and No. 3 ranks at least a dozen times due to fluctuating stock prices for Amazon and Tesla. Bezos starts April as the world’s second richest person, worth an estimated $198.4 billion.
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 just under 10% of the company. Since Amazon went public in 1997, Forbes calculates that he has sold more than $27 billion worth of his stock. Through his Bezos Expeditions he has invested in an array of companies, including Airbnb and software firm Workday.
4. Mark Zuckerberg
Net worth: $151.2 billion
Source: Meta (Facebook)
Age: 39
Residence: Palo Alto, California
Citizenship: U.S.
Zuckerberg cofounded Facebook—now called Meta Platforms—when he was a student at Harvard University in 2004. It has grown to be the world’s largest social network, with more than 3 billion monthly users. 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. He and his wife Priscilla Chan have pledged to direct 99% of their stock in the company toward “measures that promote human potential.” One ambitious goal they are funding is the development of tools to help others cure, manage or prevent all disease by the end of this century; Zuckerberg and Chan spoke to Forbes last year about their philanthropic efforts. And Zuckerberg talked to Forbes in September 2023 about Meta’s two biggest bets ahead of the company turning 20.
Zuckerberg rejoined the world’s top 10 richest in the summer of 2023 for the first time since January 2022, as the result of a rise in Meta’s stock. During the month of April, his fortune fell by $19 billion but he held onto his No. 4 spot.
5. Larry Ellison
Net worth: $142.8 billion
Source: Oracle
Age: 79
Residence: Woodside, California
Citizenship: U.S.
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. Over the years Oracle has made a series of large acquisitions, including buying Sun Microsystems in 2010 for $7.4 billion.
In 2012, Ellison bought 98% of the Hawaiian island of Lanai for $300 million. He also owns homes in California and Nevada. Ellison invested in Tesla and served on the board of the car company from 2018 through August 2022.
During February 2024, Ellison was overtaken by Mark Zuckerberg and fell from No. 4 richest to No. 5. In April, his net worth slipped $13 billion.
6. Larry Page
Net worth: $135.4 billion
Source: Google Age: 51
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 Alphabet and continues to be a controlling shareholder.
Page was a founding investor in asteroid mining company Planetary Resources, which was acquired by blockchain firm ConsenSys in 2018.
He moved into the top 10 richest in the world following a notable 15% jump in the share price of Alphabet in May 2023.
Page’s fortune rose by more than $9 billion in April after jumping nearly $11 billion in March 2024 as Alphabet shares advanced.
TIMOTHY ARCHIBALD FOR FORBES
7. Warren Buffett
Net worth: $131 billion
Source: Berkshire Hathaway
Age: 93
Residence: Omaha, Nebraska
Citizenship: U.S.
Known as the “Oracle of Omaha,” Warren Buffett is one of the most successful investors of all time. He runs investing conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway, which owns dozens of companies, including insurer Geico, battery maker Duracell and restaurant chain Dairy Queen. The son of a U.S. congressman, he first bought stock at age 11 and first filed taxes at age 13.
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 at least $51.5 billion in Berkshire Hathaway stock to the Gates Foundation and foundations run by his children and one started by his late first wife. That makes him the most generous billionaire in the U.S. —and on the planet. During April 2024, his fortune fell by nearly $8 billion, due to a downtick in Berkshire Hathaway shares.
8. Sergey Brin
Net worth: $129.9 billion
Source: Google
Age: 50
Residence: Los Altos, California
Citizenship: U.S.
Brin cofounded search engine Google with fellow Stanford computer scient PhD candidate Larry Page. Like Page, he 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.
He’s also become perhaps the largest individual donor to research on Parkinson’s disease, giving $1.25 billion to various groups, including a group of collaborative academics spearheaded by his team called Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s.
9. Bill Gates
Net worth: $127 billion
Source: Microsoft, investments
Age: 68
Residence: Medina, Washington
Citizenship: U.S.
As a teenager, Gates became passionate about computer programming. He dropped out of Harvard to cofound software firm Microsoft with his high school friend Paul Allen in 1975, creating one of the first software programs available for the nascent personal computer industry. He was CEO of the company for 25 years and remained chairman until 2014. He eventually stepped off the board in 2020 but told Forbes in 2023 that he still spends about 10% of his time consulting with teams at Microsoft. These days he has investments in dozens of companies, including waste removal firm Republic Services and agricultural equipment maker Deere & Co., and is one of the largest owners of farmland in the U.S.
Forbes first listed Gates as a billionaire in 1987; he was the richest person in the world from 1995 through 2017 (except in 2008 and from 2010 through 2013). Largely due to the $59 billion he has donated to the Gates Foundation, including a $20 billion gift in July 2022, he was overtaken as the world’s richest person in 2018 by Jeff Bezos. He and Melinda French Gates divorced in 2021; she received an estimated $10 billion in stock and other assets as part of the divorce settlement.
Gates’ fortune fell by about $4 billion during April and he slipped from No. 7 to No. 9. That’s the lowest he’s ranked in decades as others move ahead.
10. Steve Ballmer
Net worth: $117.1 billion
Source: Microsoft, Clippers, investments
Age: 68
Residence: Hunts Point, Washington
Citizenship: U.S.
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 $4.65 billion.
Ballmer’s fortune slipped in the past month amid a drop in the price of Microsoft stock. Ballmer and his wife Connie are among the 25 most generous philanthropists in America.
Who is the richest man in the world?
As of May 1, 2024, the richest person in the world is Bernard Arnault, the CEO of French luxury goods group LVMH; he’s worth nearly $209 billion. He moved into the number one spot in late January 2024, overtaking Elon Musk.
Who is the richest woman in the world?
The richest woman in the world is Francoise Bettencourt Meyers of France. As of May 1, 2024, she is worth an estimated $95.4 billion and is the world’s 15th richest person. Her fortune lies in her ownership stake in cosmetics giant L’Oreal, which she inherited from her late mother. Her grandfather was the founder of L’Oreal.
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