The ranks of the wealthiest people on the planet include 7 self-made Americans, a French luxury goods tycoon, a Mexican telecom magnate and an Indian industrialis
Billionaires are some of the most powerful people on Earth, wielding significant influence over huge parts of the global economy and playing key roles in everything from international politics and media to philanthropy and scientific innovation. They created companies that employ tens or even hundreds of thousands of employees around the world and are behind some of the best known brands including Microsoft, Amazon, Tesla, Google and Nike. The majority are self-made. Others like Bernard Arnault and Rupert Murdoch had a bit more of a leg up but expanded their fortunes greatly and went on to create empires in their respective industries.
Many billionaires hold much of their net worth in the stock of the company they founded. As that stock price moves, their fortune moves along with it. As of March 2021, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was the fifth richest person in the world, worth $97 billion. Since then, Facebook’s (rebranded as Meta Platforms) stock plunged more than 40%; Zuckerberg fell out of the top 10 richest and as of January 31, 2023 ranks No. 23, worth $58 billion.
India’s Gautam Adani overtook Mukesh Ambani to become the richest person in Asia in February 2022. His fortune soared $55 billion last year, and he quickly rose even higher up the ranks. In late January he was the third richest person in the world. Then short seller Hindenburg Research released a scathing report accusing Adani Group of running a “corporate con”, which the billionaire and his companies vehemently denied. Still his fortune started falling fast, and he dropped out of the ranks of the 10 richest on February 1, 2023.
Here are the 10 richest people in the world as of February 1 at 8 a.m. Eastern time, according to Forbes.
Stock prices fluctuate routinely, so these net worths may change on a daily basis.
Key Facts
Bernard Arnault
of France is the richest person in the world. The CEO of luxury goods firm LVMH, he is worth nearly $214 billion.
Elon Musk
who was the richest person for much of 2022, became the second richest person in December 2022.
7/10
richest people in the world are Americans, including Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison and Bill Gates.
Gautam Adani
of India fell from third richest in the world on January 24, 2023 to 13th richest on February 1, 2023.
100%
of the top ten richest people are men.
Who are the top 10 richest people in the world?*
1. Bernard Arnault
2. Elon Musk
3. Jeff Bezos
4. Larry Ellison
5. Warren Buffett
6. Bill Gates
7. Carlos Slim Helu
8. Larry Page
9. Mukesh Ambani
10. Sergey Brin
*As of February 1, 2022 at 8 a.m. ET
Jamel Toppin for Forbes
1. Bernard Arnault
Net worth: $213.7 B
Source: LVMH/ luxury goods
Age: 73
Residence: Paris
Citizenship: France
Bernard Arnault is CEO and chair of LVMH, the largest luxury goods company in the world with some 70 fashion and cosmetics brands. Among its most notable: Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Moet & Chandon and Sephora. In January 2021, LVMH acquired jeweler Tiffany & Co. for $15.8 billion.
Arnault’s father made millions in the construction business; to get his start, Arnault used $15 million of that fortune to buy Christian Dior.
Four of Arnault’s five children work in parts of the LVMH empire. In January 2023, Arnault appointed his daughter Delphine to run Dior, the second largest brand in the group.
Marlena Sloss/Bloomberg
2. Elon Musk
Net worth: $178.3 B
Source: Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter
Age: 51
Residence: Austin, Texas
Citizenship: U.S.
Musk is CEO of electric car company Tesla, rocket firm SpaceX and social media company Twitter. He owns about 25% of Tesla between stock and options, but has pledged more than half of his stock as collateral for loans. The car company still makes up more than half his fortune. He bought Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022 and owns an estimated 74% of the social media company.
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 remained the world’s richest person until December 2022, when the drop in Tesla’s share price pushed down the value of his fortune. Tesla shares fell more than 50% from their peak in November 2021 through January 31, 2023.
Michael Prince for Forbes
3. Jeff Bezos
Net worth: $126.3 B
Source: Amazon
Age: 59
Residence: Medina, Washington
Citizenship: U.S.
Jeff Bezos stepped down as CEO of e-commerce giant Amazon in July 2021 but 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.
Bezos founded online retailer Amazon.com in his garage in Seattle in 1994, after he left a job in New York at hedge fund D.E. Shaw. Amazon began as an online bookseller at a time when few people bought goods online. Amazon 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 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. He dropped to fourth richest but moved back to No. 3 on January 25, 2023 as the fortune of India’s Gautam Adani (formerly No. 3 richest) fell.
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 more of his stake and owns around 10% of the company. Since Amazon went public in 1997, Forbes calculates that he has sold more than $27 billion worth of his stock.
Jamel Toppin for Forbes
4. Larry Ellison
Net worth: $111.9 B
Source: Oracle
Age: 78
Residence: Lanai, Hawaii
Citizenship: U.S.
Larry 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, buying Sun Microsystems in 2010.
In 2012, Ellison bought the Hawaiian island of Lanai for $300 million. He moved from California to Lanai in 2020.
Ellison invested in Tesla and served on the board of the car company from 2018 through August 2022.
Timothy Archibald for Forbes
5. Warren Buffett
Net worth: $108.5 B
Source: Berkshire Hathaway
Age: 92
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 donated $51.5 billion in Berkshire Hathaway stock to the Gates Foundation and his kids’ foundations. That makes him the most generous billionaire on the planet.
Forbes
6. Bill Gates
Net worth: $104.5 B
Source: Microsoft, investments
Age: 67
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. These days he has investments in dozens of companies including Republic Services ad 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 at least $6 billion in stock as part of the divorce settlement.
Jason DeCrow/AP
7. Carlos Slim Helu
Net worth: $91.7 B
Source: telecom, investments
Age: 83
Residence: Mexico City
Citizenship: Mexico
Carlos Slim Helu and his family control América Móvil, Latin America’s biggest mobile telecom firm, with operations in at least 15 countries. Slim and some foreign telecom partners acquired Telmex, the government-owned phone company, in 1990. Telmex became a part of América Móvil.
He also owns stakes in Mexican construction, consumer goods, mining and real estate companies. He used to own 17% of the New York Times, but sold the stake in 2021.
Slim overtook Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to become the world’s richest person from 2010 to 2013. Before going into business, Slim taught algebra at UNAM, a university in Mexico City.
Kimberly White/Getty Images
8. Larry Page
Net worth: $85.8 B
Source: Google
Age: 49
Residence: Palo Alto, California
Citizenship: U.S.
Page and his fellow Stanford computer science PhD student Sergey Brin cofounded Google in 1998, creating a search engine that took off and made money by selling ads. Over the years, Google acquired YouTube, got into self-driving cars and experimented with different forms of wearable computing–including the Google Glass, which failed to take off.
Page stepped down as the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet in December 2019 but remains a board member and controlling shareholder.
He is a founding investor in space exploration company Planetary Resources and is also funding flying car startups Kitty Hawk and Opener.
Simon Dawson/Bloomberg
9. Mukesh Ambani
Net worth: $83.7 B
Source: petrochemicals, telecommunications
Age: 65
Residence: Mumbai, India
Citizenship: India
Mukesh Ambani chairs and runs $104 billion (revenue) Reliance Industries, which has interests in petrochemicals, oil and gas, telecom and retail. It owns Network18, a licensee of Forbes Media, and the Mandarian Oriental hotel in New York. Reliance was founded by his late father Dhirubhai Ambani, a yarn trader, in 1966 as a small textile manufacturer. After his father’s death in 2002, Ambani and his younger sibling Anil divvied up the family empire.
Ambani was India’s richest person for 14 years until he was overtaken by Gautam Adani in February 2022. He ranked among the world’s top 10 richest in the world on Forbes’ global rankings between 2008 and 2011 and again starting in 2021.
Arturo Holmes/Getty Images
10. Sergey Brin
Net worth: $82.2 B
Source: Google
Age: 49
Residence: Los Altos, California
Citizenship: U.S.
Sergey Brin stepped down as president of Alphabet, parent company of Google, in December 2019 but remains a controlling shareholder and a board member. He cofounded Google with Larry Page in 1998 after the two met at Stanford University while studying for advanced degrees in computer science. Brin, who came to the U.S. from Russia when he was 6 years old in the wake of anti-Semitism against his family, is one of the richest immigrants in America.
Who is the richest man in the world?
As of February 1, 2023, the richest man in the world is Bernard Arnault, the CEO and chairman of LVMH of France; he’s worth nearly $214 billion. He moved into the number one spot after Elon Musk’s fortune fell in late 2022 as shares of electric carmaker Tesla fell.
Who is the richest woman in the world?
The richest woman in the world is Francoise Bettencourt Meyers of France. As of February 1, 2023, she is worth $81.2 billion. Her fortune lies in her ownership of shares in cosmetics giant L’Oreal, which she inherited from her late mother. Her grandfather was the founder of L’Oreal.
Editor’s note: February 1, 2023: This article has been updated to say that Sergey Brin is one of the richest immigrants in America; it previously incorrectly said he was the richest immigrant in America.