Fueled by a sharp rise in Tesla shares and a rising value for his artificial intelligence startup , Elon Musk’s fortune grew by a whopping 25% in November, pushing his fortune past $300 billion for the first time in two years. Tesla shares soared after Donald Trump won the US presidential election on November 6, with shareholders betting on Musk’s close ties to Trump.
Musk has been the world’s richest person since late May , and has just widened the gap on the second-richest to more than $100 billion. His fortune briefly hit an all-time high — $334 billion — on Nov. 22, according to Forbes estimates. As of midnight Eastern Time on Dec. 1, Musk is worth $330 billion, up $66 billion from Nov. 1.
November was also a banner month for some of the world’s 10 richest. Larry Ellison , at No. 2, was the second-biggest gainer. He increased his wealth by $22 billion during the month on the strength of shares in Oracle , the software company he co-founded and chairs, and is now worth an estimated nearly $227 billion. Amazon founder and chairman Jeff Bezos , who comes in at No. 3, has grown $19 billion richer thanks to an 11% rise in the e-commerce giant’s stock over the past month. At $223 billion, he is worth only a few billion less than Ellison.
In total, the world’s 10 richest people had an estimated wealth of $1.81 trillion as of December 1, up $106 billion from a month ago. U.S. stock indices rallied following Trump’s election victory, with the S&P 500 index up nearly 3.6% on the month and the Nasdaq up 3.5%.
The biggest loser in this elite group was French luxury titan Bernard Arnault , whose fortune fell by $9 billion during the month to an estimated $160.3 billion. Despite the drop, he retained his spot as the No. 5 richest man. LVMH shares are down about 6% in November and 20% over the past six months, due to weak sales in China.
Forbes has been tracking the world’s billionaires since 1987. In April, we found 2,781 of them for our annual list.
These are the 10 richest people on the planet as of December 1, 2024 at 12 a.m. Eastern Time, according to Forbes. Stock prices fluctuate routinely, so these net worths can change daily. Forbes tracks daily changes to our billionaires list in real time.
Key facts
Elon Musk is the richest person in the world, a title he regained at the end of May 2024. His fortune increased by $66 billion in the last month.
Larry Ellison became the world’s second richest person after Oracle’s share price rose in September. He remained second as of December 1.
Bill Gates dropped out of the top 10 on October 1, after Forbes obtained new information about a significant contraction in his fortune.
8/10 of the richest people in the world are Americans, including Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Steve Ballmer.
All of the ten richest people as of December 1 are men. Each of them is worth $120 billion or more.
1. Elon Musk
Net worth: $330.1 billion
Source: Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, X
Age: 53
Residence: Austin, Texas
Nationality: USA
Musk is the CEO of electric car company Tesla and rocket company SpaceX; chairman and CTO of social media company X, formerly known as Twitter; and founder of artificial intelligence company xAI. He owns 13% of Tesla stock and has pledged some of his shares as collateral for loans. Shareholders of the electric car maker voted in June to allow Musk to keep nearly $50 billion in performance-based stock options, in what a Delaware judge had earlier called “the largest potential compensation opportunity ever seen in the public markets” when she vacated the grant in January. But the matter won’t be resolved anytime soon. A lengthy appeal of the Delaware ruling is likely. Until Musk receives those options, Forbes will continue to discount Tesla’s options from his pay package by 50%.
Musk, who donated more than $100 million to support Donald Trump in the Nov. 5 presidential election, was named by Trump to co-chair the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an advisory group that will recommend cuts to government jobs, programs and spending. Potentially significant conflicts of interest are at play, given the ties of Musk’s companies to the federal government, including SpaceX (a Defense Department client) and Tesla (regulated by the Department of Transportation and the EPA).
Originally from South Africa, Musk moved to Canada before he turned 18, worked a number of jobs, enrolled at Queen’s University in Ontario and then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a degree in economics.
In 2000, he merged X.com, an online bank he co-founded, with a similar one co-founded by Peter Thiel to form PayPal, which eBay bought in 2002 for $1.4 billion. In 2002, he founded SpaceX in El Segundo, near Los Angeles. In 2004, he joined Tesla as an investor and chairman, a year after its founding; he was later granted the title of co-founder. Musk, who became CEO of Tesla in 2008, took the company public in 2010. Its market capitalization skyrocketed throughout 2020 and 2021. In September 2021, Musk became the richest person in the world. In November 2021, his fortune reached a whopping $320 billion. Musk was also the richest person in the world for most of 2022, until December 2022, when a drop in Tesla’s stock price reduced the value of his fortune. Musk became the world’s richest person again on June 8, 2023, and held the top spot for the rest of 2023. He fell to number 2 on January 31, 2024.
Musk became the world’s richest person again in late May 2024, after his startup xAI raised $6 billion from private investors at a valuation of $24 billion. xAI raised another $5 billion from investors in November, valuing the startup at $50 billion. He owns an estimated 54% of the company.
2. Larry Ellison
Net worth: $226.9 billion
Source: Oracle
Age: 80
Residence: Woodside, California
Nationality: USA
Ellison co-founded software company Oracle in 1977 and led it as CEO until 2014; he is now the company’s president and chief technology officer. Over the years, Oracle has made a number of big acquisitions, including its $7.4 billion purchase of Sun Microsystems in 2010.
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 car company’s board from 2018 to August 2022.
Oracle shares have surged over the past month, adding $22.1 billion to Ellison’s fortune. As of Dec. 1, he’s worth about $3.6 billion more than No. 3 Jeff Bezos.
3. Jeff Bezos
Net Worth: $223.3 Billion
Source: Amazon
Age: 60
Residence: Miami, Florida
Nationality: USA
Jeff Bezos founded e-commerce giant Amazon in 1994 and led it as CEO until July 2021 (he remains chairman); that same month he traveled to space on a rocket built by the private rocket company Blue Origin, which he founded and has funded with billions of dollars.
Amazon shares rose nearly 11% in November, adding $19 billion to Bezos’ fortune.
In late October, Bezos came under scrutiny and reportedly lost a couple hundred thousand subscribers to The Washington Post, which he owns, after ordering the paper’s editorial page not to endorse any presidential candidate ahead of the Nov. 5 election.
Before founding Amazon.com in his Seattle garage, he worked in New York at hedge fund DE Shaw. Amazon started out as an online bookstore at a time when few people bought things online. The company also grew to dominate cloud storage and moved into movie and TV production to power Amazon Prime Video.
Bezos was the richest person in the world on Forbes’ list of the world’s billionaires from 2018 to 2021; he fell to second place on the 2022 billionaires list and to number 3 on the 2024 list.
In 2019, Bezos and his wife MacKenzie divorced; as part of the settlement, she got 4% of Amazon stock and he got 12%. He has since sold and given away more shares and owns just under 10% of the company. Since Amazon went public in 1997, Forbes estimates he has sold more than $27 billion worth of stock. Through his Bezos Expeditions, he has invested in a number of companies, including Airbnb and the software firm Workday.
4. Mark Zuckerberg
Net worth: $198.7 billion
Source: Meta (Facebook)
Age: 40
Residence: Palo Alto, California
Nationality: USA
Zuckerberg co-founded Facebook — now called Meta Platforms — as a student at Harvard University in 2004. It has grown to become the world’s largest social network, with several billion users worldwide. The company also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, both of which have been acquired and greatly expanded. Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, took the company public in 2012 and still owns about 13% of it.
Zuckerberg’s net worth rose by $2.4 billion, as Meta’s stock rose slightly in November.
5. Bernard Arnault
Net worth: $160.3 billion
Source: LVMH/Luxury Goods
Age: 75
Residence: Paris
Nationality: French France
Bernard Arnault, CEO and chairman of luxury goods group LVMH, has held on to his fifth spot despite his fortune shrinking by $9 billion last month. In October, the company reported its quarterly results, which were hit by weak demand in China.
Arnault’s father made millions in the construction business; Arnault used $15 million of that fortune to buy Christian Dior for a start. He has since built the world’s largest luxury goods company, with some 70 fashion and cosmetics brands, including Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Moet & Chandon, Sephora and the jeweler Tiffany & Co.
Arnault’s five children all work in parts of the LVMH empire. Earlier this year, Arnault appointed two of his sons — Alexandre and Frédéric — to the LVMH board, and in November Alexandre was named deputy CEO of LVMH’s wines and spirits division. His daughter Delphine, who runs Dior, and his son Antoine are already on the board. In June, he appointed his son Frédéric as head of the family holding company LVMH. His youngest son, Jean, is head of watchmaking at Louis Vuitton.
Arnault was the world’s richest person for most of the first half of 2023 and again from February to the end of May 2024.
6. Warren Buffett
Net worth: $150.6 billion
Source: Berkshire Hathaway
Age: 94
Residence: Omaha, Nebraska
Nationality: USA
Buffett’s fortune increased by $8.6 billion during the month of November, even after accounting for a $1.1 billion donation of Berkshire Hathaway stock to his children’s charitable foundations. Berkshire Hathaway’s A-share price rose nearly 7% in November, helping Buffett climb to No. 6 on the list of the richest people, up from No. 7 a month ago.
Known as the “Oracle of Omaha,” Buffett is one of the most successful investors of all time. He heads the investment conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway, which owns dozens of companies including the insurance company Geico, the battery maker Duracell and the restaurant chain Dairy Queen. The son of a U.S. congressman, he first bought stocks at age 11 and filed his first tax return at 13.
Buffett created the Giving Pledge with Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates in 2010, asking billionaires to pledge to give at least half their fortune to charitable groups. Buffett has said he would give away 99% of his fortune. He has so far donated more than $60 billion in Berkshire Hathaway stock to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and to foundations run by his children and one created by his late first wife. That includes $5.3 billion in June 2024, which helped him slip to No. 10 in early July for the first time in years. But his position has since rebounded.
7. Larry Page
Net Worth: $140.4 Billion
Source: Google
Age: 51
Residence: Palo Alto, California
Nationality: USA
Page falls to No. 7 on the list of richest people from No. 6 in November. His fortune fell by $1.7 billion as shares of Google parent Alphabet fell. In late November, the Justice Department said Google should sell its Chrome browser to reduce the company’s dominance of the Internet. In response, Google said in a statement that such a move would hurt consumers and America’s technological leadership.
Page co-founded the 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 sits on the board of Google parent Alphabet and remains a majority shareholder.
Page was a founding investor in asteroid mining company Planetary Resources, which was acquired by blockchain firm ConsenSys in 2018.
8. Sergey Brin
Net Worth: $134.3 Billion
Source: Google
Age: 51
Residence: Los Altos, California
Nationality: USA
Brin held on to his No. 8 spot from a month ago despite a small drop in Alphabet shares; his fortune fell by $1.6 billion to an estimated $134.3 billion.
Brin co-founded the Google search engine with fellow Stanford computer science graduate Larry Page. Like Page, he is currently a board member of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, and a majority shareholder.
Last year, Brin came out of semi-retirement to introduce changes to Google’s Gemini AI chatbot and was listed as a “core contributor” when the model was published in December.
He has also become the largest individual donor to Parkinson’s disease research, donating some $1.25 billion to various groups, including an academic collaboration led by his team called Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s.
9. Steve Ballmer
Net worth: $124.8 billion
Source: Microsoft, Clippers, investments
Age: 68
Residence: Hunts Point, Washington
Nationality: USA
Ballmer, a classmate of Bill Gates at Harvard University, joined Microsoft as employee number 30 in 1980 after dropping out of Stanford University’s MBA program. He led Microsoft as CEO from 2000 to 2014.
When Ballmer retired from Microsoft, he bought the Los Angeles Clippers for $2 billion, a record sum for an NBA team at the time. Forbes now values the team at $5.5 billion. The Clippers’ new home, the Intuit Dome in Inglewood — not far from Los Angeles International Airport — is set to open in August 2024.
Ballmer’s fortune is estimated to have increased by $3.9 billion in November, largely due to a surge in Microsoft shares, which rose about 4% during the month.
10. Amancio Ortega
Net worth: $123.8 billion
Source: Inditex/Zara
Age: 88
Residence: La Coruña, Spain
Nationality: Spain
The fast-fashion pioneer co-founded Inditex, best known for its Zara chain of stores, in 1975 with his ex-wife, Rosalía Mera (who died in 2013). Ortega was ranked No. 6 of the world’s richest in 2020, with a fortune of $55 billion. He was No. 13 on Forbes’ lists of the world’s billionaires for both 2023 and 2024. A surge in Inditex shares in September put Ortega back in the top ten for the first time in years. Last month, he fell from No. 9 to No. 10 as Inditex shares fell; his fortune is estimated to have shrunk by $3.8 billion. He owns around 60% of Madrid-listed Inditex.
