June was a busy month for the world’s richest people. Elon Musk held on to the top spot on Forbes’ billionaires rankings, thanks to a bumper month for Tesla . Musk’s fortune has grown by $11.1 billion since June 1 and nearly $19 billion in the past two months.
His fortune is likely to be boosted soon by SpaceX , which is set to sell shares in an offering that values the company at $210 billion — up from $180 billion last December (Musk owns an estimated 42% stake in the company).
Jeff Bezos , whose fortune has increased by $15.5 billion in the past month, rose to No. 2 when Amazon’s market capitalization surpassed $2 trillion for the first time in late June.
Bernard Arnault — who was the world’s richest person from February to the end of May — dropped to third place as shares in his LVMH group fell for a second straight month.
The month’s biggest gainer was Larry Ellison, whose fortune rose $26.8 billion to an estimated $173 billion as Oracle shares soared to all-time highs.
Warren Buffett revealed in the last week of June that he had given away Berkshire Hathaway stock worth about $5.3 billion. That, along with a slight drop in the holding company’s stock price, was enough to drop him to 10th place among the world’s richest people on July 1. That’s the lowest position Buffett, arguably the most generous person on the planet, has held in years.
So together, the world’s 10 richest people are worth a combined total of $1.66 trillion — about $76 billion more than a month ago.
Check out who are the 10 richest people on July:
1. Elon Musk
Net Worth: $228.6 Billion
Source of Wealth: Tesla, SpaceX, X
Age: 52
Citizenship: US
Musk is the CEO of electric car company Tesla, rocket company SpaceX and social media company X, formerly known as Twitter. He owns 13% of Tesla between stock and options and has pledged some of the shares as collateral for loans. The automaker accounts for about two-thirds of his fortune. He bought X, then known as Twitter, for $44 billion in October 2022 and owns about 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 he turned 18, worked a variety of jobs, enrolled at Queen’s University in Ontario, and then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he majored in economics.
In 2000, he merged an online bank he founded, X.com, with a similar company founded 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 its founding; he later received the title of co-founder. Musk, who became Tesla’s CEO in 2008, took the company public in 2010. Its market capitalization soared in 2020 and 2021. In September 2021, Musk became the richest person in the world. In November 2021, his fortune reached a staggering $320 billion. He held the position of the world’s richest person for most of 2022 – until December 2022, when a drop in Tesla’s share price knocked the value of his fortune down.
Musk became the world’s richest person again on June 8, 2023, and held the top spot until the end of 2023. He dropped to second place on January 31, 2024, following a January 30 ruling by a Delaware judge that voided Musk’s nearly $51 billion payout (Forbes discounted Tesla options from the pay package by 50%).
Musk became the world’s richest person again in late May 2024 after his startup xAI raised $6 billion from private investors. He owns 60% of the company.
2. Jeff Bezos
Net Worth: $212.9 Billion
Source of Wealth: Amazon
Age: 60
Citizenship: U.S.
Jeff Bezos founded e-commerce giant Amazon in 1994 and ran it as CEO until July 2021 (he remains chairman); that same month, he went into space on a rocket built by the private rocket company Blue Origin, which he founded and funded with billions of dollars. His fortune grew by about $3 billion in March, driven by a surge in Amazon shares.
Before founding Amazon.com in his Seattle garage, Bezos worked in New York at the hedge fund DE Shaw. Amazon began as an online bookseller at a time when few people were buying products online. The company also grew to dominate cloud storage and began producing movies and TV shows to power Amazon Prime Video.
Bezos surpassed Bill Gates to become the world’s richest person in July 2017. He and Gates have traded first and second place on several occasions. Bezos was the world’s richest person on Forbes’ list of global billionaires from 2018 to 2021; he fell to second place in 2022, then to fourth, but returned to third place on January 25, 2023, when the fortune of Indian businessman Gautam Adani (previously the third richest) fell.
In 2019, Bezos and his wife MacKenzie divorced; as part of the settlement, she got 4% of Amazon’s shares and he got 12%. He has since sold and given away some of his stake and currently owns just under 10% of the company. Since Amazon went public in 1997, Forbes estimates that he has sold more than $27 billion worth of shares. Through his Bezos Expeditions, he has invested in a number of companies, including Airbnb and software company Workday.
3. Bernard Arnault and family
Net worth: $193.3 billion
Source of Wealth: LVMH Age: 75
Citizenship: France
Bernard Arnault, CEO and chairman of LVMH, returned to the top of the list on January 31, 2024, surpassing Elon Musk, and has held that position ever since. Arnault built the world’s largest luxury goods company with some 70 fashion and cosmetics brands. Notable ones include Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Moet & Chandon and Sephora. In January 2021, LVMH acquired jeweler Tiffany & Co. for $15.8 billion.
Arnault’s father made his millions in the construction business; for starters, Arnault used $15 million of that fortune to buy Christian Dior.
All five of Arnault’s children work in parts of the LVMH empire. In January 2023, Arnault appointed his daughter Delphine to head Dior, the group’s second-largest brand. He also appointed two of his sons, Alexandre, 31, and Frédéric, 29, to the LVMH board.
Arnault was the world’s richest person for most of the first half of 2023 and again from February through the end of May 2024. As of June 1, 2024, Arnault was worth about $7.8 billion less than he was a month ago, according to Forbes estimates, following a slight decline in LVMH’s share price.
4. Larry Ellison
Net worth: $176.1 billion
Source of Wealth: Oracle
Age: 79
Citizenship: U.S.
Larry Ellison co-founded the software company Oracle in 1977 and was its CEO until 2014; he now serves as chairman and chief technology officer. Over the years, Oracle has made a number of major acquisitions, including its $7.4 billion purchase of Sun Microsystems in 2010.
In 2012, Ellison purchased 98% of the Hawaiian island of Lanai for $300 million. He moved from California to Lanai in 2020, but kept his homes in California and Nevada. Ellison invested in Tesla and served on the automaker’s board from 2018 to August 2022.
In February of this year, Ellison was surpassed by Mark Zuckerberg and dropped to fifth place on the list. In May, his net worth increased by $3.4 billion.
5. Mark Zuckerberg
Net worth: $175.3 billion
Source of Wealth: Facebook
Age: 40
Citizenship: US
Zuckerberg co-founded Facebook — now called Meta Platforms — as a student at Harvard University in 2004. It has become the world’s largest social network, with 3.88 billion monthly users. The company also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, both of which it has acquired and expanded. Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, took the company public in 2012 and still owns about 13 percent of it. He and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have pledged to direct 99 percent of their shares in the company to “actions that advance human potential.” One ambitious goal they are funding is to develop tools to help people cure, manage or prevent disease by the end of this century.
Zuckerberg rejoined the world’s top 10 richest people in the summer of 2023, for the first time since January 2022, as a result of a surge in Meta’s share price. During the month of May, his fortune increased by $12.6 billion, with Meta’s shares rising 8.5%.
6. Larry Page
Net worth: $150.4 billion
Source of Wealth: Google
Age: 51
Citizenship: USA
Page co-founded the Google search engine with fellow Stanford doctoral student Sergey Brin in 1998 and served as its CEO until 2001, and then from 2011 to 2015.
He is now a board member of Google’s parent company Alphabet and remains its majority shareholder.
Page was a founding investor in asteroid mining company Planetary Resources, which was acquired in 2018 by blockchain firm ConsenSys.
He moved into the top 10 of the world’s richest people after a remarkable 15% jump in Alphabet’s share price in May 2023.
Page’s fortune rose $7.5 billion in May after jumping $9 billion in April 2024 as Alphabet shares surged.
7. Sergey Brin
Net worth: $143.9 billion
Source of Wealth: Google
Age: 50
Citizenship: USA
Brin co-founded the Google search engine with Larry Page, a Stanford computer science doctoral candidate. Like Page, he now sits on the board of Google’s parent company Alphabet and is a controlling shareholder. His fortune increased by $7 billion in May 2024.
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 also became the largest individual donor to Parkinson’s disease research, donating $1.25 billion to several groups, including an academic collaborative led by his team called Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s.
8. Bill Gates
Net worth: $133.6 billion
Source of Wealth: Microsoft
Age: 68
Citizenship: U.S.
As a teenager, Gates fell in love with computer programming. He dropped out of Harvard to co-found the software company 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 served as CEO of the company for 25 years and remained chairman until 2014. He finally stepped down from the board in 2020, but told Forbes in early 2023 that he still spends about 10% of his time consulting on Microsoft teams. He now has investments in dozens of companies, including waste-removal company Republic Services and farm-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 world’s richest person from 1995 to 2017 (excluding 2008 and 2010 to 2013).
Largely due to the $59 billion he has donated to the Gates Foundation (including a $20 billion donation in July 2022), he was surpassed as the world’s richest person in 2018 by Jeff Bezos. He and Melinda French Gates divorced in 2021; she received about $10 billion in stocks and other assets as part of the divorce settlement.
Gates’ fortune rose about $2.4 billion in May but remained at No. 9. It’s his lowest ranking in decades, as others have surged ahead.
9. Steve Ballmer
Net Worth: $132.2 Billion
Source of Wealth: Microsoft
Age: 68
Citizenship: U.S.
Ballmer was a classmate of Bill Gates at Harvard. In 1980, he left his MBA at Stanford University to join Microsoft, where he was employee number 30. He was the company’s CEO from 2000 to 2014.
When he retired from Microsoft, Ballmer purchased the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team for $2 billion, a record for an NBA team. Forbes currently values the Clippers at $4.65 billion.
Ballmer’s fortune has increased by about $6 billion in the past month amid a surge in Microsoft’s stock price. Ballmer and his wife Connie are among America’s 25 most generous philanthropists.
10. Warren Buffett
Net worth: $127.6 billion
Source of Wealth: Berkshire Hathaway
Age: 93
Citizenship: U.S.
Known as the “Oracle of Omaha,” Warren Buffett is one of the most successful investors of all time. He heads the investment conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway, which owns dozens of companies, including insurance company Geico, battery maker Duracell and 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 age 13.
Buffett created the Giving Pledge with Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates in 2010, asking billionaires to commit to donating at least half of their wealth to charity. Buffett has said he would donate 99% of his fortune. To date, he has donated at least $51.5 billion worth of Berkshire Hathaway stock to the Gates Foundation and his children’s foundations. That makes him the most generous billionaire on the planet. As of mid-June, Buffett had donated $4.6 billion worth of Berkshire Hathaway stock. By May 2024, his fortune had increased by $6 billion, driven by the surge in Berkshire Hathaway stock.
