In the ever-evolving landscape of global wealth, the list of the richest billionaires serves as a barometer of economic prowess and entrepreneurial achievement. As we delve into the year 2024, it’s time to take a closer look at the individuals who sit atop the pinnacle of financial success. and are the top 10 richest billionaires in 2024.
1. Bernard Arnault & family
Bernard Arnault is the Chairman And CEO, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton.
Bernard Jean Étienne Arnault is a French businessman, investor, and art collector. He is the founder, chairman, and CEO of LVMH, the world’s largest luxury goods company.
Arnault is the richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of US$227 billion as of April 2024, according to Forbes.
2024 Billionaires Net Worth: $233B
About Bernard Arnault & family
- Bernard Arnault oversees the LVMH empire of 75 fashion and cosmetics brands, including Louis Vuitton and Sephora.
- LVMH acquired American jeweler Tiffany & Co in 2021 for $15.8 billion, believed to be the biggest luxury brand acquisition ever.
- Arnault’s holding company Agache backs venture capital firm Aglaé Ventures, which has investments in businesses such as Netflix and TikTok parent company ByteDance.
- His father made a small fortune in construction; Arnault got his start by putting up $15 million from that business to buy Christian Dior in 1984.
- Arnault’s five children all work at LVMH; in July 2022, he proposed a reorganization of his holding company Agache to give them equal stakes.
2. Elon Musk
Elon Musk is a well-known entrepreneur and business magnate, best known for founding companies such as SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, and The Boring Company. He is also involved in projects related to renewable energy and space exploration. Musk is known for his ambitious vision for the future, including the colonization of Mars and the development of sustainable energy solutions.
Networth as of April: $195B
About Elon Musk
- Elon Musk cofounded six companies, including electric car maker Tesla, rocket producer SpaceX and tunneling startup Boring Company.
- He owns about 12% of Tesla excluding options, but has pledged more than half his shares as collateral for personal loans of up to $3.5 billion.
- In early 2024, a Delaware judge voided Musk’s 2018 deal to receive options equaling an additional 9% of Tesla. Forbes has discounted the options by 50% pending Musk’s appeal.
- SpaceX, founded in 2002, is worth nearly $180 billion after a December 2023 tender offer of up to $750 million; SpaceX stock has quintupled its value in four years.
- Musk bought Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion, after later trying to back out of the deal. He owns an estimated 74% of the company, now called X.
- Forbes estimates that Musk’s stake in X is now worth nearly 70% less than he paid for it based on investor Fidelity’s valuation of the company as of December 2023.
3. Jeff Bezos
Jeffrey Preston Bezos is an American businessman, media proprietor and investor. He is the founder, executive chairman, and former president and CEO of Amazon, the world’s largest e-commerce and cloud computing company, according to Wikipedia
2024 Billionaires Net Worth as of 4/2/24: $194B
About Jeff Bezos
- Jeff Bezos founded e-commerce giant Amazon in 1994 out of his Seattle garage.
- Bezos stepped down as CEO to become executive chairman in 2021. He owns a bit less than 10% of the company.
- He and his wife MacKenzie divorced in 2019 after 25 years of marriage and he transferred a quarter of his then-16% Amazon stake to her.
- Bezos donated more than $1.1 million worth of stock to nonprofits in 2023, though it’s unclear which organizations received those shares
- He owns The Washington Post and Blue Origin, an aerospace company developing rockets; he briefly flew to space in one in July 2021.
- Bezos said in a November 2022 interview with CNN that he plans to give away the majority of his wealth in his lifetime, without disclosing specific details.
4. Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg is an American technology entrepreneur and philanthropist best known as the co-founder and CEO of Facebook, the world’s largest social networking platform. He was born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York, and attended Harvard University, where he launched Facebook in 2004 with his college roommates.
2024 Billionaires Net Worth as of 4/2/24: $177B.
About Mark Zuckerberg
- A 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in 2004 for students to match names with photos of classmates.
- Zuckerberg took Facebook public in 2012; he now owns about 13% of the company’s stock.
- Facebook changed its name to Meta in 2021 to shift the company’s focus to the metaverse.
- In 2015, Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, pledged to give away 99% of their Meta stake over their lifetimes.
5. Larry Ellison
Lawrence Joseph Ellison (78 years old), also known as Larry Ellison, is an American businessman and entrepreneur who co-founded Oracle Corporation and is its current chief technology officer and executive chairman.
Ellison was the CEO of Oracle from 1977 to 2014, and he owns more than 40% of the company.
Oracle is a database company that reported $50 billion in revenue in 2023. Ellison also has stakes in Tesla, the Indian Wells tennis event, real estate, and sailing.
2024 Billionaires Net Worth as of 4/2/24: $141B
About Larry Ellison
- Larry Ellison is chairman, chief technology officer and co-founder of software giant Oracle, of which he owns just under 40%.
- He gave up the Oracle CEO role in 2014 after 37 years at the helm.
- Oracle has grown in part through steady acquisitions of software companies: the biggest was $28.3 billion for electronic health records company Cerner in 2021.
- In 2020, Ellison moved permanently to the Hawaiian island Lanai, which he bought nearly all of in 2012 for $300 million.
- Ellison sat on Tesla’s board from December 2018 to August 2022. He still owns about 15 million shares in the electric carmaker.
6. Warren Buffett
Warren Buffett is an American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist who is considered one of the most successful investors in the world. He is the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, a multinational conglomerate holding company.
Buffett is known for his value investing strategy, where he looks for undervalued companies with strong fundamentals and long-term growth potential. He is also known for his frugal lifestyle and down-to-earth personality, despite being one of the wealthiest individuals in the world.
2024 Billionaires Net Worth as of 4/2/24: $133B
About Warren Buffett
- Known as the “Oracle of Omaha,” Warren Buffett is one of the most successful investors of all time.
- Buffett runs 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.
- He has promised to donate over 99% of his wealth. So far he has given more than $56 billion, mostly through the Gates Foundation and his kids’ foundations.
- In 2010, he and Bill Gates launched the Giving Pledge, asking other billionaires to commit to donating at least half of their fortune to charitable causes.
7. Bill Gates
William Henry Gates III, also known as Bill Gates, is an American businessman, investor, philanthropist, and writer. He is best known for co-founding Microsoft with his childhood friend Paul Allen in 1975. Gates has also founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which funds global health and development programs.
Gates was born in Seattle, Washington on October 28, 1955. He attended Harvard University, but dropped out in his junior year to start Microsoft. In 2008, Gates transitioned to focus full-time on the foundation, which has goals such as improving equity, creating a world without pandemics, and making vaccine access faster and more equitable. Gates co-chairs the foundation with Melinda French Gates, and has said that he is very lucky to have Microsoft and that he gives away his wealth back to society.
Gates was the world’s richest man for most of 20 years, but Amazon.com Inc. surpassed him.
2024 Billionaires Net Worth as of 4/2/24: $128B
About Bill Gates
- Bill Gates diversified his fortune from software firm Microsoft into dozens of holdings, including waste disposal firm Republic Services and tractor maker Deere & Co.
- Gates, a computer enthusiast from a young age, dropped out of Harvard to cofound Microsoft with Paul Allen (d. 2018) in 1975, hoping to capitalize on the spread of personal computers.
- As of March 2020, when Gates stepped down from the Microsoft board, he owned about 1.3% of the software and computing company’s shares.
- In May 2021, Bill and Melinda Gates each announced on Twitter they were ending their marriage after 27 years. They still co-chair the charitable Gates Foundation.
- To date, Gates has donated more than $59 billion to the Gates Foundation, including a $20 billion gift announced in July 2022. Most of his early donations were gifts of Microsoft stock.
8. Steve Ballmer
Steve Ballmer is an American investor and business executive who was the CEO of Microsoft from 2000 to 2014. He is also the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers NBA team.
Ballmer was born on March 24, 1956 in Detroit, Michigan. He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and mathematics from Harvard University and attended Stanford University Graduate School of Business. Ballmer joined Microsoft in 1980 and became CEO after the first dot-com crash. During his time as CEO, he led the company to compete with Apple for mobile phones and Google for search capabilities. In 2014, Ballmer stepped down as CEO and purchased the Clippers for $2 billion. As of November 2023, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimated Ballmer’s wealth at around $122 billion, making him the fifth-richest person in the world.
Ballmer remains a shareholder in Microsoft, which makes the Windows operating system, the Xbox game console, and Surface tablet computers.
2024 Billionaires Net Worth as of 4/2/24: $121B
About Steve Ballmer
- Steve Ballmer is the high-wattage former CEO of Microsoft, who led the company from 2000 to 2014.
- He joined Microsoft in 1980 as employee No. 30 after dropping out of Stanford’s MBA program.
- Ballmer ran Microsoft as CEO after the first dot-com crash and through efforts to catch up to Google in search capabilities and Apple in mobile phones.
- In 2014, the year he retired from Microsoft, he bought the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers for $2 billion; Forbes now values the team at $4.65 billion.
- He has ramped up his philanthropy since 2014, putting over $2 billion into a donor-advised fund, with a focus on economic mobility; to date the Ballmers have given away nearly $3.5 billion.
- In 2022, he and his wife Connie donated some $425 million to the University of Oregon to create an institute aimed at the behavioral and mental health needs of children in the state.
9. Mukesh Ambani
Mukesh Ambani is an Indian billionaire businessman and the chairman of Reliance Industries, a conglomerate with interests in petrochemicals, refining, oil, telecommunications, and retail. He is one of the richest people in the world and has been ranked as the wealthiest person in Asia.
2024 Billionaires Net Worth as of 4/2/24: $116B
About Mukesh Ambani
- Mukesh Ambani chairs and runs $110 billion (revenue) Reliance Industries, which has interests in petrochemicals, oil and gas, telecom, retail and financial services.
- 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.
- Reliance’s telecom and broadband service Jio has more than 470 million subscribers. In August 2023, Reliance listed its finance arm, Jio Financial Services.
- Ambani is pivoting Reliance into green energy. The company will be investing $80 billion over the next 10-15 years on renewable energy and building a new complex next to its refinery.
- Ambani’s three children joined the board of Reliance in 2023. Son Akash heads Jio; daughter Isha oversees retail and financial services; and younger son Anant is in the energy business
10 Larry Page
Larry Page is an American businessman, computer scientist, and internet entrepreneur. He co-founded Google in 1998 with Sergey Brin and served as its first CEO. Page is also a board member and controlling shareholder of Alphabet, Google’s parent company.
Page is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has also received the Marconi Prize, which is given to those who have made advances in communications and information technology.
2024 Billionaires Net Worth as of 4/2/24: $114B
About Larry Page
- Larry Page stepped down as CEO of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, in 2019 but remains a board member and a controlling shareholder.
- He cofounded Google in 1998 with fellow Stanford Ph.D. student Sergey Brin.
- With Brin, Page invented Google’s PageRank algorithm, which powers the search engine.
- Page was CEO until 2001, when Eric Schmidt took over, and then from 2011 until 2015, when he became CEO of Google’s new parent firm Alphabet.
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