The super entrepreneur Elon Musk, Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg, and Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang all contributed to the wealth mass breaking all previous records. Despite many of the super rich seeing their coffers shrink during the year, there was a total increase of 1,500 billion compared to the previous year, an increase that can be explained primarily by a technology rally on the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York.
Musk also got an extra boost from his close relationship with the US's incoming president Donald Trump. According to Bloomberg, this contributed to increasing the value of Musk's companies Tesla, Space X, and AI company XAI.
The list of the world's richest people also includes, among others, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Chinese business leaders Pony Ma (Tencent), Colin Huang (Temu), and Lei Jun (Xiaomi), as well as French luxury billionaires Bernard Arnault (LVMH) and Françoise Bettencourt (owner of L'Oréal and the richest woman on the list).
The combined wealth of the 500 richest people corresponds to the combined GDP of Germany, Australia, and Japan, according to figures from the World Bank.
