The world’s 500 richest people have reached a total fortune of $10 trillion
1 January 2025 10:33
the world’s 500 richest people became much richer in 2024, with their combined wealth reaching $10 trillion. This group of billionaires is headed by Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jensen Huang, according to "Komersant Ukrainian" with reference to Bloomberg.
The unbridled growth of US tech stocks has played a key role in the rapid growth of the fortunes of these three, as well as the fortunes of Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell, and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. These eight tech titans alone have earned more than $600 billion this year, accounting for 43% of the $1.5 trillion increase among the 500 richest people in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
However, it was Musk – the so-called “first buddy” of President-elect Donald Trump after his unprecedented support of his election campaign – who dominated the world’s richest people in 2024.
His close relationship with the future president helped to increase the value of his companies, including Tesla Inc., SpaceX, and xAI. This increased his wealth to an unprecedented $442.1 billion, which is $213 billion more than at the beginning of the year. The difference of $237 billion between him and Bezos on December 17 was the largest ever recorded between the first and second place in the Bloomberg Wealth Index.
The world’s richest people have generally benefited from a stock market that has exceeded expectations in 2024. The S&P 500 Index was up 24% as of Monday, buoyed by a small group of stocks dubbed the “Magnificent Seven,” including Musk’s Tesla, Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms Inc. and Huang’s Nvidia Corp. which accounted for more than half of the stock index’s performance.
The total global wealth is about $110 trillion, so the world’s 500 richest people own almost 10% of the world’s money.
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Winners of the year
- Elon Musk. The entrepreneur’s fortune is growing rapidly and is approaching $500 billion. In 2024, he earned $229 billion thanks to the growth in the value of his companies’ shares.
- Mark Zuckerberg. Despite a record $841 million fine from the EU for violating antitrust laws and initial investor doubts about the company’s multibillion-dollar investment in AI, the CEO of Meta added $81 billion to his fortune this year as Meta shares rose by almost 70%.
- Jensen Huang. The Nvidia CEO has become one of the biggest individual winners of the AI boom, adding $76 billion to his fortune this year. Nvidia shares almost tripled in 2024, and the company became the most valuable in the world for the first time in June.
Losers of the year
- French billionaires from the luxury goods sector. The fortunes of Bernard Arnault, Françoise Bettancourt Meyers, and François Pinot, whose wealth comes from holdings in the luxury goods sector, suffered major losses in 2024. After years of pandemic-driven growth, slowing sales, especially in the key Chinese market, cost the three billionaires a total of $71 billion.
- Colin Huang. The businessman suffered the largest drop in wealth among Chinese billionaires. The founder of the e-commerce platform Temu briefly became China’s richest man in August, but ended the year with a loss of $18 billion after a disappointing financial report caused his company’s shares to fall 29% in one day.
- Ricardo Salinas. The chairman of Grupo Elektra SAB, a Mexican retail and banking conglomerate, lost more than half of his fortune in one day after his company’s stock plunged following Salinas’ claims that he was defrauded by a former financial adviser. Last week, Salinas announced that he would take the company private.
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