Who Is the Richest Person in the World? Top 10 Are All Men

The title of world's richest person goes to Elon Musk, co-founder and CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and The Boring Company. After delivering a record amount of Tesla cars and profit to investors in 2024, Musk has redirected his energy toward social media and politics.

In October 2022, Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion and changed its name to X. Within a few weeks, he laid off roughly half of the organization's workforce, with hundreds more resigning in opposition to Musk's ultimatums.

Looking ahead to 2025, Trump has invited Musk to take the top position at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

In 1994, a former hedge fund manager decided to bet on his business acumen and leave his job to start an online bookstore out of his Seattle garage. The technology entrepreneur was named Jeff Bezos, and that little project grew to become the global behemoth Amazon.

The Amazon co-founder then went on to begin an aerospace company called Blue Origin in 2000 and acquired the Washington Post in 2013. Bezos and crew completed the first crewed Blue Origin flight in July 2021, as his wealth soared to all-time heights.

In that same month, Bezos stepped down as CEO of Amazon. However, he remains a significant shareholder and executive chairman.

Although he is no longer at the helm, Bezos leaves a legacy of revolutionizing e-commerce, even in the wake of backlash against Amazon's poor treatment of workers, vendors and the environment.

Like other tech billionaires, Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook (now Meta), is no stranger to scandal.

In 2003, Zuckerberg created a prototype social media website called "FaceMash," where users ranked the attractiveness of fellow Harvard students. The superficial and problematic website gained significant traction, inspiring Zuckerberg to aim higher.

Zuckerberg received initial funds to start Facebook from his friend and co-founder, Eduardo Saverin. After lots of legal drama and unfavorable allegations, Saverin and Facebook parted ways.

Although Zuckerberg's former friend missed out on billions of dollars of future Meta shares, he would also avoid waves of negative publicity. Most of the backlash against Meta is due to a lack of accountability for several data privacy failures, misinformation and the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Zuckerberg has most recently been in the news for donating $626,000 to promote affordable housing in Kaua'i — the same island where he owns approximately 1,300 acres of beachfront property and a $270 million bunker.

Larry Ellison became one of the richest people once he connected with future partners Ed Oates and Bob Miner. This modern triumvirate developed Oracle into the second-largest software company in the world.

After 37 years of changing the face of coding and computing, he stepped away from Oracle to join Tesla's board between 2018 and 2022. In recent years, he has shifted his immense wealth from high-performing assets and stocks to cancer research and other philanthropic pursuits.

French entrepreneur Bernard Arnault built his mountain of money through the sale of luxury goods to the richest people in the world. His company, LVMH, is comprised of such top-name brands as Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Marc Jacobs and Sephora.

Although the former co-founder of the largest software company in the world, Microsoft, only owns a 1-percent share in his and Paul Allen's brain-child — but that "measly" stake is still worth over $26 billion.

During his windfall career, Gates has diversified his Cascade Investments LLC portfolio and served as a board member of Berkshire Hathaway between 2004 and 2020.

Aside from his philanthropic work with his ex-wife on the Melinda Gates Foundation, Gates has fallen into hot water for several controversies, including his connections to convicted child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Larry Page, co-founder of Google (Alphabet), is not the richest person in the world but definitely one of the most powerful in terms of information control.

As the dominant search engine, Page's former company decides which relevant products and news stories appear on the first few pages of any Google search.

The "Oracle of Omaha," Warren Buffett, has become one of the richest people in the world through his intuitive knowledge of finance and investments. In 1962, this stock trading guru bought significant shares in a textile company called Berkshire Hathaway.

Since becoming a majority stakeholder in 1965, Buffet has led his cash cow into green pastures of nearly every sector of society, including insurance, transportation, energy, manufacturing and utilities. This one company now impacts nearly everything U.S. citizens consume.

Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft (2000-2014) and current owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, has been an influential force in the tech market for decades.

He dropped out of Stanford to become Microsoft's 30th employee and has worked his way to becoming one of the richest people in the world ever since — due, in large part, to his share of company holdings (4 percent).

Sergey Brin, the Russian-born co-founder of Google, made his fortune by shaping the face of the internet forever — although not always in a way that would best serve society.

Some of Google's biggest scandals under Brin's leadership include tax avoidance, censorship issues and several flopped product launches.

Brin has donated millions of dollars to Parkinson's research but receives criticism for his philanthropic investments paling in comparison to his multibillion-dollar earnings.

According to Bloomberg, Brin has enjoyed a year-to-date (YTD) upswing of almost $25 billion, a benchmark that he will likely surpass in future years during the upcoming administration.

There's an enormous disconnect between most multibillionaires and the everyday man person who contributes to their empire and boosts each publicly traded company's share price. It would take the average U.S. citizen more than three million years to become as rich as the people on this list.

Beyond bare bank account numbers, that wealth gap has an inherent impact on lifestyles and perceptions of reality; not many of us can even entertain the idea of an underground bunker in Hawaii, nor does the internet put us on blast for only donating a fraction of our income to charitable causes.

But when your total fortune is more than you could exhaust in a lifetime, the way you spend your money falls under public scrutiny.

If money truly "makes the world go round," then people with net worths that end up on Forbes or Bloomberg are worth being aware of. As Spiderman's uncle Ben once said, "With great power, comes great responsibility."