- The world’s wealthiest people have shuffled their ranks and seen their fortunes surge since 2000.
- Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison, and Steve Ballmer held top-20 spots then and still do.
- Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg didn’t rank in the top 20 less than 25 years ago.
Compare the wealthiest people on the planet today to a quarter-century ago, and it’s striking to see how the fortunes have grown, and most of the names have changed.
Bill Gates topped Forbes’ rundown of the world’s richest people in 2000, the earliest list accessible using the Wayback Machine. The Microsoft cofounder’s net worth has grown from $60 billion then to $105 billion at Tuesday’s close — good for 15th place in the real-time rankings.
Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett, Walmart heir Rob Walton, Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, and LVMH founder and CEO Bernard Arnault also made the top 20 then and still do today.
Forbes; Wayback Machine
But retaining a top 20 spot has required them to grow dramatically more wealthy since 2000. For example, Ellison’s net worth has more than quadrupled from $47 billion to $217 billion.
Buffett’s fortune has grown more than five-fold from about $26 billion to $143 billion, despite the investor gifting over half of his Berkshire shares to good causes since 2006.
Walton and Dell’s fortunes have more than quintupled in size from roughly $20 billion to well above $100 billion.
Ballmer and Arnault have notched even larger gains, with their net worths growing from about $16 billion and $13 billion each to $128 billion and $168 billion, respectively.
Meanwhile, SoftBank founder and CEO Masayoshi Son’s wealth has only grown from about $19 billion to $30 billion, dropping him from eighth place to 59th.
Several other people have fallen out of the top 10. They include Gates’ late cofounder, Paul Allen; Theo and Karl Albrecht, the brothers who cofounded supermarket giant Aldi; Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Al Saud of Saudi Arabia; and newspaper tycoon Kenneth Thompson.
On the other hand, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Alphabet cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang now rank in the top 10.
While a $20 billion fortune would have landed someone firmly in the top 10 in 2000, a net worth of that magnitude barely cracks the top 100 nowadays.
The top 10 wealthiest individuals were worth a combined $275 billion in 2000, or about one-seventh of their $2 trillion in total wealth at Tuesday’s close. The 20 richest people were worth $406 billion then, a fraction of the $3 trillion they’re worth today.
Musk alone is worth $454 billion today, exceeding the combined wealth of the top 20 in 2000.
The consistency between the two lists shows how companies such as Microsoft, Oracle, Berkshire Hathaway, Dell, and Walmart have gained value over the course of decades, enabling their largest shareholders to retain their top 10 spots almost a quarter-century later.
But it also underscores how businesses like Amazon, Alphabet, Tesla, Meta, and Nvidia have skyrocketed in value and propelled their biggest backers into top 10 positions.
