Lifted by a post-presidential-inauguration surge in stocks, the world’s ten richest people got a collective $107 billion wealthier in the past month. Altogether they are worth $2.03 trillion, per Forbes estimates.
Elon Musk is still the world’s wealthiest person, per Forbes, worth a remarkable $421 billion. It’s the second month in a row he’s started off with a fortune greater than $400 billion – a level no other billionaire has reached in the nearly four decades Forbes has been tracking the world’s wealthiest people.
The biggest gainer in the past month was Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who overtook Larry Ellison to become the world’s third richest; he is now worth nearly $238 billion. Zuckerberg’s fortune jumped by $35 billion in the past month as Meta shares popped up by 16%. Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan were featured guests at Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20, standing next to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his fiancée Lauren Sanchez and just feet away from Musk. Also in the crowd there: Google cofounder Sergey Brin, now ranked No. 7, and LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault, ranked No. 5.
Bezos also got a notable bump in his fortune in the past month. The world’s second richest person is $16.6 billion richer–now worth $250 billion–thanks to a rise in Amazon’s stock price.
One person not in the top ten this month: Nvidia cofounder and CEO Jensen Huang. News in late January about Chinese AI firm DeepSeek sent some tech stocks tumbling, including Nvidia’s. Huang, who ranked No. 10 as of January 1 with a $117 billion fortune, has fallen to No. 16, worth $105 billion, due to the drop in Nvidia’s shares.
Replacing Huang in the top ten: Spanish clothing retail tycoon Amancio Ortega, who at No. 9 is worth $123.3 billion. Former Microsoft CEO and current LA Clippers owner Steve Ballmer fell from ninth last month to No. 10, with an estimated $122.9 billion fortune– just a few hundred million behind Ortega. Ballmer is the only one of the current top 10 whose fortune declined in the past month– a $1.4 billion drop.
Forbes has been keeping track of the world’s billionaires since 1987. In April 2024 we found 2,781 of them for our annual list.
Here are the 10 richest people on earth as of February 1, 2025 at 12 a.m. Eastern time, according to Forbes. Stock prices fluctuate routinely, so these net worths may change on a daily basis. Forbes tracks the daily changes on our Real Time list of billionaires.
*As of February 1, 2025 at 12 a.m. ET
Musk’s fortune grew by $400 million in the past month—a rounding error for someone worth more than $400 billion.
Musk, who donated more than $100 million to support Donald Trump in the November 2024 presidential election, was named by Trump as co-head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an advisory group that will recommend cuts to government jobs, programs and spending. There are potentially significant conflicts of interest at play, given Musk’s companies’ ties to the federal government, including SpaceX (a customer of the Department of Defense) and Tesla (regulated by the Department of Transportation).
Musk is CEO of electric car company Tesla and rocket firm SpaceX; chairman and chief technology officer of social media company X, formerly known as Twitter; and founder of artificial intelligence firm xAI. He owns 13% of Tesla stock and has pledged some of his stock as collateral for loans. The electric car maker’s shareholders voted in June in favor of Musk keeping nearly $50 billion of performance based stock options in what a Delaware judge had earlier called “the largest potential compensation opportunity ever observed in public markets,” when she voided the award this January and affirmed the ruling in December. But the matter won’t be resolved anytime soon. A lengthy appeal of the Delaware ruling is likely to follow. Until Musk receives those options, Forbes will continue to discount the Tesla options from the pay package by 50%.
Originally from South Africa, Musk moved to Canada before his 18th birthday, worked a variety of jobs, enrolled at Queen’s University in Ontario and then transferred to University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics.
In 2000, he merged an online bank he cofounded, X.com with a similar outfit cofounded by Peter Thiel to form PayPal, which eBay bought in 2002 for $1.4 billion. He founded SpaceX in 2002 in El Segundo, near Los Angeles. In 2004 he joined Tesla as an investor and chairman, a year after it was founded; he was later granted the cofounder title. Musk, who became CEO of Tesla in 2008, took the company public in 2010. In September 2021, Musk became the world’s richest person. Musk was also the world’s richest person for most of 2022—until December 2022, when a drop in Tesla’s share price pushed down the value of his fortune. Musk became the world’s richest person again on June 8, 2023 and held onto the number one spot for the remainder of 2023. He fell to No. 2 on January 31, 2024.
Musk became the world’s richest person yet again in late May 2024, after his startup xAI raised $6 billion from private investors at a $24 billion valuation. xAI raised an additional $5 billion from investors in November, valuing the startup at $50 billion. He owns an estimated 54% of the company.
Jeff Bezos created e-commerce giant Amazon in 1994 and ran it as CEO until July 2021 (he remains chairman); that same month he went to space on a rocket built by private rocket company Blue Origin, which he founded and has funded with billions of dollars.
Amazon shares rose by about 7% during January, adding $16.6 billion to Bezos’ fortune.
Before founding Amazon.com in his garage in Seattle, he worked in New York at hedge fund D.E. Shaw. Amazon began as an online bookseller at a time when few people bought goods online. The company also grew to dominate cloud storage and moved into movie and series production to feed Amazon Prime Video.
Bezos was the world’s richest person on Forbes’ list of the World’s Billionaires from 2018 through 2021; he dropped to second richest on the 2022 billionaires list and No. 3 on the 2024 list.
In 2019, Bezos and his wife MacKenzie divorced; as part of the settlement, she got 4% of Amazon’s shares and he kept 12%. He has since sold and given away more of his stake and owns just under 10% of the company. Since Amazon went public in 1997, Forbes calculates that he has sold more than $38 billion worth of his stock. Through his Bezos Expeditions he has invested in an array of companies, including Airbnb and software firm Workday.
Zuckerberg was the biggest gainer of the top 10 during January. His fortune grew $35.4 billion in the past month, as Meta shares climbed 16%.
Zuckerberg cofounded Facebook—now called Meta Platforms—when he was a student at Harvard University in 2004. It has grown to be the world’s largest social network, with several billion users globally. The company also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, both of which it acquired and greatly expanded. Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, took the company public in 2012 and still owns about 13% of it.
Despite his fortune rising $3.7 billion during January, Ellison dropped one notch in the ranking from No. 3 last month as he was overtaken by Zuckerberg, who had a much bigger gain.
On January 21, the day after Donald Trump was inaugurated as president, Ellison was on hand when Trump announced the Stargate Project, a venture with Ellison’s firm Oracle, Chat GPT creator OpenAI, Japan’s Masayoshi Son and his firm Softbank and MGX of the UAE. The group says it will spend $500 billion over four years to build AI infrastructure—mainly data centers—in the U.S.
Ellison cofounded software firm Oracle in 1977 and ran it as CEO until 2014; he now serves as chairman and chief technology officer of the company.
In 2012, Ellison bought 98% of the Hawaiian island of Lanai for $300 million. He also owns homes in California, Nevada and Florida. Ellison invested in Tesla and served on the board of the electric vehicle company from 2018 through August 2022.
Bernard Arnault, CEO and chairman of luxury goods group LVMH, got $20 billion richer in the past month thanks to a nearly 12% increase in the price of the company shares. The group announced 2024 results on January 29; though revenue increased slightly, its profits fell 17% compared to the prior year. Shares fell on the news but still ended the month higher than when it started.
Arnault’s father made millions in the construction business; to get his start, Arnault used $15 million of that fortune to buy Christian Dior. He has since built the largest luxury goods company in the world with some 70 fashion and cosmetics brands, including Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Moet & Chandon, Sephora and jeweler Tiffany & Co.
All five of Arnault’s children work in parts of the LVMH empire. Earlier this year, Arnault nominated two of his sons—Alexandre and Frédéric—to the board of LVMH and in November Alexandre was named deputy CEO of LVMH’s wine and spirits division. His daughter Delphine, who runs Dior, and son Antoine, already sit on the board. In June he named son Frédéric as head of LVMH’s family holding group. His youngest son, Jean, is director of watches at Louis Vuitton.
Arnault was the world’s richest person for most of the first half of 2023 and again from February through late May 2024.
Page’s fortune expanded by $11 billion in the past month, supported by a nearly 7% rise Google-parent Alphabet’s shares.
In late November the Department of Justice said Google should sell its Chrome browser in order to reduce the company’s dominance online. In response, Google said in a statement that such a move would hurt consumers and America’s technological leadership. The decision may have been one reason that Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai attended Donald Trump’s inauguration.
Page cofounded search engine Google with fellow Stanford PhD student Sergey Brin in 1998 and served as CEO until 2001 and from 2011 to 2015. He now serves as a board member of Google’s parent Alphabet and continues to be a controlling shareholder.
Page was a founding investor in asteroid mining company Planetary Resources, which was acquired by blockchain firm ConsenSys in 2018.
Like his Google cofounder Larry Page, Brin’s fortune also rose in the past month —up $10.8 billion—as Alphabet shares rallied.
Brin cofounded search engine Google with fellow Stanford computer science PhD candidate Larry Page. Like Page, he currently serves as a board member of Google’s parent company Alphabet and is a controlling shareholder.
Brin came out of semi-retirement to submit changes to Google’s Gemini AI chatbot last year and was listed as a “core contributor” when the model was released in December.
Buffett’s fortune rose $4.5 billion during January amid an uptick in Berkshire Hathaway’s A shares.
Known as the “Oracle of Omaha,” Buffett is one of the most successful investors of all time. He runs investing conglomerate 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.
Buffett created the Giving Pledge with Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates in 2010, asking billionaires to commit to give away at least half their fortune to charitable groups. Buffett has said he would donate 99% of his fortune. So far he’s give more than $60 billion of Berkshire Hathaway stock to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and foundations run by his children and one started by his late first wife. That includes $5.3 billion in June 2024.
Amancio Ortega rejoins the top ten richest after falling short at the beginning of January. At the start of December 2024, he was ranked No. 10, worth $123.8 billion. Shares of Inditex rose about 5% in January, giving Ortega’s fortune a boost.
Ortega, one of the pioneers of fast fashion, founded Inditex—parent of the Zara chain of stores—in 1975 with his then-wife Rosalia Mera. (They later divorced and she died in 2013.) He owns about 60% of Madrid-listed Inditex, which has eight brands including Massimo Dutti and Pull & Bear, and 5,000 stores around the world. In 2022, after working at Inditex for 15 years, his daughter Marta Ortega Pérez became chairperson of the company.
Ortega has invested dividends from the clothing business into commercial real estate in Europe and North America.
Ballmer fell from No. 9 in early December to No. 10 richest as a result of weakness in Microsoft shares, which dropped following its quarterly earnings report on January 29, reportedly because the company issued weaker-than-expected guidance for the next quarter. Ballmer’s fortune fell $1.4 billion over the month.
Ballmer, a classmate of Bill Gates’ at Harvard University, joined Microsoft as employee number 30 in 1980 after dropping out of the MBA program at Stanford University. He ran Microsoft as its CEO from 2000 to 2014.
When Ballmer retired from Microsoft, he purchased the Los Angeles Clippers team for $2 billion—a record high for an NBA team at the time. Forbes now values the team at $5.5 billion. The new home for the Clippers, the Intuit Dome in Inglewood—not far from Los Angeles International Airport—opened in August 2024.
As of February 1, 2025, the richest person in the world is Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. He’s worth $421.6 billion. He moved into the number one spot in late May 2024, overtaking Bernard Arnault of France.
The richest woman in the world is Alice Walton, daughter of Walmart founder Sam Walton. As of February 1, 2025, she is worth an estimated $107.1 billion and is the world’s 14th richest person. Her fortune lies in her ownership stake in retailer Walmart, which she inherited from her late father. Her brothers Rob, Jim and John (d. 2005) also inherited stakes in Walmart from their father. John’s widow Christy Walton and their son Lukas Walton inherited John’s shares and both rank on Forbes’ billionaires list.
