The world’s billionaires continue to accumulate wealth on an extraordinary scale, with many of the world’s richest individuals seeing their fortunes grow by hundreds of billions of dollars in a single year. Others were not so lucky, shedding significant chunks of their net worth over the past twelve months. While the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence and technology has created striking gains for some of the world’s most prominent entrepreneurs, billionaire wealth creation extends far beyond tech, spanning industries from finance and manufacturing to retail, energy, and real estate.
This is what inspired the team at BestBrokers to analyse the Forbes Real-Time Billionaire List as of 12 October 2026. To establish an accurate year-on-year comparison, we used the Wayback Machine to retrieve an archived version of the Forbes list dated 12 October 2025 and recorded each billionaire’s real-time net worth. We tracked how each individual’s fortune changed over the year to identify the biggest increases and declines in wealth, while also examining how billionaire wealth is currently distributed across countries and industries.
Billionaires Who Gained the Most Wealth in One Year
Even among the world’s wealthiest people, Elon Musk’s fortune is in a league of its own. A significant portion of his wealth comes from Tesla, where his large ownership stake has soared as investors bet on the electric-vehicle maker’s growth and self-driving technology. His net worth reached $473.1 billion in October 2025 before surging past $1 trillion following SpaceX’s record-breaking stock market debut in June 2026, making him the world’s first trillionaire. In a single year, Elon Musk’s net worth surged by nearly $531 billion, more than the entire net worth of any other person on the list. That amounts to roughly $1.45 billion a day.
The AI boom has not only transformed the tech industry, but also the net worths of countless founders and CEOs whose companies supply it. A good example is Michael Dell of Dell Technologies, who gained $139.4 billion and nearly doubled his fortune in the span of a single year as demand for his AI servers sent the company’s shares to record highs. Dell went from a market cap of roughly $100 billion in October 2025 to $370 billion just a year later, making it the 53rd largest company by market cap in the world.
Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s net worths surged by $90.6 billion and $81.9 billion, respectively, capitalising on Alphabet’s AI momentum. Nvidia chief Jensen Huang gained another $39.4 billion, while the boom in emerging technologies created new fortunes: DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng added $28.5 billion, and Figure AI founder Brett Adcock gained $21.9 billion as investors bet on the future of humanoid robotics.
Besides AI, crypto is another tech sector that has produced outlandish fortunes in the past year. Tether co-founder Giancarlo Devasini saw his fortune nearly quadruple from $22.4 billion to $89.3 billion, while company executives Paolo Ardoino and Jean-Louis van der Velde each added $28.5 billion to their net worths. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao has also recorded a substantial net worth increase in the past year, with his fortune growing from $92.5 billion to $114.6 billion, a growth of $22.1 billion in a single year.
The biggest winners weren’t all riding the tech and crypto waves. Mexican mining magnate Germán Larrea added $26.7 billion as copper prices surged. Africa’s richest person, Aliko Dangote, doubled his fortune to $51.2 billion ahead of his oil refinery’s landmark IPO. Interactive Brokers founder Thomas Peterffy gained $21.4 billion, crossing the $100 billion threshold.
Figure AI’s Brett Adcock Has the Fastest-Growing Fortune
It is one thing to be wealthy already and grow your fortune through investments; it is quite another to see it increase almost 16-fold in a single year. That was the case for Brett Adcock, founder and CEO of humanoid robotics company Figure AI, whose net worth rose from $1.5 billion in October 2025 to $23.4 billion a year later. The surge reflects growing investor enthusiasm for humanoid robots, which are designed to perform tasks in human environments, from factory work to more general-purpose applications.
Adcock wasn’t the only AI founder to multiply his wealth: all seven of Anthropic’s co-founders saw their fortunes more than quadruple, from $3.7 billion to $15.5 billion each, after the company raised $65 billion in a funding round announced in May 2026, valuing it at $965 billion. The deal more than doubled Anthropic’s previous valuation and pushed it past rival OpenAI, which was valued at $852 billion in March. The surge came amid massive demand for Anthropic’s Claude AI models, particularly among businesses using them for coding and other professional tasks.
AI has proved hugely profitable for founders and CEOs, but its rapid development also relies on the companies supplying the chips, power systems and computing infrastructure behind it. As investment pours into AI, the people building this essential technology are seeing their fortunes surge. Zhu Yiming, founder of Chinese memory chipmaker CXMT, saw his net worth rise nearly 8-fold, from $1.8 billion to $13.9 billion, after the company’s record-breaking Shanghai IPO in July. Patrizio Vinciarelli, founder and CEO of US power electronics specialist Vicor, quintupled his fortune to $5.5 billion as demand grew for the technology powering increasingly energy-hungry data centres.
Not all of this year’s fastest-growing fortunes were driven by AI, however. Antonio Gracias, one of Elon Musk’s earliest backers, saw his wealth rise to 7 times its previous level, to $17.1 billion, as his firm, Valor Equity Partners, emerged as a major beneficiary of SpaceX’s IPO. Moderna also stands out among the S&P 500’s top-performing stocks this year, despite having little to do with the AI boom. Best known for its Spikevax COVID-19 vaccine, the pharmaceutical and biotech company made headlines in August 2026 when its personalised mRNA skin cancer vaccine, developed alongside Merck, became the first personalised mRNA cancer treatment to succeed in a late-stage Phase 3 clinical trial. The breakthrough helped CEO Stéphane Bancel’s fortune soar 6-fold, from $1.2 billion to $7.2 billion.
Larry Ellison’s Wealth Was Cut Nearly in Half in a Single Year
Fascinatingly, just as AI created some of the year’s biggest winners, it also contributed to some of the steepest losses in net worth. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, whose fortune fell from $352.4 billion to $183.5 billion, a loss of $168.9 billion, or roughly $463 million a day. Oracle has bet heavily on building data centres for AI, but soaring spending and mounting debt have spooked investors.
AI’s ripple effects hit others, too. Xiaomi founder Lei Jun saw his fortune more than halve, losing $21.6 billion, or $59 million a day, as demand for AI servers absorbed much of the world’s memory chip supply and drove up costs for smartphone makers. The same shortage helped make CXMT’s Zhu Yiming one of the year’s fastest risers. AppLovin’s Adam Foroughi also saw his fortune halve as investors questioned how the ad-tech company would fare against AI-powered rivals.
The luxury market has struggled to sustain the profits it saw during the post-pandemic boom of 2022-2023, with the biggest brands being hit the hardest. Bernard Arnault, chairman of LVMH and briefly the world’s richest person in 2024, lost $47.8 billion ($131M/day) as demand for high-end luxury cooled across the world.
During 2024 and 2025, Labubu seemed to be everywhere. But fads can be fleeting, and what captivates consumers one year can quickly lose its appeal the next. Pop Mart founder Wang Ning saw $8.6 billion wiped from his fortune as the Labubu craze began to lose steam. The rabbit-eared dolls propelled Wang into the ranks of China’s youngest top-10 billionaires last year, but with sales of its Labubu franchise falling and its share of revenue dropping from 34.7% to 26% in a year, investors are questioning how long the craze can last.
Countries With the Most Billionaires
There are currently 3,382 billionaires in the world, who are collectively worth a staggering $20.6 trillion. To put this number in perspective, this is nearly enough money to buy the S&P500’s 5 biggest companies (NVIDIA, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon). If you were to take this wealth and distribute it evenly across the United States, each person living in the country of 349 million would get roughly $60,000.
Despite billionaire numbers rising over the past year, their wealth is excessively concentrated in a handful of affluent economies. The United States is home to 985 billionaires, less than a third of the total, yet together they hold $9.42 trillion, close to half of all billionaire wealth on the planet and more than four and a half times China’s total. Elon Musk alone accounts for over a tenth of that figure: his $1 trillion fortune is worth more than all 231 Indian billionaires combined.
China ranks second, with 519 billionaires worth $2.01 trillion, led by ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming, whose fortune stands at $84 billion. India follows with 231 billionaires collectively worth $990.3 billion, with the country’s richest people being Mukesh Ambani, chairman of telecoms, energy and retail conglomerate Reliance Industries, who has a net worth of $78.8 billion, and Gautam Adani, founder of infrastructure and energy group Adani Enterprises, with a net worth of $74.9 billion.
Germany is Europe’s biggest billionaire hub, with 206 billionaires worth $897.1 billion, with supermarket chain chairman Dieter Schwarz as the country’s richest billionaire, who has a net worth of $56.1 billion. France is among the more interesting countries on the continent: despite having fewer billionaires than the UK, France’s billionaires are collectively worth $547 billion, nearly double the $274.1 billion of those in the UK. Just four luxury heirs and founders, Bernard Arnault, Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, and Alain and Gérard Wertheimer, account for more than half of it.
In some countries, billionaire wealth is concentrated in just a handful of people. Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, accounts for nearly four-fifths of Nigeria’s billionaire wealth, with his $51.2 billion fortune exceeding the annual economic output of Mali or Botswana. In Spain, Zara founder Amancio Ortega is worth $140.7 billion, over half the country’s billionaire wealth, making him Europe’s richest person. In Mexico, Carlos Slim’s telecoms empire has made him Latin America’s richest billionaire.
Tech Holds Nearly 30% of All Billionaire Wealth
The technology sector has been the dominant billionaire-producing industry for the past decade, and with good reason. No other sector can match technology’s scalability, global reach, and high profit margins. Every problem solved through technology opens up new, often barely tapped opportunities for profit. Best of all, technology itself makes it easier to start a company and reach billions of potential customers. Smartphones created global distribution, cloud computing lowered the cost of launching businesses, cheap capital inflated valuations, and network effects allowed a handful of companies to dominate entire markets. Then AI arrived and turned all of this up to 11.
Of the 3,382 billionaires around the world, 564 are in tech, holding a collective $6.12 trillion, or roughly 29.7% of the $20.57 trillion owned by the world’s billionaires. That’s more than the next two largest sectors combined. Tech is also home to the nine richest billionaires, including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, and Michael Dell. Together, they are worth more than $3 trillion, more than any other billionaire sector.
Finance & Investments ranks a distant second, with 458 billionaires worth $2.62 trillion. Warren Buffett leads the sector with $146.6 billion, but much of its upper ranks are dominated by trading powerhouses such as Interactive Brokers’ Thomas Peterffy, Susquehanna’s Jeff Yass and Citadel’s Ken Griffin. Traditional industries still hold sizeable fortunes, with Manufacturing accounting for $1.36 trillion, Food & Beverages $1.18 trillion and Retail $1.14 trillion. However, much of this wealth is concentrated in a few hands. The Walmart heirs Rob, Jim, and Alice Walton alone account for over a third of Retail’s billionaire wealth.
Combined net worth only tells half the story, as it doesn’t show which industries have the wealthiest billionaires on average. Cryptocurrency and blockchain come out on top, with just 20 billionaires averaging $18.1 billion each, more than $7 billion above the $10.8 billion average for tech billionaires. Manufacturing shows the opposite trend. Despite having the third-highest number of billionaires, at 378, the average fortune is just $3.6 billion, as many are founders of mid-sized Chinese industrial companies.
Methodology
To analyse the changing fortunes of the world’s billionaires, the team at BestBrokers analysed data from the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires List as of 12 October 2026. To establish a consistent year-on-year comparison, we used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to retrieve an archived version of the Forbes list from 12 October 2025 and recorded the estimated net worth of the same billionaires at that point in time. This allowed us to calculate how much each individual’s fortune increased or decreased over the one-year period. Individual gains, losses and growth rankings include only billionaires with a recorded net worth in both 2025 and 2026.
Using these datasets, we identified the largest absolute and percentage changes in individual net worth over the one-year period and calculated each billionaire’s average daily gain or loss. Country-level totals compare all billionaires on the 2025 list with those on the 2026 list. We also grouped each billionaire’s primary source of wealth into 24 industry categories, calculating average wealth by dividing each industry’s combined billionaire net worth by its number of billionaires. Each person on the list is assigned to a country using Forbes’ classification, which is generally based on citizenship. China, Hong Kong and Taiwan are counted separately.
All figures represent estimates based on Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires List and archived Forbes data available through the Wayback Machine. Billionaire net worths can fluctuate significantly with changes in public and private company valuations, asset prices and other market conditions, meaning the figures represent a snapshot of estimated wealth on the specified dates. All calculations and comparisons were based on the same methodology and dates to provide a consistent measure of changes in billionaire wealth over the year.