It’s a new category of the ultra-rich: the Superbillionaire.
According to The Wall Street Journal, there are now two dozen people in the world whose net worth is at least $50 billion. So, who’s on the list?
Obviously, Elon Musk is on top. He has a net worth of about $419 billion, which is—wait for it—more than two million times as much as the typical American household. Also on the list is Jeff Bezos, who is worth $264 billion; Mark Zuckerberg, who is worth $221 billion and Google’s Sergey Brin, who is worth $160 billion.
None of these names are a big surprise. The Wall Street Journal, though, notes that the ultra-rich in the 19th and 20th centuries were industrialists. We’re talking about the Carnegies and the Rockefellers: people who built railroads, steel plants and oil wells.
Today’s ultra-rich are basically all in the tech sector, and moreover they’re not building things. Their wealth is affixed entirely to the stock price of their related companies, which means their wealth can vacillate by tens of billions of dollars in any given year and not really hurt their status on the list.
The World’s Top 24 Superbillionaires (The Wall Street Journal):
- Elon Musk – $419.4 billion (Tesla, SpaceX)
- Jeff Bezos – $263.8 billion (Amazon)
- Bernard Arnault – $238.9 billion (LVMH)
- Larry Ellison – $237 billion (Oracle)
- Mark Zuckerberg – $220.8 billion (Meta)
- Sergey Brin – $160.5 billion (Alphabet)
- Steve Ballmer – $157.4 billion (Microsoft)
- Warren Buffett – $154.2 billion (Berkshire Hathaway)
- James Walton – $117.5 billion (Walmart)
- Samuel Robson Walton – $114.4 billion (Walmart)
- Amancio Ortega – $113 billion (Inditex)
- Alice Walton – $110.2 billion (Walmart)
- Jensen Huang – $108.4 billion (Nvidia)
- Bill Gates – $106 billion (Microsoft)
- Michael Bloomberg – $103.4 billion (Bloomberg)
- Larry Page – $100.9 billion (Alphabet)
- Mukesh Ambani – $90.6 billion (Reliance Industries)
- Charles Koch – $67.4 billion (Koch Industries)
- Julia Koch – $65.1 billion (Koch Industries)
- Francoise Bettencourt Meyers – $61.9 billion (L’Oreal)
- Gautam Adani – $60.6 billion (Adani Group)
- Michael Dell – $59.8 billion (Dell Technologies)
- Zhong Shanshan – $57.7 billion (Nongfu Spring)
- Prajogo Pangestu – $55.4 billion (Barito Pacific)
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, responding to this list, said that one reason for all this wealth creation is simply that antitrust laws were not designed to handle the near or virtual monopolies that have emerged in the tech sector. That’s allowed many of the new breed of super billionaires to amass huge amounts of money.
Stiglitz also points out that these “Superbillionaires” are all masters of tax avoidance—far more so than the Carnegies or Rockefellers of days gone by, who would kick in more of their money towards the government and theoretically towards society. That doesn’t happen with this crowd.
And here’s another statistic: the top 1% is now one-third of America’s wealth.
