Elon Musk Regains Title of World’s Richest in 2025 Forbes Billionaires List

The highly anticipated “2025 Forbes Global Billionaires List” was officially released on Tuesday, April 1st, with American entrepreneur Elon Musk reclaiming the top spot as the world’s richest person with a net worth of $342 billion. Forbes noted that Musk’s significant increase in wealth is attributed to his precise positioning in cutting-edge technologies, especially in the fields of artificial intelligence and space exploration.

Despite Musk spending a considerable amount of time managing the cost-cutting department DOGE of the Trump administration, his wealth increased by $147 billion, thanks to the stellar performance of his rocket company SpaceX and AI company xAI (which he merged with social media giant X last week) over the past year. Even though Tesla has recently faced protests and stock market sell-offs, its stock price is still higher than a year ago. Forbes used stock prices and exchange rates from March 7, 2025, for this year’s billionaire ranking.

Compared to the previous year, Musk’s wealth has seen a significant increase. In the 2024 and 2023 Forbes billionaire lists, Musk ranked second with net assets of $195 billion and $180 billion for two consecutive years, while in 2022, Musk topped the list for the first time with net assets of $219 billion.

The 2025 Forbes Billionaires List ranks Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of the American network technology company Meta, as second with a net worth of $216 billion. In the previous year, he ranked fourth with $177 billion.

Following closely behind is Jeff Bezos, the founder of e-commerce giant Amazon, with a net worth of $215 billion. Bezos held the top spot on the billionaire list for four consecutive years from 2018 to 2021.

Larry Ellison, the co-founder and chairman of software giant Oracle Corporation, ranks fourth with a net worth of $192 billion. Ellison’s wealth has seen a significant increase compared to the previous year when he was ranked fifth.

The United States boasts a record-breaking 902 billionaires, remaining the country with the highest number of billionaires in the world.

The 2025 Forbes Billionaires List not only reflects the astonishing accumulation of personal wealth but also mirrors global economic trends. The continued prosperity of the technology industry, especially the rapid development of artificial intelligence, clean energy, and space technology, has been the core driver behind the wealth growth of these billionaires.

Additionally, the traditional luxury goods industry continues to hold a prominent position, with Bernard Arnault and his family, the heads of the LVMH Group in France, ranking fifth with a net worth of $168.8 billion, despite their wealth decreasing compared to the previous year due to a sluggish luxury goods market. In 2024, the Arnault family topped the billionaire list with $233 billion.

The top ten billionaires also include Warren Buffett with a net worth of $154 billion in sixth place, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders of Google, ranking seventh ($144 billion) and eighth ($138 billion) respectively, Amancio Ortega, the founder of the Spanish fashion retail group Inditex, in ninth place with $124 billion, and Steve Ballmer, the owner of the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers, in tenth place with a net worth of $118 billion.

Noteworthy is the inclusion of Jensen Huang, CEO of the American AI chip giant Nvidia, who ranks sixteenth with a net worth of $98.7 billion, riding the wave of the artificial intelligence boom. He is a highlight on the list and the only Chinese entrepreneur to make it into the top twenty of the Forbes Billionaires List.