Business | World’s 500 richest people surpass $10…
The world’s 500 richest people got vastly richer in 2024, with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang leading the group of billionaires to a new milestone: A combined $10 trillion net worth.
An indomitable rally in US technology stocks played a key role in turbocharging the trio’s wealth, as well as the fortunes of Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The eight tech titans alone gained more than $600 billion this year, 43% of the $1.5 trillion increase among the 500 richest people tracked by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
But it was Musk — the so-called “first buddy” of President-elect Donald Trump after unprecedented support for his reelection campaign — who dominated the world’s wealthiest in 2024.
His close relationship with the incoming president helped increase the value of his companies, including Tesla Inc., SpaceX and xAI. That boosted his fortune to an unprecedented $442.1 billion, up $213 billion from the beginning of the year. The $237 billion gap between him and Bezos on Dec. 17 was the largest ever recorded between the first- and second-ranked names on Bloomberg’s wealth index.
