Too poor for the Forbes 400: 590 billionaires miss the cut

There are, by Forbes’s count, about 990 billionaires in the United States. This month, 590 of them were told they were not rich enough.

That is the arithmetic of the 2026 Forbes 400, published on 15 September. The minimum fortune required to appear on the list of America’s wealthiest people rose to a record $4.4bn, up $600mn in a single year.

The 400 members are worth a combined $8tn, against $6.6tn last year. Among those left outside the rope are Oprah Winfrey (an estimated $3.4bn), Sam Altman ($3.3bn), Tim Cook ($3bn) and Taylor Swift ($2bn).

Meg Whitman, at $4.2bn, missed by a margin that would count as a rounding error in her former line of work.

A higher bar

The first Forbes 400, in 1982, required a fortune of $91mn. The entry fee has since risen roughly 48-fold, a compound rate of a little over 9 per cent a year. Consumer prices over the same period have risen about three-and-a-half times.

In real terms, then, it is roughly 14 times harder to join the list than it was when Ronald Reagan was president.

Forbes puts most of this year’s rise down to the boom in artificial intelligence and data centres, and to a US stock market trading near record highs. Most very large fortunes are held in shares, so when investors pay more for companies, founders get richer whether or not they have done anything differently that year.

Who fell off

Just below the line the picture is odder. Of the 34 people who dropped out, seven were richer than a year earlier and fell off anyway, because everyone else had gained more. Five billionaires were valued at $4.3bn on 4 September, the date Forbes locked its numbers, and missed the cut by $100mn each.

Fifteen of the 34 new entrants came from technology, accounting for nearly 60 per cent of newcomer wealth. The richest arrival was OpenAI president Greg Brockman, at $25.5bn. Four co-founders of the AI developer Anthropic arrived together in a four-way tie at No 75, each estimated at $15.5bn.

The youngest member, 30-year-old Steven Hao of the AI coding company Cognition, qualified with $5.8bn after a funding round valued his company at $48bn.

Famous, and too poor

Celebrities do badly on this kind of list. Swift and Winfrey made their money from performing, catalogues, brands and property, which pay well but are seldom valued the way investors value a fast-growing software company.

A founder can add billions to their estimated wealth on the day a funding round is announced. Swift has to sell tickets.

Nobody on the outside of the list is short of money. At $2bn, Swift is worth about 10,000 times the typical American household. The list that Forbes started in 1982 was a guide to who owned America’s factories, oil fields and department stores.

Its 2026 edition reads more like a register of shareholdings in a few dozen technology companies, several of them still private.

Sources

• Forbes: a record 590 US billionaires aren’t rich enough to make the Forbes 400
• Forbes: meet the 34 newcomers to the 2026 Forbes 400
• Forbes releases its 45th annual Forbes 400
• Forbes: the youngest billionaires on the 2026 Forbes 400

The 1982 comparison uses the published minimum for the first Forbes 400 and the change in the US consumer price index; figures are rounded. Cover image: Itrytohelp32, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Cropped.