A billion dollars is already difficult to picture. At the summit of this list, even that enormous unit becomes too small to describe a fortune conveniently. These are estimates of ownership on an extraordinary scale: stakes in businesses, investments and other assets, measured against liabilities.
The interesting question is how those fortunes are held. A founder can become dramatically richer on paper without selling anything. A family can remain near the top for generations because it retains an interest in a business that keeps growing. Read the amounts beside the sources of wealth, and the list becomes a map of ownership.
Who is the richest person in the world?
Elon Musk, with an estimated net worth of US$929.4bn, according to Forbes’ real-time list as captured on 12 September 2026.
Why the numbers move
A shareholding has a price whenever the stock market is open. A privately held business is harder to value, and a published estimate can change after a funding round, a transaction or new reporting. That means a wealth ranking combines assets measured in different ways. A small difference between two fortunes deserves less confidence than the precise ordering might suggest.
Wealth is not a bank balance
Net worth describes estimated assets after liabilities. It does not mean the person could withdraw the displayed amount tomorrow. Selling a large stake can change its price, trigger tax and reduce control of the business. The economic influence attached to ownership can also be quite different from the amount someone spends personally.
Read the family labels
Some source records explicitly include relatives. We retain that wording because removing it would make a family estimate look like an individual balance sheet. Citizenship is the source’s classification; it is not a claim about where every business operates, where the person lives or where tax is paid.
What this snapshot shows
Elon Musk leads this captured list at approximately US$929.4bn. The entry at number 100, Vladimir Lisin, is approximately US$25.53bn. The first ten account for 38.9% of the sum of the hundred reported values. That share is calculated within this list; it is not a share of all global wealth.
The first ten
Elon Musk
Source of wealth: Tesla, SpaceX ·
Elon Musk’s net worth is about US$929.4bn, according to Forbes’ estimate captured on 12 September 2026.
Electric cars and reusable rockets explain more about Elon Musk’s fortune than any salary figure could. He founded SpaceX in 2002, backed Tesla in 2004 and later became its chief executive. The companies address very different markets, but both tie his wealth to businesses that require substantial engineering and manufacturing investment.
Forbes attributes the core of this fortune to Tesla and SpaceX. The figure is an estimate of ownership interests and other assets, not a cash balance: changes in the value of those holdings can move the total dramatically.
Larry Page
Source of wealth: Google ·
Larry Page’s net worth is about US$277.9bn, according to Forbes’ estimate captured on 12 September 2026.
Larry Page’s path to this list began with a research problem: how to decide which web pages deserve to appear first in a search result. At Stanford, he and Sergey Brin developed the work that became Google, founding the company in 1998. PageRank made the relationships between pages part of the answer.
Page later led both Google and its parent, Alphabet. Although he stepped away from day-to-day executive duties in 2019, his ownership kept him closely connected to a business spanning search, advertising, video and cloud computing.
Michael Dell
Source of wealth: Dell Technologies ·
Michael Dell’s net worth is about US$276.5bn, according to Forbes’ estimate captured on 12 September 2026.
Michael Dell built a computer business around selling directly to customers, then helped turn it into a supplier of the infrastructure behind large organisations. The acquisition of EMC brought storage and enterprise technology into a group already familiar to generations of PC buyers. Dell Technologies’ history includes both a private buyout and a return to public markets.
His fortune also extends beyond the company bearing his name. Forbes describes substantial investments through DFO Management, while the VMware separation and subsequent Broadcom acquisition added another chapter to the ownership story.
Jeff Bezos
Source of wealth: Amazon ·
Jeff Bezos’s net worth is about US$273bn, according to Forbes’ estimate captured on 12 September 2026.
Amazon began in 1994 as an online bookseller. Under Jeff Bezos it expanded into a marketplace, a logistics network and a cloud-computing supplier, building businesses that operate behind the screen as well as on it. Bezos moved from chief executive to executive chairman in 2021.
His Amazon holding remains central to the wealth estimate, but his interests reach into spaceflight through Blue Origin and publishing through The Washington Post. Those connections make his entry a story about ownership across several industries, rather than the income from one executive position.
Sergey Brin
Source of wealth: Google ·
Sergey Brin’s net worth is about US$255.8bn, according to Forbes’ estimate captured on 12 September 2026.
Sergey Brin met Larry Page while studying computer science at Stanford. Their search project became Google in 1998, and the company’s 2004 stock-market debut gave a public price to a business built around finding information. Alphabet became its parent company in 2015.
Brin stepped down as Alphabet’s president in 2019 while retaining an ownership and board connection. His position in this ranking therefore reflects the value of a long-held stake in the enterprise he helped create, rather than whether he holds its most visible operating job.
Mark Zuckerberg
Source of wealth: Facebook ·
Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth is about US$222.6bn, according to Forbes’ estimate captured on 12 September 2026.
Facebook started at Harvard in 2004 as a way for students to connect. Mark Zuckerberg helped turn that campus project into a global social platform, then into the wider business now called Meta. Instagram and WhatsApp sit alongside Facebook in that group, while advertising finances much of its activity.
Zuckerberg’s founder ownership links his personal fortune to the public company. The story behind the number is the expansion of a social network into a collection of communication services, with newer investments in artificial intelligence and immersive computing.
Larry Ellison
Source of wealth: Oracle ·
Larry Ellison’s net worth is about US$195.4bn, according to Forbes’ estimate captured on 12 September 2026.
Larry Ellison co-founded Oracle in 1977, building a business around databases that organisations use to store and retrieve information. Much of that work is invisible to consumers: the customer records, accounting systems and applications that keep companies running depend on software beneath the surface.
Ellison led Oracle as chief executive until 2014 before becoming executive chairman and chief technology officer. His large ownership interest connects his fortune to the company’s development from a database specialist into an enterprise-software and cloud-infrastructure supplier.
Jensen Huang
Source of wealth: Semiconductors ·
Jensen Huang’s net worth is about US$189.1bn, according to Forbes’ estimate captured on 12 September 2026.
Jensen Huang co-founded NVIDIA in 1993. The company became known for graphics processors that could draw increasingly convincing game worlds, but the ability to carry out many calculations in parallel proved useful far beyond the screen. Scientific computing and artificial intelligence became major applications of that architecture.
Huang’s ownership links his personal wealth to this change in how computing is bought and used. His entry captures a business moving from a component familiar to gamers toward the systems and software used to train and run large AI models.
Steve Ballmer
Source of wealth: Microsoft ·
Steve Ballmer’s net worth is about US$155bn, according to Forbes’ estimate captured on 12 September 2026.
Steve Ballmer joined Microsoft in 1980 and eventually succeeded Bill Gates as chief executive, serving from 2000 to 2014. His career is unusual among the technology names here: he became closely associated with a company he joined early, rather than one he founded.
A substantial Microsoft holding is central to the wealth story. Away from software, his ownership of the Los Angeles Clippers makes him a familiar figure in basketball, while the Ballmer Group supports philanthropic work. The market value of the shares and the value of a sports franchise are different kinds of estimate.
Warren Buffett
Source of wealth: Berkshire Hathaway ·
Warren Buffett’s net worth is about US$145.1bn, according to Forbes’ estimate captured on 12 September 2026.
Warren Buffett turned Berkshire Hathaway from a textile business into a holding company with operating businesses and a large investment portfolio. Insurance became an important part of that structure, alongside businesses in areas such as rail transport, utilities and consumer goods.
His entry is the accumulated result of decades of ownership and capital allocation. A Berkshire share represents an interest in that collection of businesses; Buffett’s wealth estimate reflects his remaining holdings and other assets, alongside a long-running programme of charitable share donations.
The ranking continues: 11–100
Forbes · ranking and methodology
- Estimated net worth: US$139,564,513,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$131,588,062,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$130,310,046,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$128,398,980,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$122,098,867,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$118,221,819,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$115,124,009,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$114,611,309,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$105,792,497,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$94,920,000,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$94,724,071,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$89,300,000,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$86,313,730,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$84,627,000,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$84,000,000,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$82,513,461,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$80,497,916,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$77,790,000,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$76,942,000,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$68,271,081,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$60,893,128,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$60,507,595,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$60,371,147,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$58,295,801,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$53,780,815,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$50,348,000,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$50,348,000,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$49,736,023,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$48,428,506,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$47,959,350,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$46,330,189,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$45,417,734,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$45,417,734,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$45,041,812,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$44,513,473,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$44,387,108,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$41,930,894,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$41,635,256,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$40,179,262,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$39,880,012,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$39,813,334,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$39,419,720,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$39,419,720,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$39,221,461,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$38,000,000,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$38,000,000,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$37,862,727,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$37,818,418,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$37,701,823,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$36,907,479,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$36,573,100,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$35,973,285,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$35,378,127,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$35,176,618,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$35,057,609,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$35,020,432,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$34,668,520,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$34,496,615,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$34,156,938,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$33,686,051,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$32,902,779,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$32,239,000,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$32,171,478,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$32,151,000,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$31,886,548,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$31,418,873,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$30,431,064,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$29,740,299,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$29,624,850,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$29,475,064,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$28,591,532,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$28,504,000,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$28,447,983,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$28,301,370,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$27,794,249,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$27,784,085,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$27,588,800,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$27,555,932,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$27,423,045,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$27,403,708,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$26,683,538,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$26,671,482,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$26,223,263,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$26,102,575,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$25,948,447,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$25,941,770,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$25,662,204,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$25,638,864,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$25,567,387,000.00
- Estimated net worth: US$25,532,466,000.00
There is always a story.
The list captures a moment in the ownership of the world’s businesses. It is most useful when the date and the source of each fortune stay attached to the number. Tomorrow’s market can change the order without changing the underlying story quite as quickly.