About this chart race
Bill Gates was the richest person in the world in 15 of these 29 Forbes lists, including ten years in a row from 1998 to 2007. The title changed hands eight times in all, between six people: Gates, Warren Buffett in 2008, Carlos Slim from 2010 to 2013, Jeff Bezos from 2018 to 2021, Elon Musk in 2022 and again in 2025 and 2026, and Bernard Arnault in 2023 and 2024.
The numbers underneath moved further than the names did. The leading fortune grew from $51.0B in 1998 to $839B in 2026, and the ten largest together went from $232B to $2,591B, eleven times larger. Musk's 2026 figure on its own is bigger than the entire 1998 top ten combined, and bigger than Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Jeff Bezos put together ($718B). At 3.3 times the second-placed fortune it is the widest first-to-second gap in the whole period; the previous widest was Gates in 1999, at 2.5 times Warren Buffett.
Warren Buffett is the only person who appears in all 29 lists, rising from $33B to $149B while reaching first place just once, in 2008. Larry Ellison appears in 23 of them and Gates in 27, though Gates drops out of the top ten entirely after 2024. Jensen Huang enters for the first time in 2026.
Two things here look like mistakes and are not. The leading fortune sometimes falls: $40.7B in 2003 and $40B in 2009 are the two smallest first-place figures in the chart, both below where it starts in 1998, because every list is a snapshot taken in March rather than a running total. And Forbes sometimes ranks a fortune jointly, so the "Walton family" is a single entry in 1998 and appears as individual Waltons from 1999 onward, while tied fortunes are listed at the same value, which is why five Waltons all sit at $20.0B in 2004.
This animated ranking shows how net worth changed across 47 series between 1998 and 2026. The bars re-order themselves as the years advance, so overtakes are visible as they happen rather than hidden inside a table. Use the list on the left to choose exactly who competes, drag the slider to jump to any year, or open the table view to read the underlying numbers.
As of 2026, Elon Musk leads with 839.0.
Included in this race
Elon Musk, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Bernard Arnault, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Warren Buffett, Jensen Huang, Amancio Ortega, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Mukesh Ambani, Michael Bloomberg, Carlos Slim, David Koch, Charles Koch, Jim Walton, Alice Walton, S. Robson Walton, Walton family, Lakshmi Mittal, Anil Ambani, Christy Walton, Liliane Bettencourt, Sheldon Adelson, Ingvar Kamprad, Li Ka-shing, Paul Allen, Kushal Pal Singh, Eike Batista, Oleg Deripaska, Karl Albrecht, Karl and Theo Albrecht, Stefan Persson, Al-Waleed bin Talal, David Thomson, John Walton, Helen Walton, Kenneth Thomson, Masayoshi Son, Michael Dell, Theo Albrecht, Philip Anschutz, Jay and Robert Pritzker, Forrest Mars Sr., Lee Shau-kee.
Source
Data from Forbes annual billionaires list. Every figure shown comes from this source — nothing is estimated or generated.
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