About this chart race
For most of this century the top of the list barely moved. Bill Gates was the world's richest person on 13 of the 18 lists between 2000 and 2017, interrupted only by Warren Buffett in 2008 and by Carlos Slim, whose Mexican telecoms fortune put him first from 2010 to 2013 and peaked at $74 billion in 2011.
Then the numbers changed scale. Jeff Bezos took the lead in 2018 as the first person on the list to pass $100 billion, and held it for four years. Elon Musk went first in 2022, Bernard Arnault took 2023 and 2024 on the back of LVMH, and Musk returned in 2025 — reaching $839 billion in 2026.
That is the real story in this chart. The richest person in the world was worth $60 billion in 2000 and roughly fourteen times that in 2026, while the tenth place has climbed from about $16 billion to well over $100 billion. The whole field moves up and to the right.
How to read it: the figures are Forbes' snapshot published each spring, so a bar shows what someone was worth at that moment, not their peak. A person only appears in the years they ranked inside the global top ten, which is why lines begin and end — Paul Allen after 2006, Jensen Huang arriving in 2026. Entries that Forbes lists jointly rather than as one person, such as the Albrecht brothers and family holdings, are left out because their naming changes between years and no consistent series can be built from them.
Two bars at the end of the race are older figures. Forbes publishes only the global top ten, so once someone drops out of it there is no further data: Bill Gates' bar holds his 2024 value of $128 billion and Carlos Slim's his 2023 value of $93 billion. The other eight bars in the closing frame are genuine 2026 figures. For the same reason a line can appear to drift upward during years a person was outside the top ten — that stretch is drawn between their last and next known values, not measured.
This animated ranking shows how net worth on the forbes annual list changed across 41 series between 2000 and 2026. The bars re-order themselves as the years advance, so overtakes are visible as they happen rather than hidden inside a table. Use the list on the left to choose exactly who competes, drag the slider to jump to any year, or open the table view to read the underlying numbers.
As of 2026, Elon Musk leads with 839 US$ billion.
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, 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, Stefan Persson, Al-Waleed bin Talal, David Thomson, John Walton, Helen Walton, Kenneth Thomson, Masayoshi Son, Michael Dell, Theo Albrecht.
Source
Data from Forbes annual billionaires list, via Wikipedia. Every figure shown comes from this source — nothing is estimated or generated.
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