wealth timeline
30 years of the rich list.
Same names, bigger numbers.
Forbes has published 31 lists since 1995. Only 6 people have ever held #1.
/ scrub the year
world's billionaires
2025
richest person
Elon Musk
$342B· 26.5× vs 1995
#1 trajectory
nominal $Bwealth of the world's richest, 1995–2025
top 10 · 2025
most recent list
- 1US$342B
Elon Musk
Tesla, SpaceX
- 2US$216B
Mark Zuckerberg
Meta
- 3US$215B
Jeff Bezos
Amazon
- 4US$192B
Larry Ellison
Oracle
- 5FR$178B
Bernard Arnault
LVMH
- 6US$154B
Warren Buffett
Berkshire Hathaway
- 7US$144B
Larry Page
Google
- 8US$138B
Sergey Brin
Google
- 9ES$124B
Amancio Ortega
Zara
- 10US$118B
Steve Ballmer
Microsoft
"30 years. Same pool. Membership closed."
Across 31 Forbes lists, only 6 distinct people have ever held #1. The world's richest grew 27× since 1995 — nominal, before inflation.
share this year · the URL holds your selection.
source: Forbes World's Billionaires (annual list, March each year). Net worth values are nominal USD as Forbes published them — no inflation adjustment.
Forbes publishes once per year in March; mid-year real-time rankings (Bloomberg, Forbes Real-Time) may differ — e.g., Musk briefly retook #1 mid-2024 by Bloomberg's clock, but Forbes' annual cut had Arnault.
Some early entries (1995–2005, ranks 3–10) are reconstructed from archived sources and may differ slightly from later corrected figures.