There’s a new No. 2 on Forbes’ ranking of the world’s wealthiest people.

_{Last update: August 1, 2025, 12 A.M. EDT}

The planet’s 10 richest people enter the last month of 2025 in an AI arms race. After the mid-November launch of Google’s Gemini 3 model, its parent company Alphabet may have steered itself into the lead. That has made cofounder Larry Page the world’s second wealthiest person for the first time ever. Page is worth an estimated $262 billion as of 12 a.m. Eastern time on December 1, up $30 billion from November 1, thanks to a 14% surge in shares of Alphabet.

And Page’s Google cofounder, Sergey Brin, was the second biggest winner among the world’s top ten wealthiest, as his fortune soared by $27 billion to an estimated $242 billion, bumping Brin up one spot to No. 5. Meanwhile, Warren Buffett, whose conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway disclosed a nearly $5 billion stake in Alphabet in mid-November, was the third largest gainer and the only member of this month’s top 10 who didn’t make last month’s ranking. Buffett, whose net worth rose by $9 billion to an estimated $152 billion, moved up from No. 11 to No. 10, as shares of Berkshire climbed by 8%. He replaced former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who moved down from No. 9 to No. 11, as his fortune fell by $6 billion to an estimated $149 billion. Overall, seven of the ten richest people in the world saw their rankings rise or fall on Forbes’ billionaires list over the past month.

Page, who ranked No. 4 as of November 1, overtook Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who each dropped one spot to No. 3 and No. 4., respectively. Ellison, who had ranked No. 2 since mid-June, was the biggest loser among the world’s top 10 wealthiest, as shares of Oracle sank by 23% and Ellison’s fortune fell by $67 billion to an estimated $253 billion. The second biggest loser, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, managed to hold onto the No. 8 spot, even as shares of his chipmaking giant slumped by 13% and his net worth dropped by $22 billion, to an estimated $154 billion.

Elon Musk remains the world’s wealthiest person, by far, despite being the third biggest loser of the past month. Musk is worth an estimated $483 billion, even after Tesla’s stock slid by 6% and his fortune fell by $15 billion.

Forbes has been tracking the world’s billionaires since 1987. In April 2025, we found 3,028 of them for our annual list.

Below are the 10 richest people on earth as of December 1, 2025 at 12 a.m. Eastern time, according to Forbes. As a group, they’re worth $2.4 trillion combined, the same as last month. Stock prices fluctuate routinely, so these net worths typically change on a daily basis. Forbes tracks the daily changes on our Real Time list of billionaires.

Key Facts

Elon Musk

is the richest person in the world, a title he’s held since May 2024.

Larry Page

overtook Larry Ellison to become the world’s second-wealthiest person in November.

Bill Gates

dropped out of the top 10 richest in October 2024 after Forbes obtained new information that led to a significant contraction in his fortune.

9/10

of the richest people in the world are Americans. The one non-U.S. citizen: France’s Bernard Arnault.

All

of the top ten richest people as of December 1 are men. Each of them is worth $152 billion or more, down from $155 billion last month.

Who are the top 10 richest people in the world?*

1. Elon Musk

2. Larry Page (up from No. 4 last month)

3. Larry Ellison (down from No. 2)

4. Jeff Bezos (down from No. 3)

5. Sergey Brin (up from No. 6)

6. Mark Zuckerberg (down from No. 5)

7. Bernard Arnault

8. Jensen Huang

9. Michael Dell (up from No. 10)

10. Warren Buffett (up from No. 11)

_{*As of December 1, 2025 at 12 a.m. ET. Ranking changes since last month are in parenthesis.}

1. Elon Musk

Net worth: $483 billion (down $15 billion since last month)

Source: Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, X (formerly Twitter)

Age: 54

Residence: Austin, Texas

Citizenship: U.S.

On November 6, Tesla shareholders approved a record-breaking pay package that could give Musk up to $1 trillion in additional stock (before taxes and the cost of unlocking the restricted shares) if Tesla achieves “Mars shot” performance milestones like growing its market cap more than eightfold over the next 10 years. Meanwhile, Musk’s xAI Holdings is reportedly in talks to raise new funding at a $230 billion valuation. That would be more than double the $113 billion valuation Musk claimed when he formed the company in March by merging AI startup xAI, which he founded in 2023, with social media company X (formerly Twitter), which he acquired for $44 billion (including debt) in 2022.

Musk is CEO of Tesla and rocket firm SpaceX, and chairman and chief technology officer of xAI Holdings.

He owns about 12% of Tesla’s stock and has pledged some of his shares as collateral for loans. The electric car maker’s shareholders voted in June 2024 in favor of Musk keeping performance based stock options that would be worth nearly $125 billion today in what a Delaware judge had earlier called “the largest potential compensation opportunity ever observed in public markets” when she voided the award in January 2024 and affirmed the ruling in December. A lengthy appeal of the Delaware ruling is likely ongoing. Until Musk receives those options, Forbes will continue to discount the Tesla options from the pay package by 50%.

Musk owns an estimated 42% of SpaceX, which is worth $400 billion based on a private tender offer in August 2025 (up from $350 billion in December 2024).

Originally from South Africa, Musk moved to Canada before his 18th birthday, worked a variety of jobs, enrolled at Queen’s University in Ontario and then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics.

In 2000, he merged an online bank he cofounded, X.com, with a similar outfit cofounded by Peter Thiel to form PayPal, which eBay bought in 2002 for $1.4 billion. He founded SpaceX in 2002 in El Segundo, near Los Angeles. In 2004 he joined Tesla as an investor and chairman, a year after it was founded; he was later granted the cofounder title. Musk, who became CEO of Tesla in 2008, took the company public in 2010. Musk famously cofounded OpenAI with Sam Altman as a non-profit in 2015 but he left the organization’s board three years later following a failed power grab. More recently, the pair have been trading jabs at each other.

Musk first became the world’s richest person in September 2021 and was the world’s richest person for most of 2022—falling from the top spot in December 2022. Musk became the world’s richest person again on June 8, 2023 and held onto the number one spot for the remainder of 2023. He fell to No. 2 on January 31, 2024. Musk became the world’s richest person yet again in late May 2024 and has held onto the top spot ever since. In October, he briefly became the first person ever worth $500 billion.

2. Larry Page

Net worth: $262 billion (up $30 billion since last month)

Source: Google

Age: 52

Residence: Palo Alto, California

Citizenship: U.S.

Page has come a long way to take the title of the second-richest person on the planet. When Forbes locked in the 2025 World’s Billionaires List in March, he ranked No. 7, with an estimated $144 billion fortune. A decade ago, he ranked No. 19.

Page cofounded search engine Google with fellow Stanford Ph.D student Sergey Brin in 1998 and served as CEO until 2001 and from 2011 to 2015. Page now serves as a board member of Google’s parent company Alphabet and continues to be a controlling shareholder. He is reportedly working on a new AI startup called Dynatomics that is focused on product manufacturing.

In late 2024, the Department of Justice said Google should sell its Chrome browser in order to reduce the company’s dominance online. In response, Google said in a statement that such a move would hurt consumers and America’s technological leadership. The decision may have been one reason that Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai attended Donald Trump’s inauguration in January. In the biggest antitrust case in decades, a federal judge ruled in September that Google does not have to sell Chrome.

Page was a founding investor in asteroid mining company Planetary Resources, which was acquired by blockchain firm ConsenSys in 2018.

3. Larry Ellison

Net worth: $253 billion (down $67 billion since last month)

Source: Oracle

Age: 81

Residence: Woodside, California

Citizenship: U.S.

In January, the day after Donald Trump was inaugurated as president, Ellison was on hand when Trump announced the Stargate Project, a venture with Ellison’s firm Oracle, Chat GPT creator OpenAI, Japan’s Masayoshi Son and his firm Softbank and the UAE’s MGX investment fund. The group has committed to spend $500 billion over four years to build AI infrastructure—mainly data centers—in the U.S.

Ellison teamed up with his son David to help pull off the August merger of Paramount and David’s Skydance Media. The older Ellison now controls approximately 77.5% of the voting rights of the combined entity. Paramount is currently one of at least three companies bidding to buy Warner Bros. Discovery.

Ellison cofounded software firm Oracle in 1977 and ran it as CEO until 2014; he now serves as chairman and chief technology officer of the company. In mid-September, Ellison was briefly the second ever person worth $400 billion and was within $40 billion of Musk, thanks to Oracle’s rosy revenue projections for its cloud infrastructure business (mostly to power AI) that pushed shares up 36% in a single day. Since then, Oracle’s shares have slid by nearly 40% as some analysts have raised questions about an AI bubble, the profit margins on Oracle’s cloud infrastructure sales and their dependence upon a partnership with OpenAI.

In 2012, Ellison bought 98% of the Hawaiian island of Lanai for $300 million. He also owns homes in California, Nevada and Florida. Ellison invested in Tesla and served on the board of the electric vehicle company from 2018 through August 2022.

4. Jeff Bezos

Net worth: $245 billion (down $10 billion since last month)

Source: Amazon

Age: 61

Residence: Miami, Florida

Citizenship: U.S.

In November, the New York Times reported that Bezos is taking on his first operational role since retiring as Amazon’s CEO in 2021. He will reportedly serve as co-CEO of an AI startup called Project Prometheus, which has raised nearly $6 billion and will focus on engineering and manufacturing.

Bezos created e-commerce giant Amazon in 1994 and ran it as CEO until July 2021 (he remains executive chairman). That same month he traveled to space on a rocket built by private rocket company Blue Origin, which he founded and has funded with billions of dollars. (Blue Origin briefly sent an all-female crew to space this spring—including pop star Katy Perry, CBS Mornings co-host Gayle King and Bezos’ second wife, Lauren Sanchez.)

Before founding Amazon.com in his garage in Seattle, Bezos worked at McDonald’s as a teen, graduated from Princeton and worked in New York at hedge fund D.E. Shaw. Amazon began as an online bookseller at a time when few people bought goods online. The company also grew to dominate cloud storage and moved into movie and series production to feed Amazon Prime Video.

Bezos was the world’s richest person on Forbes’ annual World’s Billionaires list from 2018 through 2021; he dropped to second richest on the 2022 ranking and No. 3 on the list from 2023 through 2025.

In 2019, Bezos and his wife MacKenzie divorced; as part of the settlement, she got 4% of Amazon’s shares and he kept 12%. He has since sold and given away more of his stake and owns 8% of the company. Since Amazon went public in 1997, Forbes calculates that Bezos has sold more than $49 billion worth of his stock. Through his Bezos Expeditions he has invested in an array of companies, including Airbnb and software firm Workday.

5. Sergey Brin

Net worth: $242 billion (up $27 billion since last month)

Source: Google

Age: 52

Residence: Los Altos, California

Citizenship: U.S.

While Page keeps a notoriously low profile, Brin is back helping Alphabet with AI strategy. He first came out of semi-retirement to submit changes to Google’s Gemini AI chatbot last year and was listed as a “core contributor” when the model was released in December. Like his cofounder, Brin currently serves as a board member of Google’s parent company Alphabet and is a controlling shareholder. In late November, Brin reported gifting $1.1 billion of Alphabet stock, with almost all of it reportedly going to his nonprofit Catalyst4, which focuses on conditions of the central nervous system and climate change.

6. Mark Zuckerberg

Net worth: $222 billion (down $1 billion since last month)

Source: Meta (Facebook)

Age: 41

Residence: Palo Alto, California

Citizenship: U.S.

Zuckerberg cofounded Facebook when he was a student at Harvard University in 2004. Now called Meta, it has grown to be the world’s largest social network, with several billion users globally. The company also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, both of which it acquired and greatly expanded. Zuckerberg, who remains CEO, took the company public in 2012 and still owns about 13% of it.

In October, Zuckerberg was in the audience at the Wall Street Journal’s Innovator of the Year Awards, when his wife Priscilla Chan took home the top prize for her role in the couple’s philanthropy focused on curing and presenting diseases–and the singer Billie Eilish asked the crowd, “If you’re a billionaire, why are you a billionaire?”

7. Bernard Arnault

Net worth: $190 billion (up $7 billion since last month)

Source: LVMH/ luxury goods

Age: 76

Residence: Paris

Citizenship: France

Arnault is CEO and chairman of luxury goods group LVMH. Arnault’s father made millions in the construction business; to get his start, Arnault used $15 million of that fortune to buy Christian Dior. He has since built the largest luxury goods company in the world with some 70 fashion and cosmetics brands, including Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Moet & Chandon, Sephora and jeweler Tiffany & Co.

All five of Arnault’s children work in parts of the LVMH empire. In 2024, Arnault nominated two of his sons—Alexandre and Frédéric—to the board of LVMH; Alexandre was named deputy CEO of LVMH’s wine and spirits division. His daughter Delphine, who runs Dior, and son Antoine, already sit on the board. In 2024, he named son Frédéric as head of LVMH’s family holding group. His youngest son, Jean, is director of watches at Louis Vuitton.

Arnault was the world’s richest person for most of the first half of 2023 and again from February through late May 2024.

8. Jensen Huang

Net worth: $154 billion (down $22 billion since last month)

Source: Semiconductors

Age: 62

Residence: Los Altos, California

Citizenship: U.S.

Huang cofounded Nvidia in 1993 and has served as its CEO and president ever since. He owns approximately 3% of the company, which he took public in 1999. Under Huang, Nvidia’s GPUs became dominant first in computer gaming and now in AI, helping it become the first ever company worth $5 trillion in October.

Born in Taiwan, Huang moved to Thailand as a child, but his family sent him and his brother to the U.S as civil unrest mounted in the Asian nation.

9. Michael Dell

Net worth: $152.1 billion (down $2 billion since last month)

Source: Dell Technologies

Age: 60

Residence: Austin, Texas

Citizenship: U.S.

Dell got his start at 19 selling computers out of his University of Texas dorm room, grossing $80,000 by the end of his freshman year. Today, he is chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, which was formed in 2016 via Dell’s $60 billion merger with computer storage giant EMC.

He took his namesake company private with private equity firm Silver Lake Partners in 2013, after initially taking the firm public in 1988. In late 2018, Dell Technologies returned to the public market through a complicated financial restructuring. Dell’s cloud software arm, VMware, was spun off in 2021; Microchip firm Broadcom bought it in 2023 for $69 billion, 39% of which went to Dell.

10. Warren Buffett

Net worth: $151.9 billion (up $9 billion since last month)

Source: Berkshire Hathaway

Age: 95

Residence: Omaha, Nebraska

Citizenship: U.S.

Known as the “Oracle of Omaha,” Buffett is one of the most successful investors of all time. The son of a U.S. congressman, he first bought stock at age 11 and first filed taxes at age 13. He still runs Berkshire Hathaway, which owns dozens of companies, including insurer Geico, battery maker Duracell and restaurant chain Dairy Queen, but announced in May that he will retire as CEO at the end of 2025. On August 30th, Buffett turned 95.

Buffett created the Giving Pledge with Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates in 2010, asking billionaires to commit to give away at least half their fortune to charitable groups. Buffett has said he would donate 99% of his fortune. So far he’s given away some $65 billion, mostly through the Gates Foundation (formerly the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), foundations run by his children and one started by his late first wife.

Who is the richest man in the world?

As of December 1, 2025, the planet’s wealthiest man is Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. He’s worth $483 billion. He moved into the number one spot in late May 2024, overtaking Bernard Arnault of France.

Who is the richest woman in the world?

The planet’s wealthiest woman is Alice Walton, daughter of Walmart founder Sam Walton. As of December 1, 2025, she is worth an estimated $119 billion and is the world’s 15th-richest person. Her fortune lies in her ownership stake in retailer Walmart, which she inherited from her late father. Her brothers Rob, Jim and John (d. 2005) also inherited stakes in Walmart from their father. John’s widow Christy Walton and their son Lukas Walton inherited John’s shares and both rank on Forbes’ billionaires list.

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