Who are the five richest people? (2024)

Elon Musk is back on top as the world’s wealthiest man after moving ahead of his longtime rival for the top spot, Bernard Arnault.

Mr Musk is now valued at $192 billion (£153 billion) compared to Mr Arnault’s $187 (£149 billion).

The change of order came after 74-year-old Mr Arnault saw stock in his company LVMH drop in price on Wednesday. He had once been worth $225 billion (£180 billion).

Meanwhile, Mr Musk can account for his wealth from earning 13 per cent of the stock of Tesla while he is also chief executive of Space X and owner of Twitter.

So, who are the richest people in the world, what is their net worth, and how did they make their fortune?

Born in South Africa, Elon Musk grew up in Pretoria before moving to America to study at the University of Pennsylvania.

His first software startup, Zip2, was bought in 1999 for $307 million (£255m) and he went on to co-found Paypal, which he sold to eBay in 2002 for $2.5 billion (£2.1bn). He founded SpaceX in 2002 and runs electric-vehicle maker Tesla. He is its largest shareholder, with a reported stake of about 14 per cent.

He completed a $44 billion (£36 billion) takeover of social network Twitter in October.

Musk, 51, has been married twice and allegedly has eight children, though some reportedly claim 10. His last public relationship was with singer Grimes, with whom he has two children, a son named X Æ A-12 and a daughter called Exa Dark Sideræl.

The 74-year-old French billionaire oversees 70 of the world’s most famous fashion and beauty brands, including Louis Vuitton, Tiffany, and Sephora.

Like many billionaires, Arnault came from a wealthy family, which in his case owned a successful construction business. He broke into the fashion industry in 1985, after using $15 million (£12.5 m) from his father’s business to buy Christian Dior.

Currently based in Paris, Arnault is married to concert pianist Helene Mercier. The couple has five children, with four of them — Frédéric, Delphine, Antoine, and Alexandre — working in LVMH, of which Arnault is chairman and chief executive.

In 1994, Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com in a garage in Seattle shortly after he resigned from the hedge fund D E Shaw. He had originally pitched the idea of an online bookstore to his former boss, David E Shaw, who wasn’t interested.

Amazon.com started out selling books and then expanded into a one-stop shop for everything under the sun. It is now arguably the world’s largest retailer. Amazon’s pattern of constant diversification is evident in some of its unexpected expansions, which include acquiring Whole Foods and entering the pharmacy business in 2017.

Bezos, 59, owned as much as 16 per cent of Amazon in 2019 before transferring four per cent to his former wife, MacKenzie Scott, as part of divorce proceedings. In 2020, Amazon’s share price jumped 76 per cent due to the heightened demand for online shopping during the Covid-19 pandemic. On July 5, 2021, Bezos stepped down as chief executive of the e-commerce giant, becoming its executive chair.

The Microsoft co-founder set up the famous company will Paul Allen back in the 1970s — and was once well-known as the richest man globally, and self-made to boot.

He first took the title in 1995 and held it for many years, well into the 2000s.

However, he reportedly transferred $6 billion (£4.8 bn) of shares to his former wife, Melinda, as part of the divorce settlement.

He is also a philanthropist, donating more than $59 billion (£47 bn) to the Gates Foundation.

However, the fact he reputedly owns vast swathes of farmland across the US also means he will never be short of a buck or two.

Larry Ellison, 78, earns the vast majority of his wealth from owning Oracle, a computer technology company whose sales increased by 18 per cent to $12.3 billion (£10bn) by November 30, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. But he made an additional fortune from a bet on Elon Musk three years ago, disclosing in late 2018 that he’d purchased a $1 billion stake in Tesla.

As Microsoft’s former chief executive officer, it’s perhaps unsurprising that he rates a high place on the world’s rich list.

Most of Balmer’s fortune is tied to shares in Microsoft, the company he ran for more than a decade. He also owns the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers, and has recently moved into banking.

Warren Buffett, 92, was the son of a US congressman and bought and sold his first stock at age 11. He later earned himself the nickname the Oracle of Omaha. He runs Berkshire Hathaway, which owns companies including Dairy Queen.

In 2006, he pledged to give away 99 per cent of his fortune and so far has given away $48 billion (£40bn). Buffett still lives in the same house in Omaha, Nebraska, that he bought in 1958 for $31,500 (£26,000), before he made his fortune.

At just 50 years of age, the co-founder of Google could retire early.

The former CEO of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is still a major shareholder and owns a controlling interest as a board member.

The tech entrepreneur is also a founding investor in Space exploration company Planetary Resources and is also funding ‘flying-car’ start-ups Kitty Hawk and Opener.

The other Google co-founder is Sergey Brin who, like Page, was a fellow Stanford PhD student.

He originally came to the US from Russia at the age of six, to escape anti-semitism.

Brin and Page invented Google’s PageRank algorithm, which powers the search engine.

Like Page, Brin is also interested in new ways to travel, and is funding an airship project.

Rather surprisingly, the Meta giant only just scrapes into the top 10 of the world’s richest.

Last autumn, he tumbled out of the top 10 when Meta’s share price plunged due to declining advertising revenue, competition from TikTok, and a general tech slump.

However, the Facebook founder is back on top and his fortune is climbing once again. In February, Zuckerberg’s net worth rose $12.4 billion (£9.9 m) to $67.6 billion (£53.9 bn) as the company’s shares grew by 23 per cent for quarterly earnings — the biggest one-day gain for Zuckerberg since Facebook (now Meta) went public in 2012.

* Figures correct as of June 1, 2023, and differ from Forbes’s rich list, with which he was assessed previously.

MORE ABOUT