Seven of the world’s ten richest people changed positions on the Forbes billionaires ranking over the past month, and one of them is the new number two on the global rich list.

Jeff Bezos added an estimated $102 billion to his wealth within a month, taking it to $370 billion as of 12 a.m. Eastern time on October 1. The jump followed private investors’ valuation of his rocket firm Blue Origin at over $130 billion and his industrial AI startup Prometheus at $41 billion. It pushed him to No. 2 on the Forbes ranking for the first time since May 2025, as he traded places with Google’s Larry Page, now No. 3. Page had occupied the second spot at the start of each of the previous 10 months, and his fortune grew by a comparatively small $8 billion to $286 billion.

Page’s Google cofounder, Sergey Brin, slipped from fourth to fifth place even though his wealth rose by an estimated $7 billion to $263 billion. He was overtaken by Michael Dell, whose fortune grew by an estimated $28 billion to $268 billion. Shares of Dell Technologies rallied by 18 per cent on soaring demand for its AI servers, a surge that briefly made Dell the world’s second richest person for the first time in September.

Just three of the ten kept their positions unchanged. Mark Zuckerberg, who holds sixth place, gained an estimated $55 billion to reach $251 billion, as Meta’s shares leapt 27 per cent after the successful launch of its personal AI agent, Muse. The month’s third biggest gainer was Elon Musk, who added an estimated $44 billion to reach $936 billion as SpaceX stock rose 5 per cent. He is worth more than twice Bezos’ fortune and over six times that of Warren Buffett, who returned to the top 10 despite losing $1 billion in the past month. Buffett took the place of Spanish fashion tycoon Amancio Ortega, whose wealth dipped by an estimated $6 billion to $141.8 billion. The only other top-10 member to lose money was Larry Ellison, whose fortune shrank by an estimated $13 billion to $179 billion as Oracle shares fell 8 per cent, moving him from seventh to eighth.

Forbes has monitored the world’s billionaires since 1987 and counted 3,428 of them for its annual list in March 2026. The ranking below shows the ten richest people on earth as of 12 a.m. Eastern time on October 1, 2026.

Their combined wealth stands at $3.1 trillion, up from $2.8 trillion last month. Because share prices move constantly, these figures typically change every day, and Forbes follows the daily movements on its Real-Time Billionaires list.

Key Facts

Elon Musk has been the world’s richest person since May 2024 and became the first trillionaire in June. His fortune slipped below $700 billion in July for the first time since December, before recovering to nearly $900 billion in August.

Jeff Bezos became only the fourth person ever to be worth over $300 billion, in September. The other three are Musk, Larry Page and Larry Ellison.

Bezos overtook Page in September to become the second richest person, a position he last held in May 2025.

Bill Gates left the top 10 in October 2024, after Forbes obtained fresh information that significantly cut his estimated wealth.

All ten of the richest people are Americans, and all are men. Six of them are worth $200 billion or more, while the least wealthy of them has $142 billion.

The 10 richest people in the world
1. Elon Musk
2. Jeff Bezos (up from No. 3)
3. Larry Page (down from No. 2)
4. Michael Dell (up from No. 5)
5. Sergey Brin (down from No. 4)
6. Mark Zuckerberg
7. Jensen Huang (up from No. 8)
8. Larry Ellison (down from No. 7)
9. Steve Ballmer
10. Warren Buffett (up from No. 11)

1. Elon Musk
Net worth: $936 billion (up $44 billion since last month)
Source: SpaceX, Tesla
Age: 55
Residence: Austin, Texas
Citizenship: U.S.

Musk became the world’s first trillionaire on June 12, when his rocket company SpaceX listed on the Nasdaq and ended its first day of trading with a market value of nearly $2.2 trillion. The stock has dropped 6 per cent since then. Musk is SpaceX’s chairman, CEO and chief technical officer, with a 38 per cent stake, including options. In February, SpaceX acquired his artificial intelligence and social media company xAI, which had itself merged with X, formerly Twitter, in March 2025.

He also holds almost 11 per cent of Tesla, whose market value is $1.4 trillion, plus restricted stock that could add another 8 per cent upon vesting, before taxes. The restricted shares began as vested options from his 2018 CEO performance award, which a Delaware judge voided in 2024 and the Delaware Supreme Court restored in 2025. Under a fresh deal struck in April, options Musk exercised on June 16 became restricted stock, which he will lose unless he stays at Tesla until January 2028 as CEO or “an executive officer responsible for the Company’s product development or operations.” In line with its treatment of other billionaires’ unvested restricted stock, Forbes excluded those shares, worth $102 billion if he could sell them today, from its estimate of his wealth.

Also left out are large blocks of performance-based restricted shares that could lift his stakes in SpaceX and Tesla to as much as 47 per cent and 29 per cent respectively, before taxes and the cost of unlocking them. Earning them requires lofty targets: growing SpaceX and Tesla to market values of $7.5 trillion and $8.5 trillion respectively, and building a permanent human colony of at least one million people on Mars.

Born in South Africa, Musk relocated to Canada before turning 18 and did various jobs. He enrolled at Queen’s University in Ontario and later moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics. In 2000, he merged X.com, the online bank he cofounded, with a similar firm cofounded by Peter Thiel, creating PayPal, which eBay bought in 2002 for $1.4 billion. He started SpaceX in El Segundo, near Los Angeles, in 2002, and joined Tesla in 2004 as investor and chairman a year after its founding, later receiving the cofounder title. He also cofounded the nonprofit OpenAI with Sam Altman in 2015 but left its board three years later after a failed power grab. He has since sued OpenAI, claiming he deserves compensation for his contributions, but the case was dismissed on procedural grounds in May, and he is likely to appeal.

Musk first became the world’s richest person in September 2021 and held the title for most of 2022 before losing it in December that year. He reclaimed it on June 8, 2023, kept it until January 31, 2024, and regained it again in late May 2024, never to look back. He became the first person worth $500 billion in October 2025, passed the $600 billion and $700 billion marks in December 2025, and crossed $800 billion for the first time in February.

2. Jeff Bezos
Net worth: $370 billion (up $102 billion since last month)
Source: Amazon
Age: 62
Residence: Miami, Florida
Citizenship: U.S.

In a wide-ranging interview in May, the Amazon founder spoke about taxes, arguing that the bottom half of wage earners should pay none at all, and shared few details of a new AI startup, Prometheus. Bezos is its co-CEO, and it is described as an “artificial general engineer” that will “make it much easier for engineers to design physical objects.” The company announced in June that it had closed a funding round at a $41 billion valuation, and Forbes estimates Bezos owns 20 per cent of it. It is his first operational role since he stepped down as Amazon’s CEO in 2021.

Bezos launched Amazon in 1994 and remains its executive chairman. The same month he left the CEO’s seat, he flew to space aboard a rocket built by Blue Origin, the private space company he founded and has bankrolled with close to $30 billion. Blue Origin has just opened its first round of outside funding, which values it at $130 billion before the new money and is expected to raise at least $10 billion. Bezos owned all of the company before the round.

Before starting Amazon.com in his Seattle garage, Bezos flipped burgers at McDonald’s as a teenager, graduated from Princeton and took a job at the New York hedge fund D.E. Shaw, where he met his first wife, MacKenzie Scott. Amazon started as an online bookshop when few people shopped on the internet. It later came to dominate cloud storage and expanded into film and series production for Amazon Prime Video.

Bezos topped Forbes’ annual World’s Billionaires list from 2018 to 2021, then ranked second in 2022, third from 2023 to 2025 and fourth in 2026. He overtook Google’s Larry Page as the second richest person in September.

Bezos and MacKenzie divorced in 2019, and under the settlement she took 4 per cent of Amazon’s shares while he retained 12 per cent. He has since sold and donated more and now holds 8 per cent. Forbes calculates that he has sold over $49 billion worth of Amazon stock since the 1997 IPO. Through Bezos Expeditions, he has invested in many companies, including Airbnb and the software firm Workday.

3. Larry Page
Net worth: $286 billion (up $8 billion since last month)
Source: Google
Age: 53
Residence: Palo Alto, California
Citizenship: U.S.

Page cofounded the search engine Google in 1998 with fellow Stanford PhD student Sergey Brin and was its CEO until 2001 and again from 2011 to 2015. He is now a board member of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, and remains a controlling shareholder. He is reportedly building a new AI startup called Dynatomics, which focuses on product manufacturing.

In late 2024, the Department of Justice proposed that Google sell its Chrome browser to curb its dominance online, and Google replied that this would harm consumers and America’s technological leadership. The matter may partly explain why Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai attended Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2025. In the biggest antitrust case in decades, a federal judge ruled in September 2025 that Google need not sell Chrome.

Page was a founding investor in the asteroid mining company Planetary Resources, which the blockchain firm ConsenSys acquired in 2018. He recently bought a home in Florida, seemingly in reaction to California’s threat to tax billionaires’ wealth, and Google reportedly signed a lease earlier this year to expand its Miami office.

4. Michael Dell
Net worth: $268 billion (up $28 billion since last month)
Source: Dell Technologies
Age: 61
Residence: Austin, Texas
Citizenship: United States

Dell began at 19 by selling computers from his University of Texas dorm room, grossing $80,000 before the end of his first year. He now chairs and runs Dell Technologies, which was created in 2016 when Dell merged with the storage giant EMC in a $60 billion deal.

He listed his company in 1988, took it private in 2013 alongside the private equity firm Silver Lake Partners, and returned it to the stock market in late 2018 through a complicated financial restructuring. Its cloud software arm, VMware, was spun off in 2021, and the chipmaker Broadcom bought it in 2023 for $69 billion, with 39 per cent of that sum going to Dell.

In December, Dell and his wife pledged $6.25 billion to seed investment accounts known as Trump Accounts, giving 25 million American children $250 each.

5. Sergey Brin
Net worth: $263 billion (up $7 billion since last month)
Source: Google
Age: 53
Residence: Los Altos, California
Citizenship: U.S.

While Page keeps a famously low profile, Brin has returned to help Alphabet with its AI strategy. He first emerged from semi-retirement in 2024 to propose changes to Google’s Gemini chatbot and was named a “core contributor” when the model launched in December that year. Like Page, he is on Alphabet’s board and is a controlling shareholder. In late November, he reported giving away $1.1 billion of Alphabet stock, almost all of it to his nonprofit Catalyst4, which works on conditions of the central nervous system and on climate change. Brin reportedly bought homes in Malibu and on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe, and is said to have spent over $100 million to defeat California’s proposed one-time 5 per cent wealth tax on billionaires, Proposition 40. He also appears to be backing a California nonprofit working to make housing more affordable.

6. Mark Zuckerberg
Net worth: $251 billion (up $55 billion since last month)
Source: Meta (Facebook)
Age: 42
Residence: Palo Alto, California
Citizenship: U.S.

Zuckerberg cofounded Facebook as a Harvard student in 2004. The company, now called Meta, has become the world’s biggest social network, with several billion users, and also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, both of which it bought and hugely expanded. Zuckerberg remains CEO, listed the company in 2012 and still holds about 13 per cent.

In October 2025, Zuckerberg was in the audience at the Wall Street Journal’s Innovator of the Year Awards when his wife, Priscilla Chan, won the top prize for her role in the couple’s philanthropy focused on curing and preventing diseases. The singer Billie Eilish then asked the crowd, “If you’re a billionaire, why are you a billionaire?” In February, he and Priscilla were photographed in the front row at a Prada show in Milan, and Meta and Prada are reportedly working together on high-end smart glasses. In August, Meta agreed to an $18 billion settlement in a landmark suit filed by 29 U.S. states, which alleged its social media platforms were built to addict children and that it misled the public about the dangers.

7. Jensen Huang
Net worth: $200 billion (up $9 billion since last month)
Source: Semiconductors
Age: 63
Residence: Los Altos, California
Citizenship: U.S.

Huang cofounded Nvidia in 1993 and has been its CEO and president ever since. He owns roughly 3 per cent of the company, which he listed in 1999. Under his leadership, Nvidia’s GPUs rose to dominance first in gaming and now in AI, helping it become the first company ever valued at $5 trillion in October 2025.

Born in Taiwan, Huang moved to Thailand as a child, and his family later sent him and his brother to the U.S. as unrest grew in Thailand.

8. Larry Ellison
Net worth: $179 billion (down $13 billion since last month)
Source: Oracle
Age: 82
Residence: Manalapan, Florida
Citizenship: U.S.

In August 2025, Larry Ellison joined his son David in completing the merger of Paramount and David’s Skydance Media. The two are now taking a far bigger gamble with Paramount’s $111 billion offer for the media giant Warner Bros Discovery. If completed, it would rank among history’s largest mergers and give the Ellisons unmatched influence over American media: CBS and CNN under one roof, HBO Max and Paramount+ combined, and Warner Bros. and Paramount Pictures sharing one parent. This sits atop the tech and real estate empire the elder Ellison, Oracle’s cofounder, chairman and chief technology officer and President Donald Trump’s new neighbour, already controls. On September 30, a federal judge approved a settlement between Paramount and 12 states that had sued to stop the deal on antitrust grounds, and the transaction is expected to close on October 6.

A longtime Californian who also owns the Hawaiian island of Lanai, assessed at more than $1 billion, Ellison is now officially a resident of Manalapan, Florida, about 20 minutes’ drive from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago.

Despite the buzz around his deals and ties to Trump, Ellison still earns a huge portion of his wealth from Oracle, the software firm he cofounded in 1977. Oracle belonged to the consortium that bought TikTok’s U.S. business in January in a deal valuing it at $14 billion. In September 2025, Ellison briefly became only the second person ever worth $400 billion, coming within $40 billion of Musk, after Oracle’s rosy revenue forecasts for its cloud infrastructure business, mostly to power AI, sent its shares up 36 per cent in a single day. Oracle’s shares are now worth roughly half their 2025 peak.

9. Steve Ballmer
Net worth: $161 billion (up $5 billion since last month)
Source: Microsoft
Age: 70
Residence: Hunts Point, Washington
Citizenship: U.S.

The high-energy former Microsoft CEO ran the company from 2000 to 2014. He joined as employee No. 30 after leaving Stanford’s MBA program and first met Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates when both were undergraduates at Harvard. Ballmer steered Microsoft after the first dot-com crash and through its efforts to catch up with Google in search and Apple in mobile phones. In the year he retired, he bought the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers for $2 billion, and Forbes now values the team at about $7.5 billion. He spent another $2 billion building the team’s Intuit Dome stadium. On September 2, the NBA heavily sanctioned him and his franchise after a year-long investigation found the team dodged salary cap rules by arranging sham endorsement deals between team sponsors and star player Kawhi Leonard. The $30 million fine is small change for Ballmer, but he also faces a one-year ban from all games and team activities, and the Clippers will lose five first-round draft picks. In September, Ballmer accepted the punishment “to put this chapter behind us,” despite there “still [being] disagreements concerning the findings in the report.”

Ballmer held 4 per cent of Microsoft when he retired, has kept much of his stock and says he is the company’s biggest individual shareholder. He has stepped up his giving since 2014, and the Ballmers have donated over $6.5 billion to date.

10. Warren Buffett
Net worth: $142 billion (down $1 billion since last month)
Source: Berkshire Hathaway
Age: 96
Residence: Omaha, Nebraska
Citizenship: U.S.

Known as the “Oracle of Omaha,” Buffett is among the most successful investors of all time. The son of a U.S. congressman, he bought his first stock at 11 and filed his first tax return at 13. At the end of December, he retired as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, which owns dozens of businesses, including the insurer Geico, battery maker Duracell and restaurant chain Dairy Queen. His son Howard Buffett succeeded him as chairman in September.

In 2010, Buffett created the Giving Pledge with Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates, urging billionaires to commit at least half their wealth to charity. He has said he will give away 99 per cent of his own. So far he has donated some $68 billion, mostly through the Gates Foundation (formerly the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), foundations run by his children and one founded by his late first wife. In June, the Wall Street Journal reported that Buffett would hold back his annual midyear donation of Berkshire stock to the Gates Foundation until a review of the nonprofit’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein is completed.