Six of the ten richest people on the planet saw their rankings rise or fall on the Forbes billionaires list in a wild October for the world’s wealthiest.

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

Elon Musk briefly became the first person ever worth $500 billion (twice) in October, but he ended the month a little poorer than that, with an estimated fortune of $497 billion as of 12 a.m. Eastern time on November 1, up $6 billion from October 1. Still, the world’s richest person managed to grow his lead over runner-up Larry Ellison by $28 billion over the past 31 days, to $177 billion.

While shares of Musk’s Tesla climbed by 3% in October, shares of Ellison’s Oracle sank by 7%, shaving $22 billion off the fortune of the software giant’s cofounder, who is now worth an estimated $320 billion. 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 21% as some analysts have raised questions about the profit margins on those cloud infrastructure sales and their dependence upon a partnership with OpenAI.

Ellison didn’t have the worst October, though. The month’s biggest loser was Mark Zuckerberg, whose fortune fell by an estimated $29 billion, to $223 billion, as his social media giant Meta missed analysts’ earnings expectations for the third quarter and the company’s shares slumped by 12%. That was enough to knock Zuckerberg down from No. 3 in the world to No. 5 on Forbes’ ranking, and for Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to overtake Zuckerberg at the end of the month for the first time since April. Shares of Bezos’ online retailer climbed by 11% in October, as Amazon beat analysts’ earnings targets for Q3, boosting Bezos’ net worth by $22 billion, to $254 billion, and boosting his ranking from No. 4 to No. 3.

The biggest gainers of October, when the S&P 500 rose by 2%, were Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, whose fortunes soared by $30 billion and $28 billion to $232 billion and $215 billion, respectively. Shares of Google’s parent company Alphabet rose by 16% over the past month, as the online search giant reported better than expected earnings for the third quarter, propelling Page from No. 5 to No. 4 on Forbes’ ranking. Brin, meanwhile, stayed put in the No. 6 spot, making him one of only four members of this month’s top 10 whose ranking did not change.

After briefly becoming the 10th-richest person in the world for the first time in mid-December, Michael Dell once again cracked the top 10, as shares of Dell Technologies and Broadcom jumped by 14% and 12% in October, respectively. That boosted Dell’s personal fortune by $14 billion, to an estimated $155 billion, and his ranking from No. 11 to No. 10. Dell, who Forbes estimates has owned Broadcom stock since the semiconductor firm’s 2023 acquisition of Dell Technologies spinoff VMware, swapped spots with Warren Buffett, whose fortune fell by $7 billion, to an estimated $143 billion. Buffett ended the month outside the top 10 for the first time in years.

Forbes has been keeping track of 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 November 1, 2025 at 12 a.m. Eastern time, according to Forbes. As a group, they’re worth $2.4 trillion combined, up $100 billion since September. 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 Ellison

remains the world’s second wealthiest person for the fifth month in a row.

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 November 1 are men. Each of them is worth $155 billion or more, up from $150 billion last month.

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

1. Elon Musk

2. Larry Ellison

3. Jeff Bezos (up from No. 4 last month)

4. Larry Page (up from No. 5)

5. Mark Zuckerberg (down from No. 3)

6. Sergey Brin

7. Bernard Arnault (up from No. 8)

8. Jensen Huang (down from No. 7)

9. Steve Ballmer

10. Michael Dell (up from No. 11)

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

1. Elon Musk

Net worth: $497billion (up $6 billion since last month)

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

Age: 54

Residence: Austin, Texas

Citizenship: U.S.

Tesla shareholders are set to vote on November 6 on 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. On October 27, Tesla chair Robyn Denholm wrote in a letter to shareholders that Musk could leave the company if the vote doesn’t go his way.

Musk is CEO of Tesla and rocket firm SpaceX; chairman and chief technology officer of social media company X, formerly known as Twitter; and founder of artificial intelligence firm xAI. In late March, xAI acquired X at a valuation that Musk stated was $45 billion (including debt); Musk paid $44 billion (including debt) to acquire Twitter in 2022.

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 $130 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%.

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, after his startup xAI raised $6 billion from private investors at a $24 billion valuation. According to Musk, xAI is now worth $80 billion. SpaceX, meanwhile, is now worth $400 billion based on a private tender offer in August 2025 (up from $350 billion in December 2024).

2. Larry Ellison

Net worth: $320 billion (down $22 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. In October, Warner Bros. reportedly rejected a nearly $60 billion acquisition offer by Paramount.

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 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.

3. Jeff Bezos

Net worth: $254 billion (up $22 billion since last month)

Source: Amazon

Age: 61

Residence: Miami, Florida

Citizenship: U.S.

Bezos created e-commerce giant Amazon in 1994 and ran it as CEO until July 2021 (he remains executive chairman); that same month he went 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 summer—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’ 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.

4. Larry Page

Net worth: $232 billion (up $30 billion since last month)

Source: Google

Age: 52

Residence: Palo Alto, California

Citizenship: U.S.

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. He now serves as a board member of Google’s parent company Alphabet and continues to be a controlling shareholder.

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.

5. Mark Zuckerberg

Net worth: $223 billion (down $29billion 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?”

6. Sergey Brin

Net worth: $215 billion (up $28 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.

7. Bernard Arnault

Net worth: $183 billion (up $23 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: $176 billion (up $14 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. Steve Ballmer

Net worth: $156 billion (unchanged since last month)

Source: Microsoft, LA Clippers, investments

Age: 69

Residence: Hunts Point, Washington

Citizenship: U.S.

The former Microsoft CEO spoke on a podcast in June about his commitment to holding onto most of his Microsoft shares since he left the company in 2014. Ballmer, a classmate of Bill Gates at Harvard University, joined Microsoft as employee number 30 in 1980 after dropping out of the MBA program at Stanford University. He ran Microsoft as its CEO from 2000 to 2014.

When Ballmer retired from Microsoft, he purchased the Los Angeles Clippers team for $2 billion—a record high for an NBA team at the time. Forbes now values the team at $7.5 billion. The new home for the Clippers, the Intuit Dome in Inglewood—not far from Los Angeles International Airport—opened in August 2024. An investigation is currently underway following a report that accused the Clippers of circumventing NBA salary cap rules with a no-show marketing deal between star Kawhi Leonard and a Ballmer-backed company. A spokesperson for Ballmer declined to comment.

10. Michael Dell

Net worth: $155 billion (up $14 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.

Who is the richest man in the world?

As of November 1, 2025, the planet’s wealthiest man is Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. He’s worth $497 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 November 1, 2025, she is worth an estimated$110 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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