In 2025, thanks to the booming development of artificial intelligence and technology industries, the global billionaire group achieved record wealth growth. According to statistics from Forbes, more than 340 new billionaires were added to the world in the past year, a 50% increase over the average level of the past five years; the total wealth of billionaires reached US$18.7 trillion, an increase of US$3.6 trillion year-on-year, and an increase of US$10 trillion compared with 2020.
Those at the top of wealth rankings also saw huge increases in net worth. So far, the number of billionaires has reached a record high of 19. Six years ago, only Bezos of Amazon reached this level.
Statistics also found that the total wealth of the world's top ten billionaires increased by more than 700 billion U.S. dollars in the past year, of which the wealth of the richest man Musk alone increased by 330.9 billion U.S. dollars. This increase is more than 70 billion U.S. dollars higher than the total wealth of the second-ranked Larry Page, which means that the wealth accumulated by Musk in 2025 exceeds the total wealth of anyone else on the planet in their lifetime.
The reason why Musk has achieved such a huge jump in wealth in just one year is that the value of his shares in Tesla and his private company SpaceX have soared this year. In particular, the market value of SpaceX has more than doubled this year, reaching 800 billion US dollars.
The billionaire who set a record for a single-day surge in net worth this year was not Musk. On September 10, Oracle co-founder and chairman Larry Ellison gained nearly $100 billion in wealth as Oracle's stock price soared 36%, setting a world record.
Oracle's stock price fell by about 40% in recent times because its performance fell short of expectations, but Ellison's wealth has still increased by nearly $40 billion compared with the beginning of the year.
In addition to these two rich people who have made a lot of money due to investments in the technology industry, the two founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have also made their wealth skyrocketing due to artificial intelligence. Google recently released the Gemini 3 model, which not only attracted great attention from the market, but also helped Google's stock price rise sharply.
Meanwhile, Jensen Huang, CEO of GPU maker Nvidia, has benefited from Nvidia's outstanding performance and has risen up the wealth list. NVIDIA's stock price has risen steadily this year, with an increase of 30.37% during the year. The company is currently the world's largest listed company by market capitalization, with a scale of US$4.58 trillion.
In addition to these familiar rich people, a large part of this year's new billionaires also come from the artificial intelligence industry, and nearly two-thirds of the new rich are self-made, such as Liang Wenfeng, the founder of China's DeepSeek, and seven important employees who left OpenAI this year.