As the internet’s renewed fixation on 2016 has reminded many, a lot can change in a decade — for the average person and the ultra-rich alike, though in very different ways.
According to Business Insider, citing data from the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the combined net worth of the world’s top 10 billionaires at the end of 2015 was $559 billion.
Today, that figure looks almost quaint next to Elon Musk’s estimated wealth. As of Sunday, Jan. 18, Musk’s net worth was listed at $681 billion — more than the entire top 10 from 2015 put together.
Musk’s lead is also enormous compared to the rest of the field: he sits roughly $400 billion ahead of Google co-founder Larry Page, who ranks No. 2.
That gap is especially striking considering Musk wasn’t even on Bloomberg’s top 10 list back in 2016. At the time, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates led the group with an estimated net worth of $84 billion.
In 2016, the top 10 included: Inditex founder Amancio Ortega at $73 billion; Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett at $63 billion; Amazon founder Jeff Bezos at $59 billion; América Móvil’s Carlos Slim at $53 billion; Koch Inc.’s David and Charles Koch at $50 billion each; Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at $46 billion; Page at $40 billion; and Oracle founder Larry Ellison at $40 billion.
A decade later, only five of those names still appear in the top 10.
Page now sits at No. 2 with $282 billion. Bezos is No. 4 with $261 billion. Ellison ranks No. 5 with $244 billion, followed by Zuckerberg at No. 6 with $220 billion. Buffett rounds out the list at No. 10 with $149 billion.
Together, those five fortunes add up to more than double the entire top 10 total from 2016 — underscoring just how dramatically wealth at the very top has expanded.
Several former top-10 mainstays remain close behind. Ortega is now No. 15 with $134 billion. Slim follows at No. 16 with $114 billion, while Gates is No. 17 with $106 billion. Julie Flesher Koch, the widow of David Koch, is No. 21 with $79.8 billion, and Charles Koch is No. 24 with $71.6 billion.
Recently, Musk also made fresh headlines for comments about the future of personal finance in the age of artificial intelligence. Speaking on an episode of the Moonshots podcast, he suggested retirement saving could soon become irrelevant, arguing that in the “relatively near future,” people may be able to get “whatever you want.”
“You won’t need to save for retirement,” Musk said, claiming that worrying about “squirreling money away for retirement in 10 or 20 years” won’t matter.
