Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, and Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, are now among the richest people in the planet.
Artificial intelligence firms have had a fantastic year, releasing model after model and increasing investment. AI has also significantly increased the wealth of many wealthy people.
According to a Forbes article on Thursday, over 50 people in the AI industry became billionaires this year. Many of those individuals are entrepreneurs who work for startups, like the seven co-founders of Anthropic, which in less than a year almost tripled its valuation.
Edwin Chen, the CEO of Surge AI, is the richest member of the new class of AI billionaires, with an estimated net worth of $18 billion, according to Forbes. His business assists OpenAI and Anthropic in improving their AI models.
The founders of Mercor, an AI recruiting business, and Sierra, which develops and deploys AI customer-service bots, are two more recent billionaires. According to Forbes, the creators of the “vibe-coding” startup Lovable, Anton Osika and Fabian Hedin, are currently valued at $1.6 billion apiece.
Then there are the affluent individuals who increased their wealth in 2025. AI is at least partially responsible for the rising fortunes of the top five gainers monitored by Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index.
According to Bloomberg, Elon Musk nearly doubled his net worth this year, solidifying his position as the richest person in the world. His wealth increased by $213 billion in 2025, the largest increase among the 500 billionaires Bloomberg tracks.
Musk’s aerospace company SpaceX, which was recently valued at $800 billion and aims to enter the AI data center construction industry, accounts for a large portion of his current net worth, which is $645 billion. Next year, the company might go public with a valuation of up to $1.5 trillion.
His ownership of Tesla (TSLA), an electric vehicle firm that is increasingly focused on AI, and xAI, an AI startup he started two years ago that is allegedly in talks to seek funding at a $230 billion value, also contributed to his increased wealth.
The next greatest 2025 gainers were Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who created Alphabet (GOOGL), the parent company of Google, who increased their fortunes by $102 billion and $92.8 billion, respectively, as of Thursday. With a net worth of $270 billion, Page is the second richest man alive, while Brin is ranked fifth with a fortune of $251 billion. The majority of their funds come from investments in Alphabet, which last year emerged as a dominant force in AI.
As Oracle’s stock increased more than 18% through Thursday, Larry Ellison, a co-founder of Oracle (ORCL), saw his net worth increase by $59.2 billion to $251 billion this year. Investor opinion, however, has been gloomy in recent weeks as they worry that the software company will have to incur significant debt in order to finance its data-center plans.
On the morning of September 10, Ellison seemed to momentarily surpass Musk as the richest person in the world, but he ended the day in second place. He had a net worth of $251 billion as of Thursday, making him the fourth richest.
Jensen Huang, the CEO and co-founder of Nvidia (NVDA), completes the top five gainers this year. According to Bloomberg, he is worth $156 billion, up little less than $42 billion in 2025, and controls roughly 3.3% of the chip manufacturer.
These five billionaires had the most rise in fortune in 2025, but they are by no means the only IT executives to do so.
Jeff Bezos, the creator of Amazon.com (AMZN), remained the third richest person in the world, followed by Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta Platforms (META), who is sixth, and Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft (MSFT), who is eighth. The only two billionaires who did not make their fortune in the technology sector are Warren Buffett, the longtime chairman of Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B), and Bernard Arnault, the chair of luxury-brand holding group LVMH (FR:MC).
