The $100 Billion Club: These 15 People Have 12-Figure Fortunes
T
he ultra-elite echelon of people with dozen-digit fortunes didn't even exist eight years ago. Now, a record 15 people make the grade on Forbes' 2025 World's Billionaires list, up from 14 last year and six in 2023. For the first time, three of them have a net worth above $200 billion.
In all, these 15 'centibillionaires' are worth $2.4 trillion, nearly $400 billion more than a year ago—and more than the planet's 1,500 'poorest' billionaires combined. Put another way, this group of just 0.5% of the world's 3,028 billionaires holds an incredible 15% of all billionaire wealth.
In 1987, when Forbes published its first ever global rich list, the idea of a centibillionaire was hard to imagine. We found just two people, both Japanese tycoons, worth more than $10 billion (about $28 billion adjusted for inflation, good enough to rank just 71st on the 2025 list).
It took the dot-com bubble to create the first centibillionaire, Bill Gates, whose Microsoft shares briefly lifted his fortune above $100 billion in 1999, before the ensuing crash chopped his net worth nearly in half. No one else came close for nearly two decades, even as markets soared before and after the Great Recession. Jeff Bezos finally cracked the code in late 2017, becoming the second ever centibillionaire, when Amazon's market capitalization rocketed toward $1 trillion. Still, it wasn't until 2021 that the $100 Billion Club expanded beyond Bezos, when Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault and Bill Gates joined its ranks.
Now, with extreme affluence surging around the world, membership is getting (just a little bit) more common by the day. The three living children of Walmart founder Sam Walton (d. 1992) all joined the $100 Billion Club this year, replacing two members on last year's list whose fortunes dropped back into 11 figures: Indian industrial tycoon Mukesh Ambani (estimated net worth: $92.5 billion) and Mexican telecom mogul Carlos Slim Helu ($82.5 billion). Meanwhile, a number of other billionaires are knocking on the door, led by Nvidia's Jensen Huang ($98.7 billion), tech tycoon Michael Dell ($97.7 billion) and L'Oreal heiress Francoise Bettencourt Meyers ($81.6 billion), who briefly became the first-ever female centibillionaire in June 2024.
In September, Walton became the world's wealthiest woman once again, overtaking French L'Oréal heiress Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, who had surpassed her for the previous two and a half years. The Walmart heiress is best known for spearheading the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in her family's hometown of Bentonville, Arkansas. She has given away an estimated $1.7 billion, including a recent gift of $249 million to help fund the new Alice L. Walton School of Medicine, also in Bentonville.
The cofounder of financial data and media company Bloomberg LP donated $1 billion to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, last July to make its medical school tuition free for most students. Altogether he has given $4.6 billion to the school, which announced in March that it will lay off more than 2,000 employees after the Trump administration canceled $800 million of federal grants.
The Microsoft cofounder hasn't ranked this low since 1991, when he was worth $4.4 billion. Microsoft stock is down 2% since last year, but the main reason for Gates' $20 billion drop is Forbes' increased estimate of his 2021 divorce settlement, which we peg at $25 billion. In his capacity as chairman of the $70 billion (net assets) Gates Foundation, he met with Trump in February to advocate for the U.S. Agency for International Development after the administration started slashing its workforce and programs. The self-described nerd also barnstormed the country that month, appearing on the Today show, The Tonight Show (and everything in between) to promote his recently published childhood memoir, Source Code.
Three decades after Walmart founder Sam Walton's death, his children are stepping back. In June, Rob, 80, retired from the retailing giant's board after more than 40 years as a director. Jim, 76, left the board in 2016, but still chairs the family's Arvest Bank Group. In December, the Waltons announced that all eight of Sam's grandkids now share in the voting rights for the family's 45% stake in Walmart.
Ballmer stepped down as CEO of Microsoft 11 years ago but still raves about the stock, which accounts for an estimated 80% of his portfolio. It's been a heck of an investment: MSFT shares have returned nearly 1,200% since he left the top job, quadrupling the S&P 500. Ballmer is also very emotionally invested in the L.A. Clippers, the basketball team he bought for $2 billion in 2014. Now moved into the shiny new Intuit Dome stadium that Ballmer spent some $2 billion building, it's the NBA's fifth most valuable team, worth $5.5 billion.
Spain's richest person has invested more than $1 billion in logistics and office properties across Europe over the past year. He can afford it: His stake in fashion retail giant Inditex, which he founded in 1985 and is best known for its Zara brand, is worth a record $100 billion, as shares swelled 27% over the past 12 months. Plus Ortega, who stepped down as chairman 14 years ago, has another $3.4 billion (pretax) coming his way, too, thanks to a fat dividend announced in March.
The Alphabet cofounders and board members are richer this year due to a nearly 30% jump in Alphabet shares—despite the Justice Department's demand that Google be broken up. Brin has reportedly been back in the office working on Alphabet's Gemini family of AI models, and reportedly encouraged employees to do the same, penning a February memo urging in-office attendance. Page, meanwhile, is reportedly working on a new company to apply AI to manufacturing.
The 94-year-old investor has amassed $334 billion of cash on Berkshire Hathaway's books—and is in no hurry to spend it. Buffett was a net seller of $134 billion of equities in 2024 and hasn't made a splashy acquisition since 2022's $11.5 billion purchase of insurer Alleghany Corp. 'Often, nothing looks compelling,' Buffett wrote in his annual shareholder letter in February.
The richest person on the planet a year ago, Arnault has seen his fortune drop by $55 billion amid what the luxury goods giant has called 'a challenging economic and geopolitical environment.' The 76-year-old father of five (all LVMH executives) seems to be having fun keeping everyone guessing as to his successor: Son Antoine was center stage for the group's sponsorship of last summer's Paris Olympics; son Frédéric was recently named chief of its Loro Piana fashion brand; and daughter Delphine and son Alexandre were seated with their father at Trump's inauguration.
Ellison wasn't one of the tech tycoons front and center at Trump's inauguration, but the next day he stood feet away from the president at the White House as Trump announced a $500 billion initiative to build AI infrastructure, including data centers, backed in part by Ellison's firm Oracle. Ellison's fortune is up $51 billion from 2024 due to a 40% rise in Oracle's stock price.
The Amazon founder and chairman is $21 billion richer than last year and keeping busy as an investor. Bezos, who offloaded $5 billion of Amazon shares over the past 12 months, has continued to pump cash into startups, including several AI robotics firms. His space outfit, Blue Origin, announced in February that it's laying off 10% of its workforce, a month after the successful launch of its New Glenn rocket. Meanwhile his recent moves at another toy, the Washington Post, including declaring that the opinion pages must support 'personal liberties and free markets,' have ruffled establishment feathers.
The formerly progressive Meta CEO surprised many with his public embrace of MAGA, including putting pro-Trump entrepreneur Dana White, CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship, on Meta's board in early January and cohosting an inauguration reception for the president alongside several Republican billionaires. Shares of the social media behemoth have surged nearly 25% over the past year amid optimism about Meta's AI investments—enough to make Zuck the planet's second-richest person for the first time.
Musk reclaimed the title of world's richest person from LVMH's Bernard Arnault last May, when private investors valued Musk's artificial intelligence startup, xAI, at $24 billion. Then, in December, he became the first person ever worth $400 billion, after xAI's valuation doubled to $50 billion and Musk's rocket maker, SpaceX, hit $350 billion (up from $210 billion in June). Shares of his EV company, Tesla, also reached an all-time high that month, but the stock has crashed by nearly 40% since inauguration day, when Musk took over as head of President Trump's new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Still, he's worth $147 billion more than a year ago. And that's before Musk announced last Friday that xAI had acquired his social media company X (formerly Twitter) in a deal that valued xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion, or roughly what Musk paid for the platform in 2022.
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