What's New?
America's billionaires enjoyed a stellar 2024, their collective net worth soaring by hundreds of billions of dollars on the back of a sustained boom in the tech sector.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which ranks daily the world's wealthiest individuals, nine out of the 10 individuals who saw the largest growth in their net worth since January are U.S. citizens.
Elon Musk, the South African-born CEO of SpaceX, Tesla, and X (formerly Twitter), saw his net worth skyrocket by an astounding $222 billion for a total of $451 billion as of December 24. His shares in Tesla, which make up a significant portion of his total fortune, have grown by 81 percent over the same period.
Taken together, the 10 centibillionaires—which included perennial frontrunners Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos—notched an additional $730 billion onto their collective net worth in 2024, a few billion shy of Taiwan's GDP.
Why It Matters
The staggering accumulation of wealth—boosted in early November by the re-election of Donald Trump and a surge in U.S. stocks—sheds light on the dynamics of economic inequality in the U.S. and its broader implications.
These debates had already been ignited by the impacts of inflation and wage stagnation as suffered by America's middle- and working-classes, and in the past such high figures have prompted calls for higher taxation on the super-wealthy, as well as examinations into the influence of money in the American political system.
What To Know
The individuals on Bloomberg's list, ranked by the increase in their net worth over the past 12 months, are: Elon Musk (+$222 billion), Mark Zuckerberg (+$84 billion), Nvidia founder Jensen Huang (+$77.9 billion), Jeff Bezos (+$67 billion), Larry Ellison (+$67 billion), Michael Dell (+$46.6 billion), Larry Page ($46.1 billion), Sergey Brin (+$42.2 billion), and Walmart heirs Jim (+$39.6 billion) and Alice Walton (+$39.0 billion).
The nature of the billionaires on Bloomberg's list also highlights the outsized and growing impact of technology on the global economy today, nearly all of the billionaires deriving their wealth from ownership of companies in this sector.
The global reach of communication technologies, and the high scalability of companies dealing in cutting edge tech, means that businesses positioned at the forefront of the digital transformation are poised to reap even greater rewards, promising today's billionaires even greater fortunes in the future.
On the other end of the spectrum, the continued downturn in the luxury goods sector has seen many well-known billionaires shed significant portions from their net worth.
Bernard Arnault, the founder and CEO of LVMH who once held the title of the world's richest person, saw his wealth decline by $32 billion in 2024. Arnault is followed by Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, businesswoman and heiress to the L'Oréal fortune, whose net worth sank by $25.6 billion so far this year.
What People Are Saying
Peter Oppenheimer, Chief Global Equity Strategist and Head of Macro Research in Europe at Goldman Sachs, spoke to financial outlet Boring Money about the future of the tech boom: "The drivers of this success have reflected their ability to leverage software and cloud computing and to fuel high profitability generated by extraordinary demand growth. But their more recent surge in performance since 2022 owes much to the hopes and aspirations around AI."
What Happens Next?
Some analysts have likened the tech boom to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and early 2000s, and warned that this too could burst, hurting those who hedged their fortunes on the transformative power of AI.
For now, however, technology appears to have triggered an unparalleled rise in net worth for those at the pinnacle, leading to levels of individual wealth never before seen in history.
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