The 15 Richest Women in the World in 2026
The fifteen richest women in the world are worth $742 billion between them. When this page last carried the list, in March 2024, the same fifteen slots held $571 billion, and the $16.5 billion that scraped into last place then would not come close today. The cut line for fifteenth place has risen 54 per cent in two and a half years, to $25.4 billion.
The figures below are Forbes’ real-time estimates, taken from Forbes’ own feed on September 24, 2026 and reflecting the previous day’s market close. They move daily with share prices, because that is mostly what they are: Alice Walton’s entire position is 880 million Walmart shares, and Forbes marks it to whatever Walmart closed at. All figures are in U.S. dollars.
Two changes matter more than the numbers. The first is at the top, where Alice Walton has passed Françoise Bettencourt Meyers and now leads by $27.6 billion. The second is at the bottom, where four names dropped out of the top fifteen and only one of them actually got poorer. Vicky Safra’s fortune grew 23 per cent since our last edition and she still fell off the list, by $20 million.
The 15 richest women in the world at a glance
| Rank | Name | Net worth | World rank | Source of wealth | On our March 2024 list |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Alice Walton | $121.2 billion | 15 | Walmart | $72.7 billion (2nd) |
| 2 | Françoise Bettencourt Meyers | $93.6 billion | 21 | L’Oréal | $96.5 billion (1st) |
| 3 | Julia Koch | $84.6 billion | 23 | Koch, Inc. | $61.5 billion (3rd) |
| 4 | Jacqueline Mars | $50.3 billion | 36 | Mars | $38.5 billion (4th) |
| 5 | Iris Fontbona | $47.8 billion | 40 | Antofagasta, Quiñenco | $25.2 billion (12th) |
| 6 | Rafaela Aponte-Diamant | $46.3 billion | 43 | MSC | $28.6 billion (10th) |
| 7 | Abigail Johnson | $41.6 billion | 48 | Fidelity Investments | $30.0 billion (9th) |
| 8 | Savitri Jindal | $40.1 billion | 52 | O.P. Jindal Group | $31.0 billion (7th) |
| 9 | Marilyn Simons | $36.6 billion | 63 | Renaissance Technologies | not in top 15 |
| 10 | Melinda French Gates | $34.6 billion | 70 | Microsoft | not in top 15 |
| 11 | Elaine Marshall | $32.2 billion | 74 | Koch, Inc. | not in top 15 |
| 12 | Miriam Adelson | $31.5 billion | 76 | Las Vegas Sands | $34.5 billion (6th) |
| 13 | Lyndal Stephens Greth | $29.0 billion | 81 | Endeavor Energy, Diamondback | not in top 15 |
| 14 | MacKenzie Scott | $27.3 billion | 90 | Amazon | $35.2 billion (5th) |
| 15 | Gina Rinehart | $25.4 billion | 98 | Hancock Prospecting | $30.3 billion (8th) |
Net worths are Forbes’ real-time estimates as of the September 23, 2026 close. The right-hand column is what this page reported in March 2024. Eight of the fifteen entries are what Forbes calls family fortunes, shared with children or siblings and counted once.
15. Gina Rinehart — $25.4 billion
Rinehart has slipped further down this list than anyone: eighth place in 2024, fifteenth now, and down 16 per cent in dollars along the way. Iron ore is the reason. She inherited a financially distressed exploration company from her father, Lang Hancock, took the chair in 1992 and rebuilt it around Roy Hill, the Pilbara mine that began shipping to Asia in 2015. When Chinese steel demand is strong, so is she. When it is not, a fortune concentrated in one commodity moves the way the commodity does.
She has spent the past two years trying to change that, buying into rare earths and gas and closing a $1.1 billion acquisition of the lithium explorer Azure Minerals with Chile’s SQM in May 2024. She is also Australia’s second-largest cattle producer. None of it has yet replaced iron ore. The same concentration risk runs through Canadian mining stocks, where a single commodity price can carry a company’s entire earnings.
14. MacKenzie Scott — $27.3 billion
Scott is the one entry on this list actively trying to make her number go down. She received a 4 per cent stake in Amazon in her 2019 divorce from Jeff Bezos, signed the Giving Pledge weeks later, and has since given $26.4 billion to more than 2,700 nonprofits, each grant published on her Yield Giving site. Her giving style is deliberately hands-off: the organizations choose how to spend it, with no reporting conditions attached.
She is down 22 per cent since our 2024 edition, which is the arithmetic of giving away money faster than Amazon shares appreciate. Forbes still records 68.2 million Amazon shares against her name, worth about $17.4 billion, which is a little under two thirds of the total; the rest sits outside the stock. A Canadian investor who wants the same exposure does not need a U.S. dollar account for it: Amazon is one of 133 companies with a Canadian Depositary Receipt trading on the TSX in Canadian dollars.
13. Lyndal Stephens Greth — $29.0 billion
The least famous fortune on the list, and the newest. Greth joined the board of Endeavor Energy Resources in 2013 and became chair in August 2024 on the death of her father, Autry Stephens, who had built it into one of the largest privately held oil producers in the United States: roughly 327,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day, drilling rights across more than 500,000 acres, most of it in the Permian Basin of West Texas.
Six months before he died, Stephens agreed to sell the company to Diamondback Energy for about $26 billion in cash and stock. The deal closed in September 2024, and that is why Greth appears here now. A private family company became 74 million shares of a listed one, which Forbes can mark to market every day. The fortune did not grow; it became visible. That distinction explains a good deal of who does and does not appear on lists like this one.
12. Miriam Adelson — $31.5 billion
Adelson is a physician who specialized in addiction medicine before her fortune arrived by inheritance. Her husband Sheldon Adelson built Las Vegas Sands and died in 2021; she and her family now hold more than half of it, a position Forbes values at $15.3 billion of her total. The company sold its Las Vegas Strip assets in 2022 and is now essentially a bet on Macao and Singapore, which is why her number is down 9 per cent since 2024.
She bought a majority of the Dallas Mavericks from Mark Cuban in 2023 and is among the largest Republican donors in the United States. The Adelson entry is a useful reminder of what these rankings measure: an operating casino business in two Asian jurisdictions, a basketball team and a political footprint all resolve into one number, and the number moves when Las Vegas Sands does.
11. Elaine Marshall — $32.2 billion
Marshall is the second Koch heir on this list, and the more obscure one. She owns an estimated 16 per cent of Koch, Inc. with her two sons, inherited from her husband E. Pierce Marshall, who died in 2006. His father, J. Howard Marshall II, had been an early partner of the company’s founder Fred Koch, which is how a stake in one of America’s largest private companies ended up outside the Koch family itself.
Koch is private, so there is no share price to mark. Forbes estimates the whole company from its roughly $125 billion of revenue and then takes a percentage, which is a slower and blunter instrument than a stock quote. That is worth holding in mind when Marshall’s number barely moves from year to year while Alice Walton’s swings by tens of billions: the two are not measured the same way.
10. Melinda French Gates — $34.6 billion
French Gates resigned as co-chair of the Gates Foundation in 2024 after nearly 24 years, three years after her divorce from Bill Gates. Forbes puts the 2021 settlement at about $25 billion, handed over largely as shares in companies the Gates trust had accumulated rather than as Microsoft stock. The two largest positions Forbes still records against her name are Canadian National Railway and Deere.
The Canadian National position is the interesting one for readers here. Forbes records 16.1 million CN shares against her name, worth about $1.93 billion, which puts a Seattle philanthropist among the larger individual shareholders of a Canadian railway. It is also a textbook example of what the Gates trust bought with its Microsoft winnings: regulated, capital-intensive, competitively protected businesses of the kind that anchor most Canadian blue-chip portfolios. Since leaving the foundation she has committed $1 billion through 2026 to women’s and girls’ causes through her firm Pivotal Ventures.
9. Marilyn Simons — $36.6 billion
Simons is the widow of Jim Simons, the mathematician who founded Renaissance Technologies and died in 2024. She has a PhD in economics from Stony Brook University, where the two met, and chairs the Simons Foundation, which has become one of the largest private funders of basic science and mathematics in the United States. The family has given away more than $10 billion.
Her fortune is the only one on this list built by a quantitative hedge fund, and it is the hardest to think about as a shareholding. Renaissance’s Medallion fund is closed to outside money and its returns are not public. What Forbes is valuing is a share of an intensely private business plus decades of compounded proceeds, which is why the estimate carries a wider error band than Alice Walton’s Walmart stake does.
8. Savitri Jindal — $40.1 billion
Jindal chairs the O.P. Jindal Group, and hers is the most distributed fortune on the list. Her husband, the group’s founder, died in a helicopter crash in 2005, and the businesses were divided among their four sons, who now run them independently. Forbes counts the family’s combined stakes in JSW Steel, JSW Energy, JSW Infrastructure, JSW Cement, Jindal Steel & Power, Jindal Saw and JSL as one entry.
That structure explains the steadiness. Seven listed companies across steel, power, cement and ports do not all move together, and the fortune is up 29 per cent since 2024 without any single dramatic event. It is the closest thing on this list to a diversified industrial index, held by one family.
7. Abigail Johnson — $41.6 billion
Johnson is one of only two women in this top fifteen who runs the company her money comes from. Gina Rinehart, in fifteenth, is the other. She has been chief executive of Fidelity Investments since 2014, taking over from her father, and chairman since 2016; her grandfather founded the firm in Boston in 1946. She owns an estimated 29 per cent of a business that had $7.1 trillion under discretionary management as of December 2025.
She has also been the most willing of the large American asset managers to touch digital assets, launching institutional custody and trading for Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin in 2018, years before the regulated products that followed. Canadian investors reached the same asset class by a different route, through the crypto-linked stocks and funds listed in Toronto. Her fortune is up 39 per cent since 2024. Fidelity is private, so unlike Alice Walton’s, that number is Forbes’ estimate of a whole business rather than a share price times a share count.
6. Rafaela Aponte-Diamant — $46.3 billion
Aponte-Diamant is the only woman in this top fifteen whom Forbes classifies as self-made. She met Gianluigi Aponte, then a ship’s captain, on Capri in the 1960s. In 1970 they borrowed $200,000, bought a single vessel, and built Mediterranean Shipping Company into the largest container line in the world. She and her husband each own half of it outright.
Her 62 per cent gain since 2024 is the largest on this list outside the copper and Walmart entries, and it came from a business that has kept reinvesting: MSC has spent the years since the shipping boom buying vessels, port terminals and an inland logistics arm rather than paying the money out. It also runs MSC Cruises, where she is responsible for how the ships are fitted out. Very little of what arrives in a Canadian port arrives any other way than by container.
5. Iris Fontbona — $47.8 billion
The biggest percentage gain on this list belongs to a Chilean copper family: up 90 per cent since our 2024 edition. Fontbona is the widow of Andrónico Luksic, who died in 2005 and left his businesses to her and their sons. The family controls Antofagasta plc, which mines copper in Chile and is listed in London, along with a majority of Quiñenco, a Santiago conglomerate spanning banking, beer and manufacturing.
Copper did the work. Forbes records 640 million Antofagasta shares against the family’s name, so the fortune is essentially a leveraged position in one metal, and that metal has spent the past two years being described as the physical bottleneck in electrification and grid expansion. It is the same argument that has carried Canadian copper names, and it carries the same warning: a fortune that rises 90 per cent on one commodity can fall the same way. Gina Rinehart, ten places below, is what that looks like from the other side.
4. Jacqueline Mars — $50.3 billion
Mars owns about a third of the company her grandfather founded, alongside her brother John and her late brother’s four daughters. She worked there for close to twenty years and sat on the board until 2016. The reason her number jumped 31 per cent since 2024 is not confectionery. On December 11, 2025, Mars closed its acquisition of Kellanova for about $35.9 billion including debt, bringing Pringles, Cheez-It and Pop-Tarts into a portfolio that already held Snickers, M&M’s, Whiskas and Pedigree.
It was one of the largest food deals ever done, and it was paid for in cash and debt rather than shares, because Mars has no shares to offer. That is the defining feature of this entry. Mars, Incorporated has stayed private for more than a century, so there is no ticker, no quarterly call and no way for an outside investor to own a share of it.
3. Julia Koch — $84.6 billion
Koch and her three children inherited a 42 per cent stake in Koch, Inc. when David Koch died in 2019. She had moved to New York in the 1980s and worked as an assistant to the designer Adolfo before meeting him on a blind date in 1991. Her stake, together with Charles Koch’s, carries 84 per cent of the voting power in one of the largest private companies in the United States.
What she has done with it since is buy sports. Nearly $700 million for 15 per cent of BSE Global, which owns the Brooklyn Nets and the New York Liberty, in 2024; 10 per cent of the New York Giants in 2025, in a deal valuing the team above $10 billion. Professional sports franchises have become the preferred parking spot for very large private fortunes, for a reason that is not sentimental: the leagues are closed, the broadcast revenue is contracted years ahead, and there are only so many teams.
2. Françoise Bettencourt Meyers — $93.6 billion
The only woman in the top three whose fortune is smaller than it was in 2024, and the reason the top of this list changed hands. She is down $2.9 billion; Alice Walton is up $48.5 billion. Since each fortune is essentially one shareholding, that gap is really two share prices. Forbes records 185.7 million L’Oréal shares against the family, worth about €82.8 billion, which is nearly the whole of her number.
She is the granddaughter of L’Oréal’s founder and became the family’s principal heir in 2017, when her mother Liliane Bettencourt died at 94 having spent years as the world’s richest woman. She left the L’Oréal board in 2025 after 28 years, and her son Jean-Victor Meyers took her seat as vice chairman. Canadians who want to own the company do not have to buy in euros: L’Oréal is one of six French companies with a CDR listed in Toronto.
1. Alice Walton — $121.2 billion
Walton is the richest woman in the world, the fifteenth-richest person of any gender, and up $48.5 billion since this page last counted. She is the only one of Sam Walton’s children who never joined the Walmart board, having spent her career on art and philanthropy instead. The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened in Bentonville in 2011; in 2025 the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine, in the same town, admitted its first class of 48 students.
Her fortune is the simplest on this list and the easiest to verify: 880,357,677 Walmart shares, worth $96.9 billion at the September 23 close, with the remaining $24 billion or so in everything else she owns. Nothing about it requires an estimate of a private company’s earnings or a hedge fund’s returns. It is one position in one listed retailer, inherited when Sam Walton died in 1992, and it is the clearest illustration on this page of what long compounding does to a large stake nobody sells. Walmart, like L’Oréal and Amazon, can be bought in Canadian dollars on the TSX through a depositary receipt.
Who fell off the list, and why almost none of them got poorer
Four women who appeared in our March 2024 edition are not in this one. Only one of them lost money.
| Name | March 2024 | Now | Change | World rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vicky Safra | $20.6 billion | $25.4 billion | +23% | 99 |
| Susanne Klatten | $26.4 billion | $24.2 billion | -8% | 106 |
| Diane Hendricks | $23.4 billion | $23.6 billion | +1% | 109 |
| Renata Kellnerová | $16.5 billion | $19.6 billion | +18% | 139 |
Vicky Safra, who inherited the J. Safra banking group with her four children when Joseph Safra died in 2020, grew her fortune by almost a quarter and missed fifteenth place by $20 million. Renata Kellnerová, widow of the PPF Group founder Petr Kellner, gained 18 per cent and slipped from fifteenth among women to twenty-first. Only Susanne Klatten, whose wealth sits in BMW and the specialty chemicals firm Altana, actually went backwards, and she is still worth $24.2 billion.
They were pushed out rather than knocked down, by four arrivals and by the speed of the fortunes above them. Just below the cut line sits Zheng Shuliang at $24.0 billion, the widow of the founder of China Hongqiao, one of China’s largest aluminum producers, who stepped down as its vice chairman in May 2026 citing her age.
Where are the Canadians?
There is one, and she is not the household name the position might suggest.
Sherry Brydson, at $11.6 billion, is the only Canadian woman in Forbes’ top 300 and therefore the richest woman in Canada. She is a granddaughter of Roy Thomson, who died in 1976, and holds the largest single stake of any of the six Thomson heirs, roughly 23 per cent of the family’s holdings through the Woodbridge investment company. Forbes records 70.9 million Thomson Reuters shares against her name, worth about $6.8 billion, plus a position in BCE. The family’s other Canadian assets include The Globe and Mail, the Montreal Canadiens and the Winnipeg Jets.
Canada places seven people in Forbes’ global top 300 altogether. Changpeng Zhao, the Binance founder, leads them at 18th in the world; then Stuart Hoegner, Christopher Olah, Tobi Lütke of Shopify, Joseph Tsai, Jim Pattison and Brydson. Six of the seven are men. Thomson Reuters is the rare case here where the company behind a global fortune trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange directly, and it is a long-standing name in Canadian dividend portfolios.
What the list actually measures
Three things are worth understanding before treating any of these numbers as precise.
Eight of the fifteen are marked to a share price. Walton, Bettencourt Meyers, Fontbona, Jindal, Adelson, Greth, Scott and French Gates hold listed stock, and Forbes revalues them every time it trades. Alice Walton’s number is Walmart’s share price multiplied by 880 million. That is why these rankings reshuffle from month to month without anyone buying or selling anything, and why what moves a share price is most of the story behind the reshuffling.
The other seven are estimates, not counts. The businesses behind Julia Koch, Jacqueline Mars, Aponte-Diamant, Abigail Johnson, Marilyn Simons, Elaine Marshall and Gina Rinehart are all private: Koch, Mars, MSC, Fidelity, Renaissance Technologies and Hancock Prospecting. Their values come from applying a multiple to revenue or earnings that outsiders cannot see directly. The error band on Elaine Marshall’s $32.2 billion is far wider than the one on MacKenzie Scott’s Amazon stake, even though both are printed to a decimal place.
Almost none of it was founded. Forbes flags exactly one woman in this top fifteen as self-made: Rafaela Aponte-Diamant, who bought a ship in 1970. Thirteen of the other fourteen inherited or received their stakes, and Abigail Johnson, who runs a firm her grandfather started, sits somewhere in between. Among men it is not close: Forbes flags all ten of the richest people in the world as self-made, against one of the fifteen women here. The gap says less about the women on this page than about who was permitted to start companies in the generation that created the fortunes now being passed down.
The practical lesson for an ordinary portfolio is the least glamorous one on the page. The fortunes that grew fastest here were not the cleverest. They were the ones attached to a business that kept compounding while nobody sold: Walmart since 1992, L’Oréal since 1957, Mars since 1911. That is available at any scale, and the mechanics of it are the same whether the position is 880 million shares or eighty. If you are starting from the other end, our guide to buying your first stock covers the account, the order and the first purchase.
Disclaimer: The content on bestcanadianstocks.ca is for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Always consult a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions. Net worths are Forbes’ real-time estimates pulled from Forbes’ own feed on September 24, 2026, reflecting the September 23, 2026 market close. They move daily with share prices. All figures in U.S. dollars.
