The Top 10 Richest People in the World in 2026
The ten richest people in the world are worth about $2.8 trillion. When this page last carried the list, in July 2023, the same ten slots held $1.45 trillion, and the $242 billion that led it back then would not crack the top four today. Elon Musk alone is now worth more than the entire 2023 top four combined.
The figures below are Forbes’ real-time estimates as of September 1, 2026, the date of Forbes’ most recent monthly snapshot, and every one of them moves daily with share prices. Bloomberg’s rival index, which weighs some private assets differently, put Musk higher still at $918.8 billion on September 10. All figures are in U.S. dollars.
Three names have left the top ten since our 2023 edition: Bernard Arnault, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Three arrived: Michael Dell, Jensen Huang and Amancio Ortega. The pattern behind the churn is not subtle. Every fortune that grew rode artificial intelligence, either by building it, supplying the hardware underneath it, or being paid in the market’s enthusiasm for it. The three that shrank, or were given away, sit in luxury goods, philanthropy and value investing.
The top 10 richest people in the world at a glance
| Rank | Name | Net worth (Sep 1, 2026) | Source of wealth | On our July 2023 list |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Elon Musk | $892 billion | Tesla, SpaceX, xAI | $242 billion (1st) |
| 2 | Larry Page | $277 billion | Alphabet | $120 billion (6th) |
| 3 | Jeff Bezos | $268 billion | Amazon, Blue Origin | $157 billion (3rd) |
| 4 | Sergey Brin | $256 billion | Alphabet | $114 billion (10th) |
| 5 | Michael Dell | $241 billion | Dell Technologies, Broadcom | not in top 10 |
| 6 | Mark Zuckerberg | $197 billion | Meta Platforms | $118 billion (7th) |
| 7 | Larry Ellison | $193 billion | Oracle | $131 billion (5th) |
| 8 | Jensen Huang | $191 billion | Nvidia | not in top 10 |
| 9 | Steve Ballmer | $155 billion | Microsoft | $118 billion (9th) |
| 10 | Amancio Ortega | $148 billion | Inditex (Zara) | not in top 10 |
Net worth figures are Forbes’ estimates as of September 1, 2026. The 2023 column is what this page reported from the Bloomberg index in July 2023.
10. Amancio Ortega — $148 billion
Ortega is the list’s one non-American and its quietest member. The founder of Inditex, the Spanish group behind Zara, Massimo Dutti and Bershka, he moved up from twelfth place over the summer as Arnault and Buffett slipped out, and his fortune sits in two piles: a majority family stake in Inditex, and Pontegadea, the family office that converts his dividend income into one of the largest private property portfolios on the planet.
Canadian readers walk past a piece of it. Pontegadea paid about C$1.2 billion in 2022 for Royal Bank Plaza, the gold-windowed headquarters of RBC in downtown Toronto, one of the biggest single-building deals in Canadian history.
There is no photograph of Ortega in this article for an honest reason: he is famously private, and no verified, freely licensed image of him exists on Wikimedia Commons. Every candidate file we checked showed his foundation’s signing ceremonies without him in the frame. Rather than illustrate the entry with somebody else, we say so.
9. Steve Ballmer — $155 billion
Ballmer is the only person on this list who neither founded a company nor inherited one. He joined Microsoft in 1980 as roughly its thirtieth employee, took much of his pay in stock, and held on. That stake, still around 4 per cent of Microsoft, makes him the company’s largest individual shareholder, and with Microsoft valued at $3.68 trillion at the September 11 close it does almost all of the work in his fortune.
He climbed from eleventh to ninth over the past month, which says less about Ballmer than about the men he passed. Microsoft did not surge; Buffett’s and Arnault’s holdings fell. His other famous asset, the Los Angeles Clippers and their new Intuit Dome arena, was valued at $6.72 billion by the sports-valuation firm Sportico in October 2025, a rounding error next to the Microsoft position.
8. Jensen Huang — $191 billion
Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 to make graphics chips for gamers. Those same chips turned out to be the picks and shovels of the AI boom, and in October 2025 Nvidia became the first company in history to reach a $5 trillion market value. It was still the world’s most valuable company at the September 11 close, at $5.27 trillion.
Huang’s stake is small in percentage terms, roughly 3.5 per cent, which is exactly the point: 3.5 per cent of the biggest company ever assembled is enough for eighth place on this list. He is the only member of the top ten whose company sells to nearly everyone else on it. Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Oracle, Tesla and Dell’s hyperscaler customers are all, in one way or another, buying what Nvidia makes.
7. Larry Ellison — $193 billion
Nobody on this list has had a stranger year. In September 2025, Oracle’s startling cloud growth forecasts briefly carried Ellison to nearly $388 billion and second place in the world. Then the market started counting the cost of those forecasts. Oracle’s capital spending on AI data centres exploded, free cash flow went deeply negative, and the stock crashed in June 2026. At the September 11 close of $150.28 it sat more than half below its 52-week high of $331, and Ellison’s fortune had round-tripped through roughly $175 billion in mid-July, a swing of more than $200 billion in ten months.
He has since stabilized, with Forbes putting him back above $200 billion in early September as Oracle shares recovered some ground. The 82-year-old co-founder has meanwhile been financing his son David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance in its pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery, a fight over a media empire reported to be worth about $110 billion.
Ellison’s round trip is the cleanest lesson this list offers: a net worth built on one volatile stock is a number written in pencil.
6. Mark Zuckerberg — $197 billion
Zuckerberg is the list’s cautionary tale about spending money to make it. Meta raised its 2026 capital spending guidance to as much as $145 billion in April, almost entirely for AI infrastructure, and investors flinched: the stock dropped about 10 per cent, erasing roughly $175 billion of market value in a day. By the second quarter, Meta was reporting free cash flow of $784 million, down 91 per cent from $8.55 billion a year earlier, because nearly every dollar the apps earned went straight into data centres.
His August 2026 memo promised “personal superintelligence” for billions of people. The market is still deciding what that is worth; at the September 11 close Meta was valued at $1.65 trillion, and Zuckerberg, whom Bloomberg’s index still had at $233 billion in mid-July, has surrendered his place in the top five while spending more on AI than almost anyone.
5. Michael Dell — $241 billion
The biggest new arrival, and the least famous fortune on the list. Dell started assembling PCs in a University of Texas dorm room in 1984; four decades later his company builds the servers, storage and networking that AI data centres are made of, and the market has repriced it accordingly. Dell Technologies traded as low as $110.22 over the past year and as high as $567.75, and coverage of the Bloomberg index puts his 2026 wealth gain at about $107 billion, second only to Musk’s.
He began 2026 outside the top ten and passed Zuckerberg and Ellison on the way up. Bloomberg attributes his fortune to two positions, Dell Technologies and a large Broadcom stake, and his company has told investors it sees a trillion-dollar AI infrastructure opportunity through 2030. The bet embedded in his ranking is that the boom’s suppliers keep winning even if individual model-builders stumble.
4. Sergey Brin — $256 billion
Brin co-founded Google with Larry Page in 1998 and was tenth on this page’s 2023 list at $114 billion. He has since added roughly $142 billion without starting anything new, because Alphabet became the fourth company in history to cross a $4 trillion market value in January 2026 and stood at $4.14 trillion at the September 11 close.
Unlike Page, Brin came back to the office for the AI race and has been personally involved in the Gemini model work. He held third place for much of the year before Bezos passed him in July. The symmetry with Larry Page at the top of the list is the story: two graduate students, one company, more than half a trillion dollars between them.
3. Jeff Bezos — $268 billion
Bezos held this exact rank on our 2023 list, with $111 billion less to his name. Amazon, valued at $2.77 trillion at the September 11 close, still supplies the bulk of the fortune, with AWS carrying the growth story. Amazon also remains the second-largest corporate employer in the United States behind only Walmart, a scale we ranked in our list of the U.S. companies with the most employees.
The 2026 twist is that Bezos went back to work. In November 2025 he co-founded Project Prometheus, an AI startup aiming to build an “artificial general engineer” for designing and manufacturing physical products, and took the co-CEO seat alongside scientist Vik Bajaj. It is his first operational role since leaving the Amazon corner office in 2021, and in June 2026 the company raised $12 billion at a valuation of about $41 billion before shipping a product.
2. Larry Page — $277 billion
Page was sixth on our 2023 list at $120 billion. He is second now, and he did approximately nothing in public to get there, which is the purest version of what happened to this ranking. Alphabet’s shares rose 65 per cent in 2025, the company’s best year since 2009, carried by the Gemini models and capped by Apple’s decision to build the next generation of Siri on Gemini foundations. Alphabet crossed $4 trillion in market value in January 2026.
Page stepped down as Alphabet’s CEO in 2019 and has stayed out of view since, but he kept the shares. More than doubling a twelve-figure fortune in three years while in effective retirement is an argument for concentration that no financial adviser will ever make to a normal person, and the gap between him and the rank above remains the widest on the list.
1. Elon Musk — $892 billion
Musk led our 2023 list at $242 billion. He leads the 2026 edition by a margin that has no precedent: the $615 billion gap between him and Larry Page is itself larger than any other fortune on Earth. He has added roughly $650 billion in three years.
The June 12, 2026 stock market debut of SpaceX did most of the recent work. It was the largest initial public offering in history: shares priced at $135, closed their first day at $161.11, and gave the rocket and Starlink company a market value of about $2.1 trillion, immediately among the half-dozen most valuable listed companies anywhere. The offering documents are public in SpaceX’s filings with the SEC. For a stretch that month, the IPO made Musk the world’s first trillionaire on paper; Forbes’ September 1 estimate of $892 billion and Bloomberg’s September 10 figure of $918.8 billion both sit below that peak, which is a reminder that at this scale the daily noise alone is a Fortune 500 company.
Tesla, worth $1.44 trillion at the September 11 close, is no longer the majority of the story; we track the company itself on our Tesla stock page. Between SpaceX, Tesla and the xAI artificial intelligence venture, the world’s biggest fortune is now, from top to bottom, a bet on machines.
The three who fell out
Warren Buffett sat in a three-way tie at $118 billion with Zuckerberg and Ballmer on our 2023 list. The 96-year-old handed the Berkshire Hathaway chief executive job to Greg Abel in January 2026, staying on as chairman, and Berkshire’s 10.9 per cent gain in 2025 trailed the S&P 500’s 16.4 per cent. A fine year by any human standard was not enough to keep pace with an AI repricing, and Forbes now has him just outside the ten.
Bernard Arnault was second in 2023 at $198 billion. The LVMH founder has lost roughly $65 billion in 2026 alone, the largest decline among the world’s 500 richest people, as Chinese demand for luxury goods kept shrinking. Bloomberg’s index now puts him at $143 billion, below Buffett and outside its top ten for the first time since 2017. His exit created a milestone: as of September 10, all ten names at the top of Bloomberg’s ranking are American, the first time that has happened since the index launched in 2012.
Bill Gates was fourth in 2023 at $136 billion and by midyear stood at $105.6 billion and 19th, but his exit is the only voluntary one. In May 2025 he announced that he will give away virtually all of his wealth through the Gates Foundation, which will close permanently on December 31, 2045, writing that he is determined “he died rich” will not be said of him. The plan, laid out in his own essay at the Gates Foundation, directs roughly $200 billion out the door over twenty years. He will keep falling down this list on purpose, which makes him the one member of the 2023 top ten whose decline is the achievement.
One more absence worth naming: there has never been a woman in this top ten, and 2026 is no different. The wealthiest women in the world sit further down the global ranking, and we cover them separately in our list of the richest women in the world.
Where are the Canadians?
Nowhere near the top ten, and it is not close. The richest Canadian is Changpeng Zhao, the Binance founder, at $111.1 billion and 17th in the world on Forbes’ 2026 billionaires list published in April, after his crypto fortune nearly doubled in a year. He is one of 82 Canadians on that list, and even he would need to add almost $40 billion to displace Amancio Ortega from tenth place.
The more practical Canadian connection is that most of this list is ownable. Every company driving the ranking except SpaceX and xAI trades publicly, and Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla are among the largest holdings in the broad U.S. index funds that anchor most Canadian portfolios; our guide to the best ETFs in Canada covers the funds that hold them. Hold U.S. stocks in the right account and the tax treatment improves too: U.S. dividend withholding works differently inside an RRSP than in a TFSA, which we explain in our RRSP guide. And if this list is what finally makes compounding feel real, start smaller than a rocket company: our walkthrough on how to buy your first stock is the first step.
What to watch next
Two numbers hang over the next edition of this page. The first is one trillion dollars: Musk has already touched it once, and either a SpaceX rally or a strong Tesla run takes him back. The second is the AI capital-spending cycle that put most of these men where they are. Oracle’s crash and Meta’s cash-flow squeeze show the market has started grading that spending, not just applauding it. This list was rebuilt by one trade, and it can be reshuffled by the same one.
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 as of September 1, 2026 and move daily with share prices; Bloomberg Billionaires Index figures are as of September 10, 2026 where noted. Market capitalizations are as of the September 11, 2026 close. Source: StockAnalysis.
