Forbes Worlds Billionaires List 2024: The Top 200

Zhang Yiming is the main cofounder of Chinese tech giant ByteDance, best known for its insanely popular app TikTok, which has more than 1 billion users worldwide. Mukesh Ambani chairs and runs $120 billion (revenue) Reliance Industries, which has interests in petrochemicals, oil and gas, telecom, retail, media and financial services. Amancio Ortega of Spain is one of the wealthiest clothing retailers in the world.

Net Worth: $34 Billion Age: 79 Country/Territory: United States Industry: Finance & Investments

Lei Jun is cofounder, chairman and CEO of Hong Kong-listed Xiaomi, one of the world’s most popular smartphone brands. Charles Koch has been chairman of Koch, Inc., America’s second largest private company by revenue, since 1967. Elon Musk, who in 2022 bought Twitter for $44 billion, aims to pioneer new, sustainable forms of travel with his electric car maker Tesla, and owns about a fifth of the company.

Born in California in 1932, Donald Bren started his career by spending some time building homes and a planned community. When, in the early part of the ’80s, the housing market in the U.S. slowed down, Bren began to buy out his partners. In 1983, he became The Irvine Company’s majority shareholder and chairman—and, in 1996, he became its sole owner. In addition to his business pursuits, Bren has been involved in philanthropy, improving education and preserving land in California. They come from different places, have different stories, and their wealth is a result of different factors, just like so many others who are in this group of the world’s wealthiest. Jensen Huang, CEO and co-founder of Nvidia, has entered the ranks of the top 10 richest people for the first time.

Since then, Cohen has founded another hedge fund, Point72 Asset Management. In 2020, Cohen bought the New York Mets, and has been the team’s owner ever since. Born in 1950, Savitri Jindal married the founder of the power and steel conglomerate Jindal Group, O.P. Jindal, in 1965. After her husband died suddenly in a 2005 helicopter crash, Jindal took over the Jindal Group. Along with her sons—Naveen, Ratan, Sajjan, and Prithvi—Jindal inherited a stake in the conglomerate.

Fashion maven Anders Holch Povlsen’s fortune stems primarily from his nearly $4 billion (sales) retailer Bestseller.

Emmanuel Besnier is the controlling shareholder of family-held Lactalis, the world’s largest dairy conglomerate, with more than $30 billion in annual revenues. Germán Larrea Mota Velasco owns the majority of Mexico’s largest copper mining company, Grupo México, which also has operations in Perú and the U.S. Phil Knight, cofounder of shoe giant Nike, retired as chairman in 2016 after 52 years at the company. Jacqueline Mars owns an estimated one-third of Mars, the candy, food and pet care firm founded by her grandfather. Zhong Shanshan is the founder and chairman of Nongfu Spring, a bottled water company that listed its shares in Hong Kong in 2020. Jeff Yass is a cofounder of Susquehanna International Group, one of Wall Street’s largest and most successful trading firms.

Net Worth: $20.9 Billion Age: 92 Country/Territory: India Industry: Real Estate

• David Tepper, a hedge fund manager and investor, began his finance career by working at Goldman Sachs, Republic Steel, and Equibank.
• Andrey Melnichenko is the founder of fertilizer producer Eurochem and coal energy company SUEK.
• Born in 1940 in Wisconsin, John Menard Jr. founded the home improvement chain Menards in 1972.
• Phil Knight, cofounder of shoe giant Nike, retired as chairman in 2016 after 52 years at the company.

In June 2020, SoftBank announced it was launching a $100 million fund to invest in entrepreneurs of color. Stefan Quandt is the largest shareholder of German luxury carmaker BMW—a fortune he inherited from his father, Herbert Quandt, who rescued the company from bankruptcy and takeover in 1959. The younger Quandt is a deputy chairperson on BMW’s board and has separate business ventures in homeopathic medicine, logistics, and solar energy.

In 2014, the company came under criticism after a copper mine spill in Sonora contaminated the local water supply in what is considered the largest environmental spill in Mexico’s history. R. Budi Hartono, along with his brother Michael Hartono, is the co-owner of the cigarette maker Djarum Group. Their father, Oei Wei Gwan, started the business—and the sons who took over and modernized the company after its cigarette factory was nearly destroyed by fire and their father died in 1963.

Net Worth: $10.9 Billion Age: 70 Country/Territory: China Industry: Healthcare

• Besnier took over after his father’s death in 2000 and undertook several acquisitions to make Lactalis the third-largest dairy group in the world.
• To learn about the wealthiest people in the world, Stacker compiled net worth data from Forbes’ Billionaires List as of Nov. 9, 2022.
• Andrea Pignataro is the founder and CEO of ION Group, a London-based financial data and technology firm.
• Leonid Mikhelson is the founder and chairman of natural gas producer Novatek.
• Thomas Frist Jr., a former Air Force flight surgeon, founded Hospital Corp. of America with his father in 1968.

He also holds a large stake in a $27 billion oil production project in the Russian Arctic. In his free time, he heads KHL, Russia’s national hockey league, and is president of SKA Saint-Petersburg Hockey Club. Born in Armenia—which was then the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic—he lives in Geneva and counts himself a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Jan Koum cofounded WhatsApp, now the world’s biggest mobile messaging service, in 2009. Andreas “Andy” von Bechtolsheim is cofounder and chief architect of network switching company Arista Networks. Fracking pioneer Harold Hamm founded and chairs Continental Resources, one of the nation’s biggest independent oil companies. Born in Dalian, China, to Russian parents, he came to Australia as a teenager. Son of a horse breeder, Cyrus Poonawalla founded Serum Institute of India in 1966 and built it into the world’s largest vaccine maker (by doses).

He also works as the director of the Walton Family Foundation, which protects the environment and supports education. Jack Ma made his fortune with Alibaba Group, China’s giant e-commerce business. He is a major supporter of efforts to protect the environment, and left Alibaba’s chairmanship in 2019 to concentrate on philanthropy. David Tepper, a hedge fund manager and investor, began his finance career by working at Goldman Sachs, Republic Steel, and Equibank. In 1993, he struck out on his own and, with Jack Walton, founded Appaloosa Management L.P. Between 1994 and 2022, the value of the fund expanded from $300 million to $3.82 billion.

Net Worth: $18 Billion Age: 91 Country/Territory: United States Industry: Real Estate

Though he grew up in difficult circumstances, Hamm eventually became successful in the oil industry. In 1967, he established the oil company Continental Resources, where he was chief executive until the end of 2019. Additionally, Hamm co-founded the Domestic Energy Producers Alliance, of which he is chairman. He was a key donor to top 100 richest person in world Donald Trump’s presidential campaign efforts in 2016 and 2020. The wealth of Gennady Timchenko and his investment company Volga Group lies in his holdings in Novatek, a giant gas company, and Sibur Holding, a petrochemical manufacturer.

Japanese businessman Takemitsu Takizaki founded Keyence, which designs and develops electronic sensors, bar-code readers, and other components for automated factory systems. Takizaki stepped down from his position as chairman in 2015 but still serves as an honorary chairman. Before Keyence, he reportedly launched two businesses that went bankrupt, making him intent on keeping the sensor company debt-free. Wang Wei’s wealth lies in his share of more than 60% of SF Express, a package delivery service in China. Wang started his delivery career in 1993, illegally transporting packages in a minivan between Hong Kong and the mainland at a time when the Chinese postal service controlled all deliveries.

His investment company, Access Industries, also has holdings in the chemicals company LyondellBasell. Blavatnik was born in Ukraine, emigrated to the United States, and got an MBA from Harvard University before making his investments in the Soviet Union’s natural resource industries. After getting British citizenship, Blavatnik was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his philanthropy. After earning her bachelor of science and a medical degree, Israeli-born Miriam Adelson (née Farbstein) became a physician and married another physician, and they had two children together. They eventually divorced, and when Miriam was in the U.S. for an exchange program in 1986, she and businessman Sheldon Adelson met. They married five years later, by which time, he had purchased the Sands Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, and built The Venetian, a casino and resort hotel.

Industry: Automotive

Iris Fontbona is the widow of Andrónico Luksic, who built a fortune in mining and beverages before dying of cancer in 2005. Elaine Marshall owns an estimated 16% of $125 billion (sales) conglomerate Koch, Inc. (formerly Koch Industries) with her two sons. Alexey Mordashov is the majority shareholder in steel company Severstal, which he ran as CEO for 19 years before resigning in 2015. A former Caspian Sea oil rig worker, Vagit Alekperov became a deputy minister overseeing the oil industry in the Soviet Union. Indian IT pioneer Shiv Nadar cofounded HCL in a garage in 1976 to make calculators and microprocessors with five friends.

In November 2023, Zhao was charged in the U.S. with failure to maintain an anti-money laundering program, and was forced to step down as CEO. The rankings are published annually in March, so the net worths listed are snapshots taken at that time. There are thousands of billionaires on the Forbes list; the excerpts below show only the wealthiest 10 for each year. Forbes senior editor Chase Peterson-Withorn told Morning Edition the annual world’s billionaires list has $2 trillion more in wealth from just a year ago. The world’s billionaires are richer than ever, according to Forbes magazine’s annual list of the world’s wealthiest people. Garcia, had an especially notable jump in assets to $14.9 billion from $8.9 billion last year.

At SpaceX, Musk oversees the development of spacecraft, with plans for missions to orbit the earth and travel to other planets. He also launched The Boring Co. to design tunnel technology for use with an all-electric public transportation system. Musk was involved in creating PayPal and made $165 million when it was sold to eBay. Michael Bloomberg first made his money on Wall Street, where he worked for Salomon Brothers.

After studying commerce and marketing and starting his own water cooler company, Rodolphe Saadé joined his father, Jacques Saadé, at the company he led, Compagnie Maritime d’Affretement. Eventually, this company became CMA CGM, the third-largest shipping-container company in the world. The late Frank Mars founded Mars Inc. in 1911, and today his grandson John Mars holds one-third of the candy giant. After studying math and economics at SUNY Binghamton, Jeff Yass started options trading while studying at the business school at NYU.