A lot has changed since 2016, the year that “Stranger Things” debuted on Netflix, Leonardo DiCaprio finally won an Oscar, and the Pokémon GO craze spurred players to break into zoos and wander onto military bases to catch virtual critters.
As millennial nostalgia for 2016 floods the internet, Business Insider took a look at how the world’s wealthiest people have fared over the past decade. The striking trend: the rich getting much, much richer.
The world’s 10 wealthiest people were worth a combined $559 billion at the end of 2015, per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. They’re now worth nearly five times as much at $2.6 trillion, with Elon Musk alone worth $682 billion as of Thursday’s close.
The names at the top of the rich list haven’t changed much. Bill Gates, Amancio Ortega, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Carlos Slim, Charles Koch, David Koch, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, and Larry Ellison made up the top 10 going into 2016.
All of them rank in the top 25 today except the late David Koch; his widow, Julia Flesher Koch, and her family now hold the 22nd spot in his stead.
Musk is the most notable addition, as the Tesla and SpaceX CEO is easily the world’s richest person today. Page and his Alphabet cofounder, Sergey Brin, rank second and third with fortunes exceeding $250 billion each.
Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chairman, sits in fourth once again with a $260 billion net worth. He’s followed by Oracle and Meta’s respective cofounders, Ellison and Zuckerberg, worth $242 billion and $220 billion, respectively.
LVMH founder and CEO Bernard Arnault, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang, and Buffett round out the current top 10 with fortunes ranging from $148 billion to $200 billion.
Movers and shakers
Inditex founder Ortega has tumbled from second to 15th place over the past decade, despite his net worth nearly doubling from $73 billion to $133 billion, as tech fortunes have grown even faster in recent years.
Similarly, telecoms mogul Carlos Slim has dropped from fifth to 16th place, and industrialist Charles Koch has fallen from sixth to 24th.
Gates, who led the wealth charts a decade ago, has sunk to 17th place largely because of his charitable giving. He and his ex-wife, Melinda French Gates, have donated over $60 billion to the Gates Foundation as of the end of 2024, its website shows.
The Microsoft cofounder pegged his personal fortune at $108 billion last May and pledged to give away 99% of it by 2045.
It’s a similar story for Buffett, who’s fallen from third to 10th largely because he’s given away more than half of his Berkshire Hathaway stock.
The investor said last November that he’d like his three children, now in their 60s and 70s, to disburse virtually all of his wealth in their lifetimes.
The most notable difference in today’s rankings versus a decade ago is the size of the personal fortunes listed. The top 10 net worths ranged from about $40 billion to $84 billion then, whereas now they range from $148 billion to $682 billion.
Put another way, the world’s wealthiest individual today is 8 times richer on paper than the richest person on the planet was a decade ago.
Musk, in particular, has grown so wealthy because he owns large stakes in several of the world’s most valuable companies.
Adjusted for stock splits, Tesla shares have soared about 27-fold over the past decade, valuing the EV maker at around $1.5 trillion. SpaceX’s private valuation has rocketed to $800 billion as of December, and xAI was valued at around $230 billion this month.
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