“The 500 richest people in the world significantly increased their fortunes in 2024, with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang leading the list of billionaires, who helped reach a new milestone β a total net worth of $10 trillion.β, β write: epravda.com.ua
The 500 richest people in the world significantly increased their fortunes in 2024, with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang leading the list of billionaires, who helped reach a new milestone β a total net worth of $10 trillion. This is reported by the Bloomberg agency. The rise of the shares of American technology companies has been a key factor that has increased the fortunes of this trio, as well as entrepreneurs such as Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. These eight tech giants alone increased their fortunes by more than $600 billion this year β 43% of the $1.5 trillion total increase among the 500 richest people tracked by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Advertisement: However, Musk led the way β yes the so-called “first friend” of President-elect Donald Trump, who provided unprecedented support for his re-election. Musk’s close relationship with the future president has boosted the value of his companies, including Tesla Inc., SpaceX and xAI. This raised his fortune to an unprecedented $442.1 billion β $213 billion more than at the beginning of the year. The $237 billion gap between him and Bezos as of Dec. 17 was the largest ever between the No. 1 and No. 2 on Bloomberg’s rankings.Advertisement: Overall, the world’s richest people benefited from a stock market that beat expectations in 2024. The S&P 500 rallied 24% through Monday thanks to a small group of stocks known as the Wonder Seven, which includes Musk’s Tesla, Zuckerberg’s Meta and Huang’s Nvidia. They provided more than half of the index’s return. The total value of wealth tracked by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index was $9.8 trillion at the close on Monday, down slightly from a peak of $10.1 trillion on Dec. 11 due to the post-Christmas sell-off. These fortunes are comparable in size to the combined GDP of Germany, Japan and Australia last year, according to World Bank data.