The World's Billionaires
annual ranking by net worth by Forbes magazine
The World's Billionaires is an annual ranking by the American business magazine Forbes of people who are billionaires, i.e., they are estimated to have a net worth of US$1 billion or more. The list was first published in March 1987. The net worth of each individual is cited in United States dollars, based on their documented assets, and accounting for debt and other factors. This ranking excludes royalty and dictators whose wealth comes from their positions, as well as people whose wealth is not able to be completely ascertained.
In 2018, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was first ranked at the top and became the first centibillionaire included in the ranking, surpassing Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who had topped the list 18 of the previous 24 years. In 2022, Bezos was surpassed by Elon Musk. In 2023, Musk was surpassed by French businessman Bernard Arnault, the first French person to top the list. In 2025 and 2026, Musk once again topped the list.
Methodology
Each year, Forbes employs a team of over 50 reporters from a variety of countries to track the activity of the world's wealthiest individuals and sometimes groups or families – who share wealth. Preliminary surveys are sent to those who may qualify for the list.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q493078. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1987, 2018, 2022 and 2023.
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This entry incorporates text from “The World's Billionaires” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.