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America’s billionaires enjoyed a stellar 2024, with their combined net worth rising by hundreds of billions of dollars due to a continued boom in the tech sector.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which ranks the world’s richest individuals daily, nine of the 10 individuals who saw the biggest growth in their wealth since January are U.S. citizens.
Elon Muskthe South African-born CEO of SpaceX, TeslaAnd X (formerly Twitter), saw his fortune skyrocket by a whopping $222 billion, reaching a total of $451 billion as of December 24. His shares in Tesla, which make up a significant portion of his total fortune, have grown by 81 percent in the same period.
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Mandel Ngan and Alain Jocard/AFP via Getty Images
All in all, the ten centibillionaires, including the eternal leaders Mark Zuckerberg And Jeff Bezos– adding another $730 billion to their combined net worth by 2024, a few billion less than Taiwan’s GDP.
Why it matters
The staggering accumulation of wealth, boosted in early November by the re-election of Donald Trump and a rise in US stock prices shed light on the dynamics of US economic inequality and its broader implications.
These debates had already been fueled by the consequences of inflation and wage stagnation suffered by the American middle and working class, and such high rates have been recorded in the past led to calls for higher taxes about the super-rich, as well as studies of the influence of money in the American political system.
What you need to know
The people on Bloomberg’s list, ranked by increase in their wealth over the past 12 months, are: Elon Musk (+$222 billion), Mark Zuckerberg (+$84 billion), Nvidia founder Jensen Huang (+$77, 9 billion), Jeff Bezos (+$67 billion), Larry Ellison (+$67 billion), Michael Dell (+$46.6 billion), Larry Page ($46.1 billion), Sergey Brin (+$42.2 billion) billion), and Walmart heirs Jim (+$39.6 billion) and Alice Walton (+$39.0 billion).
The nature of the billionaires on Bloomberg’s list also highlights the outsized and growing impact of technology on today’s global economy, with almost all billionaires deriving their wealth from owning companies in this sector.
The global reach of communications technologies and the high scalability of companies engaged in cutting-edge technology means that companies at the forefront of digital transformation are poised to reap even greater rewards, giving today’s billionaires even greater fortunes in the future are promised.
Developments continued at the other end of the spectrum recession in the luxury goods sector has seen many well-known billionaires lose significant portions of their wealth.
Bernard Arnault, the founder and CEO of LVMH, who once held the title of richest person in the world, saw his wealth decrease by $32 billion by 2024. Arnault is followed by Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, businesswoman and heiress to the L’Oréal fortune, whose net worth has fallen by $25.6 billion so far this year.
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What people say
Peter OppenheimerChief Global Equity Strategist and Head of Macro Research in Europe at Goldman Sachs, spoke to Financial Outlet Boring money on the future of the technology boom: “The driving forces behind this success reflect their ability to leverage software and cloud computing and to drive the high profitability generated by the extraordinary growth in demand. But their more recent rise in performance since 2022 is in large part due to the hopes and ambitions around AI.”
What happens next?
Some analysts have compared the tech boom to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and early 2000s, warning that it too could burst, impacting those who hedged their fortunes on the transformative power of AI.
For now, however, technology appears to have led to an unprecedented rise in the net worth of those at the top, leading to levels of individual prosperity. never seen before in history.
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