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A billionaire is a person whose net worth is at least one billion units of a given currency, typically USD. It is a sub-category of the concept of the ultra high-net-worth individual. The American business magazine Forbes produces a global list of known U.S. dollar billionaires every year and updates an internet version of this list in real time. The American oil magnate John D. Rockefeller became the world's first confirmed billionaire in 1916.
Nineteen individuals had attained the status of Centibillionaire, each with a net worth of at least $100 billion, as of October 2025. there are 3028 billionaires worldwide, with a combined wealth of over $16.1 trillion, up nearly $2 trillion over 2024.
The majority of billionaires are male, as fewer than 11% (197 of 1,826) on the 2015 list were female billionaires. The United States has the largest number of billionaires of any country, with 536 , while China, India and Russia are home to 213, 90 and 88 billionaires, respectively. , only 46 billionaires were under the age of 40, while the list of American-only billionaires, as of 2010, had an average age of 66.
Different authorities use different methodologies to determine net worth and to rank them, and not all information about personal finances is publicly available. In 2019, Forbes counted a record 607 billionaires in the U.S. Over the course of the 2020s, depending on the source and the year, the world's richest person has been reckoned to be Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault and family, or Elon Musk.
From 2014 to 2019, the number of female billionaires grew by 46%. That is more than the number of male billionaires in the same period (39%). As of 2019 there were 233 female billionaires in the world, compared to 160 in 2013.
There is also a substantial correlation between top university education and billionaire status. The top 10 universities in the United States produced 99 of the top 400 billionaires in 2018, which makes these schools overrepresented among billionaires compared with the general population. For example, 10 billionaires (or 4%) had graduated from Harvard University, while Harvard graduates only make up 0.2% of the general population of adults in the United States; in other words, a billionaire from the Forbes 400 list that year was 20 times more likely to have gone to Harvard than a non-billionaire.
Billionaires come from a wide range of fields of study and initial employment. The most common field of university education for billionaires was finance and economics, which contributed to a combined 15.5% of billionaire educations, a similar proportion to the general US population. Very few college-educated billionaires pursued business interests in their field of study, with the exception of computer science majors. All twelve of the computer science major billionaires worked in computer science, while only half of engineers worked in engineering, and less than a quarter of finance and economics majors ever worked in finance or economics. The most common field for billionaires to enter for their first job was sales and military service. Military service produced 21 billionaires.
Education and work experience
Billionaires come from a very wide variety of backgrounds. College education is not universal among billionaires, as almost 30% of billionaires around the world in 2015 did not have a college degree of any kind. But this shows substantial correlation between education and success. More than 70% of these billionaires have some kind of college degree, while in the general US population only 38% have a college degree,, and in the general world population less than 10% of people have a college degree.
Inequality
Between 2010 and 2015 the wealth of the richest 62 people among the World's Billionaires increased by $500 bn (£350 bn) to $1.76 tn. More recently, in 2017, an Oxfam report noted that just eight billionaires have as much net worth as "half the human race". However, the Oxfam report has been criticized for considering debt as negative wealth, which leads to wealthy people with large amounts of debt being considered poor or not wealthy.
Statistics
These aggregated statistics for billionaires include the total number of known billionaires and the net worth of the world's wealthiest individual for each year since 2008. Data for each year is from the annual Forbes list of billionaires, with currency figures given in U.S. dollars. Data since 2018 also includes the Wealth-X billionaire census which typically finds higher numbers than Forbes.
2024 2,781 $14.2 trillion 813 473 200 Bernard Arnault & family $233 billion 2022 2,668 $9.562 trillion 735 539 166 134 83 Elon Musk $219 billion 2021 2,755 $10.016 trillion 724 626 140 136 117 Elon Musk $320 billion 2020 2,095 $10.2 trillion 614 389 102 99 Jeff Bezos $188 billion 82–106 Jeff Bezos $131 billion 117–119 $133 billion 101 Jeff Bezos $99.6 billion 90 75 Bill Gates $75 billion 88 $79.2 billion 56 $78 billion – $73 billion – $73 billion – $74 billion – $53.5 billion – $40 billion – $62 billion
See also
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