Tech billionaires get $845 billion richer, the rest lose money

Anyone who is a billionaire this year and has built up their wealth in technology is on the right side of a striking dichotomy. The AI boom and the strong performance of US tech stocks have enriched the world's richest tech entrepreneurs by hundreds of billions of dollars.

Outside the technology sector, the picture is completely different. That's where billionaires saw their combined wealth fall. The gap shows how strongly the current capital growth at the absolute world top has become dependent on American technology and artificial intelligence.

About one hundred technology billionaires within the Bloomberg Billionaires Index saw their combined wealth increase by $845 billion in the first nine months of 2026. According to Bloomberg, this is the largest capital growth ever measured over the first nine months of a year.

Together, these technology billionaires now own about $4.6 trillion. With this, they control 36 percent of all wealth within the list of the five hundred richest people in the world, while representing only about a fifth of the people on the list.

The development is in stark contrast to the rest of the billionaires. The super-rich, who made their fortunes outside the technology sector, collectively lost about $62 billion.

Especially American billionaires benefit. They accounted for as much as 94 percent of the total wealth growth within the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

As of September 10, even the entire top ten richest people in the world are Americans. According to Bloomberg, this is the first time since the billionaires list was launched in 2012.

The enormous growth in capital is strongly linked to the advance of artificial intelligence. Nine out of ten richest people in the world now owe their fortunes largely to American technology companies.

One of the biggest winners is Elon Musk. His wealth grew by about 310 billion dollars until the end of September. With that, Musk was only responsible for almost forty percent of the total wealth growth within the billionaires list.

Musk even briefly became the first person in the world with a net worth of more than a trillion dollars in June. That happened after space company SpaceX merged with its AI company xAI and then went public.

Michael Dell also benefits greatly from the AI tree. His net worth rose 81 percent this year to $254 billion. Dell benefits from the huge demand for data center equipment needed to train and run ever larger AI models.

Mark Zuckerberg also became richer. His fortune increased by about $23 billion. Meta shares rose 27 percent in September alone, the best month for the share in almost four years. The increase followed, among other things, the introduction of Muse, a personal AI assistant of Meta.

Meanwhile, the AI wave is also creating entirely new billionaires. All seven co-founders of Anthropic joined the billionaire list in June after a funding round valued the AI company at $965 billion.

New fortunes are also emerging outside the United States. Chinese entrepreneurs Yan Junjie of MiniMax and Liang Wenfeng of DeepSeek are now among the new billionaires benefiting from the global investment wave around AI.

It's not just creators of AI models who make money from it. Entrepreneurs behind data centers, chips and other infrastructure are also getting richer. For example, King Slide founder Lin Tsung-chi's fortune grew to about $9.5 billion. His Taiwanese company makes parts for servers and data centers.

Several entrepreneurs from the chip industry were also on the billionaire list this year, including MediaTek CEO Tsai Ming-kai and TSMC founder Morris Chang. In South Korea, Samsung heirs Lee Boo-jin and Lee Seo-hyun benefited from the rising demand for memory chips.

Nevertheless, the advance is not without risk. The combined wealth of the world's five hundred richest people reached a record $13.4 trillion in mid-June. After that, it fell by about six percent to $12.6 trillion.

An economic slowdown and increasing doubts about the huge investments in artificial intelligence are putting pressure on technology stocks.

Larry Ellison shows how quickly sentiment can change. Oracle's founder was briefly the richest person in the world in September 2025. His net worth rose by about $89 billion in one day at the time after Oracle presented strong growth expectations for its AI business.

A year later, the picture is completely different. Ellison's assets have declined by approximately $196 billion. At the same time, the cost of insuring Oracle debt against default has risen to near record levels. Investors are concerned about the large amount of money the company needs to borrow for new AI infrastructure.

The explosive growth in wealth also causes a political discussion about wealth inequality. In California, residents will vote on a possible tax on the wealth of billionaires in November. Proposals to tax extremely large assets more heavily have also been discussed in Washington, New York, Illinois and Rhode Island.

UBS economist James Mazeau points out that the composition of the very richest group is changing. Whereas in the past, large assets were more often linked to traditional companies and old family capital, the absolute top increasingly consists of relatively young technology entrepreneurs. According to him, this raises the question of to what extent the development will ultimately lead to even more concentration of wealth.