Tech Billionaires Gained a Record $845 Billion This Year. Everyone Else on the Rich List Lost Money

NEW YORK

The AI boom has a winner, and it isn't even close. Every dollar of net new billionaire wealth created this year came from technology. Everyone else on the rich list went backward.

That's the verdict from the relaunched Bloomberg Billionaires Index, whose first-nine-months numbers landed this week and got the full weekend-show treatment on Bloomberg This Weekend on October 11, where Bloomberg's Robert Sloan walked through the data with David Gura and Christina Ruffini. The roughly 100 technology fortunes among the world's 500 richest people gained a combined $845 billion through September 30 — the most ever for the first nine months of a year, according to the index. Fueling it, per Bloomberg's write-up by Dylan Sloan and Jack Witzig: the artificial intelligence boom and soaring technology stocks, particularly in the U.S.

Let that sink in. Tech billionaires — about a fifth of the index's members — now control $4.6 trillion, or 36% of all the wealth Bloomberg tracks. And the divergence is genuinely startling: billionaires whose money came from outside technology didn't grow more slowly. They lost a combined $62 billion. The AI boom isn't lifting all boats this year. It's lifting about a hundred of them and letting the rest take on water.

The most American rich list in history

The geography of the gains is as lopsided as the sector split. Americans accounted for 94% of the index's net gains this year, Bloomberg found — and since September 10, all ten of the world's richest people have been from the United States, the first time that's happened since Bloomberg began tracking billionaires in 2012. Nine of the world's ten wealthiest people now owe their fortunes to American tech firms.

Then there's the concentration within the concentration. Elon Musk, the world's richest person, added $310 billion to his fortune through the end of September — roughly 40% of the entire index's increase, by himself. He briefly became the world's first trillionaire after SpaceX merged with his artificial intelligence company, xAI, and went public in June. One man. Forty percent of all the new billionaire money on Earth. Read that twice.

The supporting cast tells the same story in miniature. Dell Technologies founder Michael Dell saw his wealth jump 81% to $254 billion as the company's data-center sales business ballooned on AI demand. Mark Zuckerberg added $23 billion as Meta shares gained 27% in September — their best month in almost four years — after the company rolled out its new Muse personal AI assistant.

The boom goes down the supply chain

What makes 2026 different from earlier AI wealth waves is how far down the supply chain the money is reaching. Bloomberg's roster of new entrants reads like a bill of materials for the AI buildout. All seven of Anthropic's co-founders joined the wealth list in June after a funding round valued the company at $965 billion. Founders of Chinese firms joined too, including MiniMax's Yan Junjie and DeepSeek's Liang Wenfeng, as China's push for technology independence mints its own AI fortunes.

And then there are the names you'd never guess. Lin Tsung-chi, founder of King Slide — a Taiwanese maker of server rails and cable management systems for data centers — emerged with a $9.5 billion fortune this year, four decades after starting the company. Wang Xin, chair of Guangdong Dtech Technology, joined the index because AI created demand for the specialized drill bits her company makes to assemble circuit boards. Two heirs of Samsung's Lee family — Boo-jin and Seo-hyun — joined on memory-chip demand, with the stock uptick helping the family pay back an $8 billion inheritance tax. TSMC founder Morris Chang and MediaTek's Tsai Ming-kai made the list too. When the drill-bit lady is a billionaire, the boom has officially reached the bottom of the stack.

Our newsroom has been tracking the money sloshing around this buildout — the chip-stock surge and the vendor-financing deals funding it — and the Bloomberg numbers put the scale in perspective: this isn't a stock rally. It's a restructuring of who owns the future's wealth.

Cracks in the marble

But Bloomberg's own reporting includes the counter-narrative, and it's worth reading carefully. The world's 500 richest people hit a peak of $13.4 trillion in combined wealth in mid-June — and have since fallen 6% to $12.6 trillion amid a broader market slowdown and growing doubts about some of the biggest AI names. The historic debt binge fueling Big Tech's AI ambitions is making some investors uneasy, Bloomberg's Dylan Sloan and Jack Witzig wrote.

The cautionary tale is Larry Ellison. A year ago he briefly became the world's richest person, gaining $89 billion in a single day on Oracle's AI-linked cloud story. A year later, his net worth has fallen $196 billion, while Oracle's credit-default swaps trade near record highs as investors balk at the massive borrowing needed to fund its AI infrastructure buildout. The same leverage that mints trillionaires can unmake hundred-billionaires in twelve months.

The political pressure is building, too. The surge in billionaire wealth has fueled calls for higher taxes on the ultra-rich: California voters will decide in November whether to levy a wealth tax on the state's billionaires, while Washington, New York, Illinois and Rhode Island have also discussed new taxes on wealthy residents, per Bloomberg. And the demographics are shifting the old narrative. "We talk a lot about the great wealth transfer — but for the top 100 or 1,000 richest, some may be old and own rather traditional businesses, but a lot of them are young tech entrepreneurs," said James Mazeau, an economist at UBS Group's chief investment office, in Bloomberg's report. "I wonder to what extent that will fuel more wealth concentration."

More from the newsroom: the AI chip-stock surge · the vendor-financing debt fears · OpenAI's revenue report and Friday's AI selloff