The richest in the world are much richer than in 2000, most names have changed

• The world’s richest people have shuffled their ranks and seen their fortunes explode since 2000.
• Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison and Steve Ballmer occupied then and still occupy the top 20 places.
• Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg were not in the top 20 less than 25 years ago.

Compare the richest people on the planet today to those of a quarter of a century ago, and it’s striking how much fortunes have risen and how many names have changed.

Bill Gates topped Forbes’ ranking of the world’s richest people in 2000, the first list accessible via the Wayback Machine. The Microsoft co-founder’s net worth rose from $60 billion to $105 billion as of Tuesday’s close, giving him 15th place in the real-time rankings.

Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett, Walmart heir Rob Walton, Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and LVMH founder and CEO Bernard Arnault were also in the top 20 at the time and still do today.

But to maintain a spot in the top 20, they’ve had to get significantly richer since 2000. For example, Ellison’s net worth more than quadrupled, from $47 billion to $217 billion.

Buffett’s fortune has more than quintupled, from about $26 billion to $143 billion, although the investor has donated more than half of his Berkshire shares to good causes since 2006.

Walton and Dell’s fortunes more than quintupled, from around $20 billion to well over $100 billion.

Ballmer and Arnault saw even bigger gains, with their net worth increasing from about $16 billion and $13 billion each to $128 billion and $168 billion, respectively.

Meanwhile, SoftBank founder and CEO Masayoshi Son’s wealth only increased from about $19 billion to $30 billion, dropping him from eighth to 59th place.

Several others are no longer in the top 10. They include the late Gates co-founder Paul Allen; Theo and Karl Albrecht, the co-founder brothers of supermarket giant Aldi; Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Al Saud of Saudi Arabia; and newspaper magnate Kenneth Thompson.

On the other hand, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of Meta, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, co-founders of Alphabet, as well as Jensen Huang, founder and CEO from Nvidia, are now ranked in the top 10.

While a $20 billion fortune would have put someone firmly in the top 10 in 2000, a net worth of that magnitude barely cracks the top 100 today.

The 10 richest individuals were worth a combined $275 billion in 2000, about a seventh of their $2 trillion in total wealth as of Tuesday’s close. The 20 richest people were worth $406 billion then, a fraction of the $3 trillion they are worth today.

Musk alone is worth $454 billion today, surpassing the combined wealth of the top 20 in 2000.

The consistency between the two lists shows how companies such as Microsoft, Oracle, Berkshire Hathaway, Dell and Walmart have grown in value over the decades, allowing their major shareholders to maintain their top spot nearly a quarter of a century later .

But it also highlights how companies like Amazon, Alphabet, Tesla, Meta and Nvidia have skyrocketed in value and propelled their biggest backers into the top 10.