Tech billionaires added a record $845 billion to their wealth in 2026

About a hundred technology billionaires increased their fortunes by $845 billion in the first nine months of 2026 — the biggest jump on record, according to analysts behind Bloomberg's Billionaires Index. The combined wealth of these tech moguls reached $4.6 trillion: they make up just a fifth of the people on the list of the world's 500 richest, yet control 36% of its total wealth.

The gap with other billionaires is enormous. Those who made their fortunes outside the tech sector lost a combined $62 billion over the same period, while Americans accounted for 94% of the index's total net gain. Since September 10, all ten of the world's richest people have been US citizens — the first time that has happened since 2012, when Bloomberg began compiling the ranking.

Musk accounts for almost half of the entire gain

The main beneficiary of this surge is Elon Musk, the world's richest person: by the end of September his fortune had grown by $310 billion, almost 40% of the index's entire increase. After SpaceX's June merger with his AI company xAI and the subsequent stock listing, Musk briefly even became the world's first trillionaire.

Nine of the world's ten richest people owe their fortunes to American tech companies. Dell Technologies founder Michael Dell's wealth grew by 81% to $254 billion, driven by a sharp rise in sales of data-center hardware. Mark Zuckerberg added $23 billion to his fortune: Meta Platforms shares jumped 27% in September after the unveiling of its new AI assistant Muse — the company's best month in nearly four years.

Calls to tax the rich are growing louder

The combined wealth of the world's 500 richest people peaked in mid-June at $13.4 trillion. Since then, amid a broader market slowdown and growing doubts about some of the biggest names in AI, it has fallen by 6% to $12.6 trillion.

The huge debts that big tech companies are taking on to fund their AI ambitions are worrying some investors. In September 2025, Larry Ellison briefly became the world's richest person, earning $89 billion in a single day after Oracle announced a sharp rise in its AI cloud-infrastructure business. A year later, Ellison's fortune had dropped by $196 billion, and Oracle's credit-default swaps are trading near record highs as investors worry about the huge debt needed to build AI infrastructure.

The sharp rise in billionaires' wealth is fueling calls to raise taxes on the ultra-rich. In November, California voters will decide whether to introduce a wealth tax on the state's billionaires, while Washington, New York, Illinois and Rhode Island are debating similar taxes on their wealthiest residents.

The increasingly young makeup of the ultra-rich, with a growing share of tech entrepreneurs among them, is casting doubt on the idea that the next great transfer of wealth will mainly involve an aging generation of baby boomers passing fortunes to their heirs. “People talk about the so-called great wealth transfer very often. But if you look at the hundred or thousand richest people in the world, there are indeed older owners of traditional companies among them, but a significant share are young tech entrepreneurs,” explains James Mazo, an economist at UBS's investment division. “The question is how much further this process will concentrate wealth.”

New fortunes are emerging outside AI too

While most of the money from the AI boom has so far gone to the heads of major tech corporations, newcomers to the Bloomberg ranking show that this growth is also creating huge fortunes among startup founders and AI infrastructure suppliers.

All seven co-founders of Anthropic joined the list of the wealthiest in June, after the AI company closed a funding round that valued it at $965 billion. The list also gained founders of Chinese companies, including Yan Junjie of MiniMax Group and Liang Wenfeng of DeepSeek.

The AI boom has also enriched companies that supply hardware and technical infrastructure for AI. Lin Zongqi, founder of Taiwan's King Slide, which makes server rails and cable-management systems for data centers, earned $9.5 billion forty years after founding the company. Wang Xin, chairwoman of Guangdong Dtech Technology, joined the billionaires' ranking after the AI boom drove up demand for the specialized drill bits her company makes for mounting printed circuit boards.

Thanks to strong demand for memory chips, two heiresses of the Lee family behind Samsung Electronics also made the list. The rise in Samsung's share price helped the family pay an $8 billion inheritance tax bill after the death of former chairman Lee Kun-hee in 2020. In Taiwan, this year's exclusive club also gained chip designer Tsai Ming-kai of MediaTek and Morris Chang, founder of chip giant TSMC.

China's drive for technological self-sufficiency and its rivalry with the US for leadership in AI have also brought new names into the ranking — Zou Zhinong and family of Suzhou TFC Optical Communication, and Yuan Fugen of Suzhou Dongshan Precision Manufacturing.

Czechs in the ranking

Among the Czech entrants, Renáta Kellnerová and her family took first place: Bloomberg analysts put her fortune at $17.8 billion, or nearly 389 billion koruna. The co-owners of the PPF group added $1.76 billion over the year and ranked 151st on the overall list.

Three places lower, with a fortune of $17.6 billion (384.2 billion koruna), is Michal Strnad, the main owner of the CSG group, who added $1.29 billion over the year. Daniel Křetínský ranked 291st in the world with a fortune of $12.1 billion (264.2 billion koruna). The last Czech on the list is KKCG owner Karel Komárek, whose fortune Bloomberg estimated at $9.13 billion — nearly 200 billion koruna.

Source: seznamzpravy.cz