Top 10 Richest People in the World 2023: Bernard Arnault

1. Bernard Arnault

Bernard Jean Étienne Arnault is a French business magnate, investor, and art collector. He is the founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of LVMH, Moët, Hennessy, Louis Vuitton, the world’s largest luxury goods company.

Bernard Arnault oversees the LVMH empire of 75 fashion and cosmetics brands, including Louis Vuitton and Sephora.

In January 2021, LVMH acquired American jeweler Tiffany & Co for $15.8 billion, believed to be the biggest luxury brand acquisition ever.

Arnault’s holding company Agache backs venture capital firm Aglaé Ventures, which has investments in companies such as TikTok parent ByteDance and Netflix.

His father made a small fortune in construction; Arnault got his start by putting up $15 million from that business to buy Christian Dior in 1984.

Arnault’s five children all work at LVMH; in July 2022, he proposed a reorganization of his holding company Agache to give them equal stakes.

Personal info

Age : 74

Net worth: 225.6 billion USD (2023) Forbes

Source of Wealth : LVMH

Residence : Paris, France

Citizenship : France

Marital Status : Married

Children : 5

Education : Bachelor of Arts/Science, Ecole Polytechnique de Paris

2. Elon Musk

Elon Reeve Musk FRS is a business magnate and investor. He is the founder, CEO and chief engineer of SpaceX; angel investor, CEO and product architect of Tesla, Inc.; owner and CEO of Twitter, Inc.; founder of the Boring Company; co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI; and president of the philanthropic Musk Foundation

Elon Musk cofounded six companies including electric car maker Tesla, rocket producer SpaceX and tunneling startup Boring Company.

He owns about 23% of Tesla between stock and options, but has pledged more than half his stock as collateral for loans.

SpaceX, founded in 2002, is worth $127 billion after a funding round in May 2022; it quadrupled its value in three years.

Boring Company, which aims to defeat traffic, raised $675 million in April 2022 at a $5.7 billion valuation.

Twitter’s board agreed to sell the company to Musk for $44 billion in April 2022, after he disclosed a 9.1% stake and threatened a hostile takeover.

The deal closed in October 2022 after Musk tried to back out and Twitter sued. Musk now owns an estimated 74% of the company.

Personal info

Age : 51

Net worth: 188.2 billion USD (2023) Forbes

Source of Wealth : Tesla, SpaceX

Residence : Austin, Texas

Citizenship : United States

Marital Status : Single

Children : 10

Education : Bachelor of Arts/Science, University of Pennsylvania

3. Jeff Bezos

Jeffrey Preston Bezos is an American entrepreneur, media proprietor, investor, and commercial astronaut. He is the founder, executive chairman, and former president and CEO of Amazon, the world’s largest e-commerce and cloud computing company. 

Jeff Bezos founded e-commerce giant Amazon in 1994 out of his garage in Seattle. He stepped down as CEO to become executive chairman in July 2021.

He now owns a bit less than 10% of the company.

He and his wife MacKenzie divorced in 2019 after 25 years of marriage and he transferred a quarter of his then-16% Amazon stake to her.

Bezos has donated more than $400 million worth of stock to nonprofits in 2022, though it’s unclear which organizations received those shares.

Bezos owns The Washington Post and Blue Origin, an aerospace company developing rockets; he briefly flew to space in one in July 2021.

Bezos said in a November 2022 interview with CNN that he plans to give away the majority of his wealth in his lifetime, without disclosing specific details.

Personal info

Age : 59

Net worth: 124.2 billion USD (2023) Forbes

Source of Wealth : Amazon

Residence : Medina, Washington

Citizenship : United States

Marital Status : In Relationship

Children : 4

Education : Bachelor of Arts/Science, Princeton University

4. Larry Ellison

Lawrence Joseph Ellison is an American business magnate and investor. He is the co-founder, executive chairman, chief technology officer and former chief executive officer of the American computer technology company Oracle Corporation.

Larry Ellison is chairman, chief technology officer and cofounder of software giant Oracle, of which he owns about 35%.

He gave up the Oracle CEO role in 2014 after 37 years at the helm.

Oracle has grown in part through steady acquisitions of software companies: the biggest was $28.3 billion for electronic health records company Cerner in 2021.

In 2020, Ellison moved permanently to the Hawaiian island Lanai, which he bought nearly all of in 2012 for $300 million.

Ellison sat on Tesla’s board from December 2018 to August 2022. He still owns about 15 million shares in the electric carmaker.

Personal info

Age : 78

Net worth : 119.4 billion USD (2023) Forbes

Source of Wealth : Oracle

Residence : Lanai, Hawaii

Citizenship : United States

Marital Status : In Relationship

Children : 4

Education : Drop Out, University of Chicago; Drop Out, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

5. Warren Buffett

Warren Edward Buffett is an American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. He is currently the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway.

Known as the “Oracle of Omaha,” Warren Buffett is one of the most successful investors of all time.

Buffett runs Berkshire Hathaway, which owns dozens of companies, including insurer Geico, battery maker Duracell and restaurant chain Dairy Queen.

The son of a U.S. congressman, he first bought stock at age 11 and first filed taxes at age 13.

He has promised to donate over 99% of his wealth. So far he has given more than $49 billion, mostly to the Gates Foundation and his kids’ foundations.

In 2010, he and Bill Gates launched the Giving Pledge, asking billionaires to commit to donating at least half of their wealth to charitable causes.

Personal info

Age : 92

Net worth : 108.2 billion USD (2023) Forbes

Source of Wealth : Berkshire Hathaway

Residence : Omaha, Nebraska

Citizenship : United States

Marital Status : Widowed, Remarried

Children : 3

Education : Master of Science, Columbia University; Bachelor of Arts/Science, University of Nebraska Lincoln

6. Bill Gates

William Henry Gates III is an American business magnate, philanthropist and investor. He is a co-founder of Microsoft, along with his late childhood friend Paul Allen.

Bill Gates turned his fortune from software firm Microsoft into diversified holdings including investments in zero-carbon energy.

In May 2021, Bill and Melinda Gates each announced on Twitter they were ending their marriage after 27 years. They still co-chair the charitable Gates Foundation.

Gates, who cofounded Microsoft with Paul Allen (d. 2018) in 1975, transferred at least $6 billion worth of shares in public companies to Melinda as part of the divorce settlement.

As of March 2020, when Gates stepped down from the Microsoft board, he owned about 1.3% of the software and computing company’s shares.

He has invested in dozens of companies including Republic Services and Deere & Co., and is one of the largest owners of farmland in the U.S.

To date, Gates has donated more than $59 billion to the Gates Foundation, including a $20 billion gift announced in July 2022. Most of his early donations were gifts of Microsoft stock.

Personal info

Age : 67

Source of Wealth : Microsoft

Net worth : 109.1 billion USD (2023) Forbes

Residence : Medina, Washington

Citizenship : United States

Marital Status : Divorced

Children : 3

Education : Drop Out, Harvard University

7. Michael Bloomberg

Michael Rubens Bloomberg is an American businessman, politician, philanthropist, and author. He is the majority owner, co-founder and CEO of Bloomberg L.P. He was Mayor of New York City from 2002 to 2013, and was a candidate for the 2020 Democratic nomination for President of the United States.

Michael Bloomberg cofounded financial information and media company Bloomberg LP in 1981.

He put in the seed funding for the company and now owns 88% of the business, which has estimated revenues north of $12 billion.

Bloomberg got his start on Wall Street in 1966 with an entry level job at investment bank Salomon Brothers. He was fired 15 years later.

A major philanthropist, he has donated more than $12.7 billion to gun control, climate change and other causes.

He announced a run for president in November 2019 (but dropped out in March 2020), and spent hundreds of millions to defeat Donald Trump in 2020.

The mayor of New York City for 12 years, Bloomberg is one of just four individuals to have served that long.

Personal info

Age : 81

Net worth : 94.5 billion USD (2023) Forbes

Source of Wealth : Bloomberg LP, Self Made

Residence : New York, New York

Citizenship : United States

Marital Status : In Relationship

Children : 2

Education : Master of Business Administration, Harvard Business School; Bachelor of Arts/Science, Johns Hopkins University.

8. Carlos Slim Helu & family

Carlos Slim Helú is a Mexican business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. From 2010 to 2013, Slim was ranked as the richest person in the world by the Forbes business magazine. He derived his fortune from his extensive holdings in a considerable number of Mexican companies through his conglomerate, Grupo Carso.

Mexico’s richest man, Carlos Slim Helu and his family control América Móvil, Latin America’s biggest mobile telecom firm.

With foreign telecom partners, Slim bought a stake in Telmex, Mexico’s only phone company, in 1990. Telmex is now part of América Móvil.

He also owns stakes in Mexican construction, consumer goods, mining and real estate companies. He used to own 17% of The New York Times, but sold it.

His son-in-law Fernando Romero designed the Soumaya Museum in Mexico City, home to Slim’s extensive, eclectic art collection.

Slim and his family hold a 79% stake of Grupo Carso, one of Latin America’s largest conglomerates, accounting for over 8% of his fortune.

Personal info

Age : 83

Net worth : $93.4B USD (2023) Forbes

Source of Wealth : Telecom

Residence : Mexico City, Mexico

Citizenship : Mexico

Marital Status : Widowed

Children : 6

Education : Bachelor of Arts/Science, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico.

9. Steve Ballmer

Steven Anthony Ballmer is an American businessman and investor who served as the chief executive officer of Microsoft from 2000 to 2014. He is the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers of the National Basketball Association.

Steve Ballmer is the high-wattage former CEO of Microsoft, who led the company from 2000 to 2014.

He joined Microsoft in 1980 as employee No. 30 after dropping out of Stanford’s MBA program.

Ballmer oversaw Microsoft after the first dot-com crash and through efforts to catch up to Google in search capabilities and Apple in mobile phones.

The same year he retired from Microsoft he bought the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers for $2 billion.

He has ramped up his philanthropy since 2014, putting over $2 billion into a donor-advised fund, with a focus on economic mobility.

In 2022, he and his wife Connie donated some $425 million to the University of Oregon to create an institute aimed at the behavioral and mental health needs of children in the state.

Personal info

Age : 67

Net worth : 89.8 billion USD (2023) Forbes

Source of Wealth : Microsoft

Residence : Hunts Point, Washington

Citizenship : United States

Marital Status : Married

Children : 3

Education : Bachelor of Arts/Science, Harvard University; Drop Out, Stanford University

10. Mukesh Ambani

Mukesh Dhirubhai Ambani is an Indian billionaire heir to the fortune of Reliance Industries. He is the eldest son of Dhirubhai Ambani and is currently the chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries, a Fortune Global 500 company and India’s most valuable company by market value. 

Mukesh Ambani chairs and runs $104 billion (revenue) Reliance Industries, which has interests in petrochemicals, oil and gas, telecom and retail.

Reliance was founded by his late father Dhirubhai Ambani, a yarn trader, in 1966 as a small textile manufacturer. After his father’s death in 2002, Ambani and his younger sibling Anil divvied up the family empire.

Reliance sparked a telecom price war with the launch of 4G phone and broadband service Jio in 2016. Today, it has more than 430 million subscribers and is rapidly rolling out 5G services.

Ambani is pivoting Reliance into green energy. The company will be investing $80 billion over the next 10-15 years on renewable energy and building a new complex next to its refinery.

Ambani has spelled out his succession plan: son Akash is now chairman of Reliance Jio; daughter Isha oversees retail and younger son Anant has been inducted into the new energy business.

Personal info

Age : 65

Net worth : 83.7 billion USD (2023) Forbes

Source of Wealth : Diversified

Residence : Mumbai, India

Citizenship : India

Marital Status : Married

Children : 3

Education : Drop Out, Stanford University; Bachelor of Science in Engineering, University of Mumbai.