Forbes released its annual World's Billionaires List this week, and it's the biggest one yet. The ranking now includes a record 3,428 entrepreneurs, investors, and heirs who together hold an unprecedented $20.1 trillion in wealth, up $4 trillion from last year. The United States leads the pack with 989 billionaires, and nearly 30 of them have ties to Massachusetts.
Recent campaign finance reports show Mahan has raised more than $2 million, though he has touted raising a total of $7 million so far on social media. Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale and YCombinator CEO Garry Tan are among the Silicon Valley elite who maxed out their legally-allowed contributions - $78,400 each - into Mahan's governor campaign in January. David Baszucki, the billionaire CEO of the gaming platform Roblox, and his wife Jan gave a combined $156,800 to Mahan's campaign, records show.
Initially, everybody I asked in the city was certain that this was satire, perhaps the workings of Sacha Baron Cohen or a stunt by union activists; after all, the website also lauds the value created by James Dyson, Roger Federer, and the CEO of Chobani (for having "popularized Greek yogurt"). I was reminded of how several years ago, the faux-conspiracists of the Birds Aren't Real movement rallied outside Twitter's headquarters to critique dangerous social-media rabbit holes.
When it comes to the world's richest billionaires, tech founders litter the top of the list. AI has been heralded as a multi-trillion-dollar industry, catapulting many founders to extreme wealth; but now AI bubble fears and doubts over valuations have led to billions erased from CEOs' net worths overnight. For Larry Ellison, whose net worth has been hardest hit, that looks like a $59.2 billion loss since the year started-and we're only in February.
What we don't give credit to [are] these extremely successful entrepreneurs that create hundreds of 1000's of jobs in America...if not millions,
According to Oxfam International's "Resisting the Rule of the Rich: Protecting Freedom from Billionaire Power" report this week, a billionaire boom has coincided with the rise of the richest exerting political influence, with billionaires 4,000 times more likely to hold office than less wealthy people globally. And if those billionaires aren't running for office, they're pouring money into campaigns. Per Oxfam, one in six dollars spent by all U.S. candidates, parties, and committees in the 2024 elections came from 100 billionaire families.
The world's richest individuals accumulated a record $2.2 trillion (£1.7 trillion) in additional wealth during 2025, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with just eight billionaires accounting for around a quarter of the gains. The surge pushed the combined net worth of the world's 500 wealthiest people to $11.9 trillion, fuelled by booming equity markets, a rally in cryptocurrencies and metals, and renewed investor optimism following Donald Trump's election victory in 2024.
In many historic calculations of net worth, individual fortunes weren't measured in isolation; instead, they were compared to the GDP of the US at the time. When the US economy was much smaller than it is today, the wealthiest families and individuals carried more weight in the economy than others during more prosperous times. One of the richest Americans of all time is widely considered to be Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller, whose wealth, at its peak in 1937, was equal to 1.5% of the country's GDP.
On Wednesday, shares of MetaX Integrated Circuits Shanghai - a GPU startup founded by former AMD executives - skyrocketed as much as 755% on their first day of trading on the Shanghai Stock Exchange's tech-focused STAR Market, before closing up about 700%. The surge catapulted its chairman and cofounder, Chen Weiliang, into one of China's fastest-rising tech moguls. Chen's stake in MetaX is worth about $6.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The Alphabet cofounders have respectively grown $66 billion and $60.7 billion richer in just under 10 months, outpacing Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's $56.8 billion gain and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's $51.9 billion gain. The pair only trail Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison's $150 billion increase. Page and Brin are now worth $234 billion and $219 billion each, ranking them fifth and sixth on Bloomberg's rich list - not far behind Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in fourth with a $250 billion fortune.
The world's 10 wealthiest people have added a remarkable $523 billion to their fortunes this year, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index shows. Mastercard, Exxon Mobil, and Netflix are all worth less than that; their market values were between $460 billion and $520 billion at Monday's close. Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison has notched the biggest wealth gain so far this year with a $150 billion increase in net worth, to $343 billion.
