A.I. Boom: Only Tech Billionaires Got Richer This Year

If you were a tech billionaire in 2026, the year has been kind. If you weren’t, not so much. Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index says the world’s tech fortunes gained a combined $845 billion in the first nine months of the year, the biggest jump ever for that stretch. Everyone else on the billionaire list lost $62 billion.

The scale is lopsided enough to feel almost cartoonish. About 100 tech fortunes now total $4.6 trillion, which is 36 percent of the wealth held by the world’s 500 richest people. Tech entrepreneurs are only about a fifth of that group. Nine of the 10 richest people now owe their wealth to U.S. tech companies.

Elon Musk is the standout, because of course he is. His net worth rose by $310 billion from January through September, which the report says was roughly 40 percent of the total gain across the top 500. After the merger of SpaceX with xAI and the SpaceX IPO, Musk briefly became the first trillionaire in history. Michael Dell also kept climbing as the data center business boomed, with his fortune up 81 percent to $254 billion. Mark Zuckerberg picked up $23 billion after Meta’s stock jumped 27 percent in September, helped by the launch of its AI assistant Muse. Even the supply chain is minting new names, like Taiwanese server supplier King Slide, whose founder Lin Tsung-chi has entered the billionaire club.

But the AI trade has not made everyone richer. Larry Ellison, Oracle’s founder, has lost $196 billion within a year after briefly becoming the world’s richest person in September 2025. Investors are uneasy about Oracle’s debt-fueled AI spending, and the cost of credit default swaps on its bonds is near a record high. Earlier this year, that pressure helped push Oracle to cut thousands of jobs.

The broader billionaire class has already cooled off. The 500 richest people peaked at $13.4 trillion in mid-June and have since slipped 6 percent to $12.6 trillion. That makes the political response harder to ignore. California voters will decide in November on a billionaire wealth tax, while Washington, New York, Illinois and Rhode Island have also debated versions of it.