The 2023 Forbes 400 List Of Richest Americans: Facts And Figures
It’s a good year to be a member of The Forbes 400. As a group, the richest people in America are $500 billion richer than a year ago, aided by rebounding stock markets and an AI-driven tech boom. They now hold $4.5 trillion in wealth, tying a record set in 2021.
It takes $2.9 billion to make the cut, up from $2.7 billion a year ago, also tying for the highest ever. Forbes calculated net worths using stock prices from September 8, 2023.
Elon Musk again tops the list, worth an estimated $251 billion—the exact same as last year, despite a wild 12 months that included him being forced to buy Twitter for far more than it was worth, watching Tesla stock crater, getting into internet spats with the likes of the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and the foreign minister of Taiwan, challenging Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight—then adding tens of billions to his fortune as Tesla stock came roaring back. Musk is $90 billion wealthier than No. 2 Jeff Bezos and $93 billion ahead of No. 3 Larry Ellison, who added more dollars to his net worth than anyone in America over the past year, some $57 billion, largely thanks to the generative artificial intelligence craze helping push up shares of his software firm, Oracle.
Ellison wasn’t the only one to get an AI bump. As a group, the tech tycoons on The Forbes 400 are some $300 billion richer than in 2022—accounting for around half of the entire list’s jump in wealth. Shares of Michael Dell’s Dell Technologies are up 87% amid demand for servers from AI companies. Alphabet is up 26% this year, mainly since the Google parent company announced a suite of AI tools in May, helping boost the fortunes of cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Microsoft, which has made a big bet on AI, including owning a stake in ChatGPT-developer OpenAI, is up too, helping out cofounder Bill Gates and former CEO Steve Ballmer.
But no one embodies the current moment like Jensen Huang, the cofounder of Nvidia, which makes more of the chips used to power AI systems than anyone. The stock has ballooned by more than 200% since last year, passing $1 trillion in market capitalization and making Huang (who owns around 3% of the company) the list’s biggest gainer in percentage terms. He moves up 31 rungs, and becomes a first-time member of the top 20 richest Americans, who combined account for more than 40% of the 400’s total wealth.
Despite the higher barrier to entry, 18 fresh faces joined The Forbes 400 for the first time this year. Michael Jordan is the most famous among them, thanks to nine-figure annual royalty checks from Nike and his August deal to sell a majority stake in the Charlotte Hornets NBA team. Jordan, who is worth an estimated $3 billion, is the first pro athlete to make the 400. Another notable newcomer: Ivanka Trump’s brother-in-law, Josh Kushner, after his venture capital firm Thrive Capital, an early backer of startups like Instagram, Spotify and Slack, raised $175 million in January at a $5.3 billion valuation. He’s worth an estimated $3.6 billion. The richest new member this year, is Elisabeth DeLuca, at an estimated $8.2 billion.
In August, private equity firm Roark Capital agreed to buy Subway—which she inherited half of when her husband, cofounder Fred Deluca, died in 2015—in a deal reported be worth more than $9 billion. Another ten people, including WhatsApp cofounder Brian Acton and World Wrestling Entertainment kingpin Vince McMahon, returned to the ranks after at least one year off the list.
That unseated 24 people who made the 2022 ranking but are now too poor to make the cut. Among the drop-offs are Donald Trump, whose social media platform and commercial real estate holdings are sputtering; Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, who have watched the value of their Snap Inc. stock disappear faster than a Snapchat message; and Sam Bankman-Fried and Gary Wang, who are navigating federal fraud charges after their crypto empire went up in smoke last fall.
