© BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI, MANDEL NGAN / AFP
– Billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos continued to increase their fortunes in 2024.
The years go by and are the same for billionaires. Their fortune exploded in 2024. Despite the crises, the wealth of the richest has grown significantly, reveals the annual Forbes ranking. More than half of the more than 2,800 billionaires became rich thanks to the surge in markets. Some have earned billions, even tens of billions of dollars. These gains were mainly driven by tech giantsstarting with Elon Musk, whose fortune has now reached more than 400 billion dollars. The founder of Tesla made more money than anyone on the planet in 2023 and 2024.
Just behind come the two other American personalities Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, at the head of fortunes estimated respectively at 243 and 212 billion dollars. The boss of Meta added $91 billion to his digital empire and Larry Ellison saw his fortune swell by $84 billion thanks to Oracle. According to Forbes estimates, this year’s ten richest billionaires saw their collective wealth increase by 730 billion dollars. The ten personalities who saw their fortune increase the most this year are all American citizens.
Why the accounts of the major French billionaires looked gloomy in 2024
In France, the richest have lost billions
French billionaires have seen their fortunes depreciate sharply. The reason: the political uncertainty which followed the dissolution of the National Assembly in July, but also the sluggishness of the Chinese economy, which “snubbed” the French luxury market. A situation which particularly weighed on the accounts of Bernard Arnault, Françoise Bettencourt Meyers and François Pinault. Between them, the latter lost more than $70 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
