The tech industry is home to eight of the world’s ten wealthiest individuals, but who among them will be the first to reach trillionaire status?
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, one of the richest people in the world, has recently joined the exclusive group of those whose wealth has reached or exceeded $200 billion (€182.57 billion).
Therefore, he becomes the newest member of this elite club, which includes only two other tech leaders – Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Zuckerberg’s wealth accumulation is largely attributed to his position as the largest shareholder of Meta, the parent company of social media networks Facebook, Instagram and Threads, as well as the messaging platform WhatsApp.
The industry with the richest people in the world
According to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, the three richest individuals in the world all come from the technology industry.
Indeed, out of the top 10 wealthiest people, eight are from this sector.
These include some notable names such as Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, followed respectively by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Larry Page, co-founder of Alphabet, Google’s holding company.
The tech industry has also been one of the best-performing sectors, with six out of the seven companies to have reached trillion-dollar status coming from this field.
According to a recent report by Informa Connect Academy, Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Alphabet, and Meta are all valued at over $1 trillion as of July 2024.
The same report also explored which of today’s multi-billionaires were most likely to reach trillionaire status, with predictions that the world could see its first trillionaire in as few as three years.
The analysis was based on the net worth data of the 30 wealthiest people in the world, and calculations of their average annual growth rate over the last five years.
The results were then used to create 30-year forecasts for each person’s wealth to predict who is likely to become a trillionaire and estimate the year they would reach that status.
Who will be the world’s first trillionaire?
Leading the list was Elon Musk who could become the first trillionaire by 2027, with a net worth value “growing at an average rate of 109.88 per cent every year”.
The majority of Musk’s fortune is tied to his stakes in Tesla, the world’s most valuable car manufacturer, and private rocket company SpaceX.
He also owns about 79 per cent of X Corp, which he acquired in 2022 for $44 billion (about €39.6 billion), though its value has significantly fallen since then.
Moreover, Musk also owns stakes in several startups including Neuralink, The Boring Company, and xAI.
ADVERTISEMENTHe could be followed by Gautam Adani, founder of the Adani Group, based in India, who is expected to reach the trillionaire status by 2028.
That same year, Jensen Huang, one of the founders of the trillion-dollar company NVIDIA, is anticipated to become the next tech-industry trillionaire, with an annual growth rate in net worth of nearly 112 per cent.
Out of all the 28 individuals predicted to become trillionaires within the next 30 years, 11 (about 40 per cent) were from the technology field alone.
The list included other major names in the industry such as Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Zhang Yiming, the founder of TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, and Bill Gates, rounding out the list.
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