The tech industry is home to eight of the ten richest individuals in the world, but who 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 exceeds $200 billion (€182.57 billion).
Therefore, he becomes the youngest member of this elite club, which includes only two other technology leaders – Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Zuckerberg’s wealth accumulation is said to be largely attributable to his position as the largest shareholder of Meta, the parent company of social networking sites Facebook, Instagram and Threads, as well as messaging platform WhatsApp.
The industry with the richest people in the world
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the three richest individuals in the world all come from the technology industry.
Indeed, of the 10 richest people, eight are from this sector, he writes € news, the Telegraph reports.
These include notable names such as Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, followed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Larry Page, co-founder of Alphabet, Google’s holding company, respectively.
The technology industry has also been one of the best performing sectors, with six of the seven companies that have reached trillion dollar status coming from this field.
According to a recent report from 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 achieve trillionaire status, with predictions that the world could see its first trillionaire in just three years.
The analysis was based on net worth data of the world’s 30 richest people and calculations of their average annual growth rate over the past five years.
The results were then used to create 30-year projections of 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 first trillionaire in the world?
Topping the list was Elon Musk, who could become the first trillionaire by 2027, with a net worth “growing at an average rate of 109.88% annually.”
Much of Musk’s wealth is tied to his stake in Tesla and private rocket company SpaceX.
It also owns about 79% of X Corp, which it bought in 2022 for $44 billion (about €39.6 billion), though its value has fallen significantly since then.
Additionally, Musk owns stakes in several startups, including Neuralink, The Boring Company, and xAI.
He may be succeeded by Gautam Adani, founder of India-based Adan Group, who is expected to reach trillionaire status by 2028.
That same year, Jensen Huang, one of the founders of the trillion-dollar company NVIDIA, is expected to become the next trillionaire of the technology industry, with an annual growth rate in net worth of nearly 112%.
In contrast, of all 28 individuals predicted to become trillionaires within the next 30 years, 11 are from the technology field alone.
The list includes other big 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, who rounds out the list. /Telegraph/
