America’s richest tech bosses raked in more than $550 billion this year as an AI-fueled market frenzy sent their fortunes soaring — pushing the combined net worth of the top 10 US tech founders and execs to nearly $2.5 trillion by Christmas Eve.
The staggering total, up from $1.9 trillion at the start of the year, reflects Wall Street’s all-in bet on artificial intelligence, according to Bloomberg data.
The surge came as the S&P 500 climbed more than 18%, with gains heavily concentrated in tech stocks tied to AI chips, data centers and cloud infrastructure.
Silicon Valley’s elite have been the primary beneficiaries of the hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into AI hardware and computing power worldwide, even as recent months brought jitters about a possible artificial intelligence investment bubble.
“This is all speculative and correlated to the success of AI,” Jason Furman, a Harvard economics professor and consultant for OpenAI, told the Financial Times.
“There’s a huge question mark over whether this is all going to pay off, but investors are betting that it will.”
Elon Musk remained the world’s richest person, with his net worth jumping nearly 50% to $645 billion.
He briefly lost the top spot in September but was helped reclaiming it by a $1 trillion Tesla pay deal approved by shareholders and a surge in the valuation of SpaceX, to $800 billion.
Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were among the year’s biggest winners as their fortunes rose 61% and 59%, respectively.
The search giant made significant strides in its in-house AI models and chips — led by rapid upgrades to the Gemini model.
Those combined gains convinced investors Alphabet was back at the front of the AI race, helping drive sharp stock gains that padded the net worth of both Page and Brin.
Page ended the year with about $270 billion, while Brin sat near $251 billion.
Oracle founder Larry Ellison also saw his wealth soar after the company unveiled a $300 billion data center deal with OpenAI.
But investor doubts over how Oracle would finance the massive buildout later dragged the stock down 40% from its September peak, trimming some of those gains.
Another standout was Nvidia boss Jensen Huang, whose company became the world’s most valuable publicly traded firm with a market capitalization above $4 trillion.
Huang’s net worth climbed to $156 billion, even as filings showed he sold more than $1 billion worth of shares this year.
Several tech titans cashed out along the way.
Jeff Bezos sold about $5.7 billion in Amazon stock, while Michael Dell unloaded more than $2 billion worth of shares in Dell Technologies. He and his wife Susan Dell pledged earlier this month to donate a historic $6.25 billion toward funding so-called “Trump accounts” for 25 million American children.
While Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg gained more than $28 billion in wealth year-to-date as of Friday, he nonetheless slipped down the rankings after a pullback in the company’s stock, as investors fretted over its massive spending on AI infrastructure and pricey talent deals.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates was the lone member of the group to end the year poorer than he started, after continuing to sell shares to fund his philanthropic efforts.
