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For many Americans, 2025 wasn’t a great year financially. The affordability crisis and general economic concerns became defining themes of the year as people dealt with rising costs and a worsening job market.
But for billionaires, 2025 was a boon to their already exuberant wealth.
The 15 richest billionaires in the United States saw their wealth grow by more than $1 trillion over the course of the year, according to a new analysis from the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington, D.C., think tank.
As of the end of 2025, those 15 billionaires—each with assets over $100 billion—have a combined wealth of $3.2 trillion, up from $2.4 trillion a year ago.
That’s a gain of 33%, which is more than double the growth of the S&P 500 in the same time period, the Institute for Policy Studies notes.
Over 2025, the S&P 500 rose 16%. (A double-digit gain is strong, but it is down from recent years; the S&P 500 returned 23% in 2024 and 24% in 2023.)
Not only did billionaires get richer in 2025, but more Americans became billionaires. At the end of 2024, there were 813 billionaires in the U.S., according to an Institute for Policy Studies analysis of Forbes data. Those billionaires had a combined wealth of $6.72 trillion.
By the end of 2025, there were 935 billionaires in the U.S., and their combined wealth totaled $8.1 trillion.
When Forbes first began tracking the 400 wealthiest Americans in 1982, there were just 13 billionaires on the list.
The top five wealthiest billionaires have changed over the last year, too. At the beginning of 2025, the top wealthiest billionaires were Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Amazon executive chair Jeff Bezos, Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Google cofounder Larry Page.
This year, Zuckerberg was bumped off that list, and Google cofounder Sergey Brin joined its ranks; 2025 was the best year for Google’s stock since 2009, with shares growing 65%, buoyed in part by the tech giant’s push into artificial intelligence.
In contrast, the stock price for Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms grew about 13%. Though Meta also focused on AI, its strategy was more “scattershot,” experts have said, leading to internal confusion and the tech company falling behind other AI leaders.
In its analysis, the Institute for Policy Studies broke down the current top five billionaires, and how their wealth increased from January 1, 2025, to January 1, 2026. They are:
The rich got even richer all around the world.
According to a Bloomberg analysis, global billionaire wealth increased $2.2 trillion. (That analysis was released several days before December 31.)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kristin Toussaint is a staff editor for Fast Company’s Impact section, where she covers climate change, labor, shareholder capitalism, and all sorts of innovations meant to improve the world.. On the topic of climate change, she has explained terms including cloud brightening, plastic credits, and renewable natural gas, and told the story of climate solutions, like how Maine got more than 100,000 residents to install heat pumps.