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- The world's six richest people are approaching $1 trillion in combined net worth.
- Their fortunes have soared this year largely due to a historic stock-market rally.
- The six centibillionaires include Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett.
The world's six richest people are approaching a combined net worth of $1 trillion, according to Insider calculations using the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The fortunes of Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, and Warren Buffett totaled an astounding $969 billion ahead of the market's open on Monday.
The group of six men have benefited from a remarkable rally in stocks this year, as investors have celebrated declining inflation and bought into the buzz around artificial intelligence. Tech stocks in particular have propelled the S&P 500 up 17% this year, with mega-caps such as Tesla and Amazon notching 135% and 63% year-to-date gains respectively.
Elon Musk remains top of the leaderboard, with his stakes in Tesla, SpaceX, and other companies worth $232 billion in total. He briefly became a quarter-trillionaire mark in mid-July ahead of Tesla's latest earnings, but his wealth has shrunk since then.
It's Jeff Bezos who's seen the biggest recent wealth spike recently, after Amazon posted robust second-quarter earnings on Friday. His personal fortune swelled by over $11 billion on Friday, lifting its total increase this year to over $57 billion.
Bezos is the owner of just over 990 million Amazon shares. Like Musk, his personal fortune is closely tied to the stock-market performance of his company. It's a similar story for Gates and Microsoft, Ellison and Oracle, Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway, and Arnault and LVMH.
More broadly, all of the world's 17 richest people have seen their individual net worths increase this year, largely thanks to the stock market's gains in recent months.
These figures can fluctuate wildly, though. For example, when Tesla shares hit an all-time high in November 2021, Musk's net worth was estimated at $340 billion. But just eight months later it fell to $125 billion, earning the serial entrepreneur a Guinness World Record for losing the most amount of money in a year.