It’s the fourth consecutive year at the top of The Forbes 400 for the wealthiest billionaire in the U.S.—and the world.
Over the past year, Elon Musk has been up (campaigning for Donald Trump and then briefly running the president’s new Department of Government Efficiency) and he’s been down (predictably falling out with Trump and threatening to create his own political party). But through it all, Musk has remained the richest person in America. He yet again retains the top spot on the annual Forbes 400 ranking of richest Americans.
It’s Musk’s fourth straight year at No. 1 on the list. He’s set a couple of records along the way: He has added $184 billion to his net worth over the past 12 months, a Forbes 400 record for the largest one-year gain, smashing the record he previously set between 2020 and 2021, when he gained $122 billion. Musk is also the first person ever worth more than $400 billion on The Forbes 400, with an estimated net worth of $428 billion. (We used stock prices from September 1, 2025 for this year’s ranking.)
His competitors have become distant runners up. Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison (No. 2, with an estimated $276 billion net worth) and Meta cofounder Mark Zuckerberg (No. 3, $253 billion) each trail Musk by a margin of more than $150 billion—a sum equal to the entire net worth of Warren Buffett (No. 9). All of Musk’s largest holdings have increased in value over the past year, as his investor fanbase—ranging from the Tesla stock enthusiasts to billionaire VCs and Middle East sovereign wealth funds—pour money into his companies.
Shares of Tesla, Musk’s largest and only publicly listed asset, have jumped 56% since last year’s list. That’s despite a vehicle sales slump—down 13% in the first half of 2025—and the flop of Tesla’s much-hyped robo taxi service, which debuted with a pilot program in Austin this summer. Most of Tesla’s 12-month gain came in 2024, when the stock more than doubled between September and its peak on December 17, driven by investor euphoria over Musk’s relationship with then president-elect Trump. Shares are down about 25% since then.
But Musk’s Tesla stake will soon get even bigger. He awaits a ruling by the Delaware Supreme Court on whether he’ll get to keep stock options currently worth $94 billion that Tesla’s board awarded him in 2018. (Forbes has discounted the 2018 options by 50% since January 2024, pending the case’s final outcome.) A Delaware judge has twice voided that compensation package as illegitimate, ruling on a shareholder suit that Tesla’s board was biased in Musk’s favor. Oral arguments in Musk’s appeal are scheduled for October. If that ruling goes against him too, Musk will instead get a $29 billion stock award, under a resolution passed by Tesla’s special compensation committee in August. And now, Tesla’s board wants to give him even more shares, proposing in September yet another performance-based stock compensation package that could be worth close to $1 trillion if the automaker achieves several ambitious goals over the next decade, including growing Tesla’s market capitalization more than eightfold to $8.5 trillion. The board says the prospective payout is justified because it is “designed to keep Elon’s time, energy and considerable talents focused on Tesla.”
One of Musk’s distractions is SpaceX. The company is now worth $400 billion, up from $210 billion a year ago, based on a recent $1 billion tender offer and secondary market trading data. That makes SpaceX, which Musk founded in 2002, the world’s second most valuable privately held company (behind OpenAI, worth $500 billion). Musk’s estimated 42% stake is worth $168 billion. Starlink—its internet broadband provider, with 6,800 satellites in orbit providing connectivity to 6 million customers—generated $9.3 billion in revenue last year, according to Morgan Stanley estimates. And SpaceX rockets remain the preferred U.S. government contractor for payload launches, even after Musk’s falling out with Trump earlier this summer. White House officials briefly explored cancelling some of SpaceX’s deals with NASA and the Department of Defense, The Wall Street Journal reported in July. (The White House said it had reviewed a range of companies with large government contracts).
His other big distraction is xAI Holdings, a clever piece of private market financial engineering. Once Trump was re-elected and advertisers fell back in love with Twitter (after fleeing under Musk’s leadership), Musk capitalized by merging the renamed X with his more valuable, artificial intelligence startup xAI in March. On Musk’s terms, approved by his investors, X is now worth $33 billion net of debt ($2 billion more than what he paid for it in 2022) and xAI is worth $80 billion, up from its previous $50 billion valuation, according to investors familiar with the deal and a Forbes analysis of public mutual fund filings. Between his stakes in the two sister companies, Musk has an estimated $60 billion of wealth tied up in xAI holdings. He’s aiming to grow that number even higher, reportedly chasing a valuation of more than $200 billion for its next funding round. He’s also been attacking his main competition, ChatGPT-creator OpenAI. In February, a Musk-led investor group made a $97.4 billion bid for OpenAI (which unsurprisingly failed, given that it wasn’t for sale) and then sued OpenAI and and its cofounder and CEO Sam Altman, alleging that their plans to convert OpenAI into a for-profit enterprise violated the nonprofit’s founding contract. Musk withdrew his lawsuit before a state judge could rule on whether to dismiss it. He then filed a similar lawsuit in federal court. (OpenAI has countersued Musk, alleging that he’s engaged in a “yearslong harassment campaign” against OpenAI, and that his takeover offer was a “sham bid” designed to hurt the startup.) In August, Musk brought yet another lawsuit against OpenAI, naming it and Apple as codefendants in a claim that they colluded to rig the App Store in favor of ChatGPT over xAI’s chatbot Grok. Both Apple and OpenAI have denied Musk’s claims.
Meanwhile Musk’s smaller ventures, Neuralink and the Boring Company, remain largely speculative endeavors. Neuralink has been testing its brain implant chips but has yet to commercialize any products; it was previously under investigation by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Inspector General over allegations of animal abuse in its testing. (The status of that probe under the Trump administration is not clear.) The Boring Company has only one completed project—the hyperloop tunnel in Las Vegas—despite raising over $900 million, per PitchBook. No matter: Venture capitalists have valued Neuralink and the Boring Company at $9.6 billion and $5.7 billion, respectively.
What is Musk doing with all his wealth? Compared to some of the more extravagant spenders on The Forbes 400—such as Larry Ellison buying an entire Hawaiian island or Mark Zuckerberg taking over half of Palo Alto—Musk isn’t much into real estate these days. While living in D.C., he reportedly laid out mattresses in federal office buildings. In Austin, he’s bought a $35 million compound for some of his fourteen children (and counting). His biggest monthly expense may be jet fuel. These days he is often seen flying between Los Angeles, San Francisco and Texas, seeing to his businesses. But when you’re worth over $400 billion, that’s just a rounding error.
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