A year of asset carnival: the wealth of the world's top richest people will skyrocket by $2.2 trillion in 2025

The Zhitong Finance App learned that according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, as asset values soared due to the boom in various markets such as the stock market, cryptocurrency, and precious metals, the world's richest 500 people increased their total wealth by a record 2.2 trillion US dollars in 2025.

As a result, their total net worth rose to $11.9 trillion. This growth was strongly boosted by Donald Trump's election victory at the end of 2024, and was only briefly thwarted in April when the market plummeted due to tariff concerns, triggering the biggest single-day wealth contraction since the pandemic began.

The boom in artificial intelligence continues to support large capitalization stocks in the US, with tech giants leading the way. About a quarter of the total growth recorded in the Bloomberg Wealth Index came from just eight people, including Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Alphabet co-founder Larry Page, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Notably, this contribution was less than last year, when these eight billionaires accounted for 43% of the total increase.

At the beginning of the year, Musk was undoubtedly the most prominent name on the list of the world's richest people. After donating nearly $300 million to Trump's re-election campaign, he first became an important politician and spent most of his time in Washington, D.C., in early 2025, leading the administration's cost reduction efforts.

In the end, however, it was Ellison who stole the limelight, not Musk. As this established cloud infrastructure company increased investment in artificial intelligence, Oracle's stock price rose sharply, and Ellison briefly surpassed Musk to become the richest man in the world in September. Although Oracle's stock price has since dropped about 40% from its peak, Ellison made headlines when Paramount Sky Dance Company, run by his son David Ellison, bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, putting an end to the year.

Growth isn't limited to the US. As of December 30, the S&P 500 index had an annual increase of 17%, but the UK FTSE 100 index rose 22% and the Hong Kong Hang Seng Index rose 29%, performing even better.

Other asset classes performed even better: precious metals recorded one of their best years in decades, fueled by safe-haven demand; at the same time, copper and rare earths have also risen due to their key geopolitical importance, with major holders such as Australian mining giant Gina Reinhart and Chile's Lucic family increasing their wealth by several billion dollars as a result.

Prior to the recent sell-off, cryptocurrencies were also expected to surpass stock market returns during the year: Bitcoin soared to a record high after Trump won the election and continued to rise after the government approved a series of pro-cryptocurrency policies. However, the sharp decline that began in October brought back all of its gains or more, severely damaging the wealth of billionaires including the Winklevoss twins, Changpeng Zhao, and Michael Saylor.

Here are the biggest winners and losers of the year as listed by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index:

The winner:

Larry Ellison

* Net worth: $249.8 billion

* Annual growth: $57.7 billion

The 81-year-old Oracle co-founder is taking on more day-to-day responsibilities within the company and leading its expensive, debt-driven artificial intelligence infrastructure foray. After releasing outstanding quarterly earnings reports related to Oracle's AI expansion plans on September 10, Ellison's net worth surged by $89 billion in a single day. This was the biggest single-day net worth increase since the Bloomberg Wealth Index recorded at the time. Ellison also deployed his wealth in the media sector, personally guaranteeing his son David's $108 billion hostile takeover of part of Warner Bros.'s shares. Oracle continues to advance plans to lead the $500 billion “Stargate” AI infrastructure project and take a stake in TikTok's US business, and may continue to reshape Ellison's wealth in 2026 and beyond.

Elon Musk

* Net worth: $622.7 billion

* Annual growth: $190.3 billion

After becoming the biggest donor in the 2024 election cycle, Musk stayed in Washington for most of the spring, and his “Department of Government Efficiency” drastically cut federal agency funding and initiated large-scale layoffs. But at the cost of his wealth, Tesla's stock price suffered a sharp drop during this period, partly due to consumer reactions triggered by its political activities. However, after leaving the White House after publicly falling out with Trump, Musk's net worth rebounded. SpaceX's recent internal share sale made it the world's most valuable private company and pushed its wealth above $600 billion for the first time. Meanwhile, Tesla shareholders voted to approve a new compensation plan. If he leads the automaker to a set of ambitious performance goals in the next few years, he will have a clear path to becoming the world's first trillionaire.

Gina Reinhardt

* Net worth: $37.7 billion

* Annual growth: $12.6 billion

With a global focus on securing supplies of critical rare earth minerals, few billionaires have benefited more than Australia's richest man this year. Mainly through his privately held Hancock Exploration Company, Reinhardt has amassed the largest rare earth asset portfolio outside of China, and has become a key figure in the increasingly intense geopolitical struggle over control of these materials critical to technologies from semiconductors to electric vehicles. She also attended Trump's events at Sea-Lake Estate in Florida and is an investor in Trump's Media and Technology Group, a publicly traded company that operates the former president's social media platform “Truth Social.” In the three months ending June 30, Reinhart increased its shareholding by about two-thirds.

Donald Trump and his family

* Net worth: $6.8 billion

* Annual growth: $282 million

Since starting his re-election campaign, Trump and his family have been involved in a series of dazzling deals, and their wealth has grown on a scale unprecedented in modern presidential history. Over the past 15 months, the family's wealth has grown by around 70%, even after the recent decline. On the eve of their second inauguration, Trump and his wife Melania promoted a pair of meme coins bearing their names, which briefly soared in value and then plummeted. Despite this, Trump Coin has added more than $200 million to the family's wealth, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Trump also co-founded the crypto platform World Liberty Financial with his sons a few weeks before the 2024 election. Since then, Donald Trump Jr., and Eric Trump have also worked on cryptocurrency projects, including digital currency miner American Bitcoin Corp.

One of Trump's biggest assets, his holdings in Trump's media, jumped in value after announcing a merger with nuclear fusion company TAE Technologies in December, although it still fell more than 70% from its January high. The president also won a victory in August, and a $464 million civil fraud fine was overturned on appeal, although the court upheld its finding that it was illegal by misrepresenting the value of assets such as the Sea-Lake Estate.

Losers:

Manuel Villar

* Net worth: $10 billion

* Annual loss: $12.6 billion

Once the richest man in the Philippines, his wealth evaporated over $18 billion in just a few days after the stock of his real estate development company Golden MV Holdings Inc. plummeted by more than 80% after a six-month suspension of trading in November. The deal was suspended because Golden MV did not submit a financial report after disclosing that it had purchased a plot of land from Villars for $93 million (but then re-valued it to more than $23 billion). Earlier this month, Villar also sold all of its shares in water utility company PrimeWater to grocery mogul Lucio Coe. PrimeWater was investigated by the government for possible “irregularities” in July.

Bob Pendle and Mike Sabell

* Net assets: $7 billion each

* Annual losses: $17.7 billion each

After three years of downturn in the IPO market, liquefied natural gas supplier Venture Global Inc. went public in January, which is expected to start a year of new stock issuance, boosted by a pro-business government and a large backlog of transactions. As Venture Global prepared to go public, its co-founders each planned to hold nearly $30 billion in shares, which would be the largest energy IPO in over a decade. However, in the end, the listing fell short of expectations: lukewarm demand for its shares forced the company to reduce the size of its offering, while disappointing quarterly results and loss in a key arbitration case with British Petroleum, one of its largest customers, caused its share price to drop by more than 70% thereafter.

Michael Saylor

* Net worth: $3.8 billion

* Annual loss: $2.6 billion

In the first half of this year, Saylor's Strategy (MSTR.US) was one of the darlings of the booming cryptocurrency market, which rose to a record high after Trump won the election in November 2024 and continued to rise after the administration introduced a series of pro-cryptocurrency policies. Strategy pioneered the “crypto treasury” model, holding billions of dollars worth of bitcoin on its balance sheet and regularly selling additional shares to raise cash to increase reserves. This model yielded huge returns when Bitcoin hit a new high in early October. However, the situation took a sharp turn since then. The fall in Bitcoin's value caused Strategy's stock price to fall short, and Saylor's net worth was dragged down by nearly $6 billion from its high point.