Billionaire

A billionaire is a person whose net worth is at least one billion units of a given currency, typically USD. It is a sub-category of the concept of the ultra high-net-worth individual. The American business magazine Forbes produces a global list of known U.S. dollar billionaires every year and updates an internet version of this list in real time. The American oil magnate John D. Rockefeller became the world's first confirmed billionaire in 1916.

Nineteen individuals had attained the status of centibillionaires, each with a net worth of at least $100 billion, as of October 2025. As of March 2025,^[update] there are 3028 billionaires worldwide, with a combined wealth of over $16.1 trillion, up nearly $2 trillion over 2024.

According to the UBS/PwC Billionaires Report 2019 report released in November 2019, there are currently 2,101 U.S. dollar billionaires worldwide, from 66 countries, with a combined net worth of $8.5 trillion. Also according to the report, billionaires have a substantial positive contribution to the sustainability and success of companies controlled by them. Billionaire-controlled companies listed on the equity market returned 17.8 percent, compared with the 9.1 percent of the MSCI AC World Index. According to the authors of the report, this Billionaire Effect is connected with smart risk-taking and willingness to plan and invest for the long term.

The majority of billionaires are male, as fewer than 11% (197 of 1,826) on the 2015 list were female billionaires. The United States has the largest number of billionaires of any country, with 536 as of 2015^[update], while China, India and Russia are home to 213, 90 and 88 billionaires, respectively. As of 2015^[update], only 46 billionaires were under the age of 40, while the list of American-only billionaires, as of 2010, had an average age of 66.

Different authorities use different methodologies to determine net worth and to rank them, and not all information about personal finances is publicly available. In 2019, Forbes counted a record 607 billionaires in the U.S. Over the course of the 2020s, depending on the source and the year, the world's richest person has been reckoned to be Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault and family, or Elon Musk.

From 2014 to 2019, the number of female billionaires grew by 46%. That is more than the number of male billionaires in the same period (39%). As of 2019 there were 233 female billionaires in the world, compared to 160 in 2013.

Billionaires come from a very wide variety of backgrounds. College education is not universal among billionaires, as almost 30% of billionaires around the world in 2015 did not have a college degree of any kind. But this shows substantial correlation between education and success. More than 70% of these billionaires have some kind of college degree, while in the general US population only 38% have a college degree,, and in the general world population less than 10% of people have a college degree.

There is also a substantial correlation between top university education and billionaire status. The top 10 universities in the United States produced 99 of the top 400 billionaires in 2018, which makes these schools overrepresented among billionaires compared with the general population. For example, 10 billionaires (or 4%) had graduated from Harvard University, while Harvard graduates only make up 0.2% of the general population of adults in the United States; in other words, a billionaire from the Forbes 400 list that year was 20 times more likely to have gone to Harvard than a non-billionaire.