Zuck Now Worth $200 Billion Puts Meta CEO In World’s Most Exclusive Club

Bezos joined the uber-exclusive group this year thanks to a $39 billion increase in his net worth to $216 billion. Amazon shares have risen about 28% in 2024 to trade at near-record levels above $190.

Musk started the year with a fortune of $229 billion, which has grown by $36 billion in less than nine months to $265 billion at Monday’s close.

The only other person worth $200 billion earlier this year was LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault. However, shares of his luxury conglomerate have fallen nearly 16% this year, reducing his estimated fortune by $30 billion to $177 billion.

Arnault dropped to fifth place behind Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, who added $55 billion to his fortune this year thanks to a 57 percent rise in his company’s stock. Both Arnault and Ellison are more than $20 billion away from $200 billion status, suggesting they won’t be joining the club for quite some time.

Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg and Ellison have all benefited greatly from the fervor surrounding artificial intelligence. Investors are betting heavily that Tesla can harness artificial intelligence to power its self-driving cars and humanoid robots; Amazon can use it to supercharge its cloud services and e-commerce profits; Meta can take social media and digital communication to the next level with it; and Oracle can make a fortune by renting capacity in its AI data centers.

The broader stock market also got a boost this month from the Federal Reserve cutting interest rates for the first time after raising them from near zero to above 5 percent in less than 18 months.

Lower rates tend to boost economic growth by fueling more spending, hiring and borrowing, and also support stocks by making safer assets like cash and bonds less attractive to investors.