Elon Musk retained his title as the richest person in the world for the fifth time in six years, with wealth surging 89 percent to US$792 billion (HK$6.2 trillion), while Zhang Yiming of ByteDance ranked as China's wealthiest individual with a fortune of US$79 billion, according to the Hurun Global Rich List 2026.
Zhang's net worth grew 32 percent to rank 25th worldwide.
Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos, ranks second with US$300 billion of net worth, up 13 percent, followed by Alphabet's founder, Larry Page, whose net worth grew 65 percent to US$271 billion, marking his first time ranking in the top three.
NVIDIA's chief executive, Jensen Huang, enters the top 10 for the first time, placing him the ninth richest, as his wealth increased by 34 percent to US$172 billion.
Other big entrepreneur risers in China, Nongfu Spring's (9633) founder Zhong Shanshan and Tencent's (0700) CEO Ma Huateng rank as China's second and third richest with a net profit of US$74.66 billion and US$67.42 billion, respectively, while founder and chairman of Contemporary Amperex Technology (3750), Robin Zeng Yuqun, ranks fourth after its wealth grew 46 percent to US$55.09 billion.
This year's billionaires with US$10 billion or more in wealth exceeds 4000 for the first time in history, reaching 4020 billionaires in the world, up 578 from last year. This is equivalent to adding 2 new US$10 billion entrepreneurs every day on average in the past year. Their total wealth increased 28 percent.
China leads the billionaire baton with 1,110 billionaires, up 287, while the US follows with 1,000 billionaires, and India secures its third place with 308 billionaires.
The artificial technology wave became this year's most powerful wealth-building engine, creating 114 billionaires with over US$10 billion of wealth from AI companies, among them, 46 are new entrants. Other than Huang, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's net worth almost tripled to US$4.7 billion. Anthropic, the company behind Claude AI, also sees its valuation soar to US$380 billion.
Rupert Hoogewerf, chairman and chief researcher at Hurun Report, said more than 70 percent of billionaires with US$10 billion or more this year were not on the list ten years ago, showing immense changes in wealth creation.
He said wealth creation was faster last year than at any point in the Hurun Global Rich List's history, noting that AI is fundamentally different from every previous technological wave, with the overwhelming returns flowing to those who already control the data, compute, and platforms.
He expects Elon Musk to be the first to break through the trillion-dollar benchmark as early as this year, and predicts there will be as many as ten trillionaires by 2030.
Gloria Leung
