AI made tech billionaires even richer this year. Here's how much.

By William Gavin

There are 50 new tech billionaires in 2025 because of AI, including the seven co-founders of Anthropic

Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang have become two of the wealthiest individuals in the world.

This has been a great year for artificial-intelligence companies, which launched model after model and ramped up spending. AI has also made a lot of rich people much richer.

More than 50 individuals involved in the AI sector became billionaires this year, Forbes reported on Thursday. Many of those people are entrepreneurs involved in startups, such as the seven co-founders of Anthropic, which nearly tripled its valuation in less than a year.

Surge AI Chief Executive Edwin Chen is the wealthiest of the new class of AI billionaires, worth about $18 billion, according to Forbes. His company helps refine AI models for companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.

Other newly minted billionaires include the founders of Sierra, which builds and implements AI customer-service agents, and the founders of Mercor, an AI recruiting startup. Anton Osika and Fabian Hedin, the founders of "vibe-coding" startup Lovable, are now worth $1.6 billion each, Forbes reports.

Then there are the already wealthy people who became even richer in 2025. The top five gainers tracked by Bloomberg's Billionaire Index all have AI to thank, at least in part, for their surging fortunes.

Elon Musk maintained his status as the world's richest individual this year, nearly doubling his net worth, according to Bloomberg. Out of the 500 billionaires tracked by Bloomberg, his wealth rose the most in 2025, by $213 billion.

Much of Musk's current net worth - put at $645 billion - now comes from SpaceX, his aerospace business that plans to get into the business of building AI data centers in space and was recently valued at $800 billion. The company could go public next year at a valuation of as much as $1.5 trillion.

His wealth also rose based on his ownership of xAI, an AI startup he founded two years ago that is reportedly in talks to raise funds at a $230 billion valuation, and of Tesla (TSLA), the electric-vehicle company that is increasingly focused on AI.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who founded Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL), were the next biggest gainers in 2025, adding $102 billion and $92.8 billion to their respective fortunes as of Thursday. Page is the second-wealthiest man alive, with a $270 billion net worth, while Brin's $251 billion fortune puts him in the fifth spot. Most of their money comes from stakes in Alphabet, which has become an AI superpower this year.

Oracle (ORCL) co-founder Larry Ellison's net worth grew by $59.2 billion to $251 billion this year as the company's stock rose more than 18% through Thursday. However, investor sentiment in recent weeks has been dour, with shareholders fearing that the software company will need to take on high levels of debt to fund its data-center plans.

Ellison appeared to briefly overtake Musk as the world's richest person on the morning of Sept. 10 before ending the day in the No. 2 spot. As of Thursday, he was the fourth richest, with a net worth of $251 billion.

Rounding out the top five gainers this year is Jensen Huang, the co-founder and CEO of Nvidia (NVDA). He owns about 3.3% of the chip maker and is worth $156 billion, up by a little less than $42 billion in 2025, according to Bloomberg.

Read: Here's what Nvidia investors can look forward to in 2026

While those five are the billionaires whose wealth increased the most in 2025, they're far from the only tech leaders who got richer this year.

Amazon.com (AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos held on to his spot as the third richest person in the world, while Meta Platforms (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg is the sixth richest and Microsoft's (MSFT) Steve Ballmer is the eighth richest. Of the 10 wealthiest people alive, Bernard Arnault, the chair of luxury-brand holding company LVMH (FR:MC), and Warren Buffett, longtime chair of Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B), are the only billionaires who made their wealth outside of tech.

-William Gavin

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12-26-25 1120ET