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Top 10 Richest American People

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Every year, the list of the world’s wealthiest people is updated to reflect their most recent net worth and financial performance. The amount of money these people have is just about enough to make anything literally possible, it is unfathomable and shocking, to say the least. 

Here is the most recent list of the world’s top 10 richest people, based on the real-time Forbes List on January 28, 2022, along with some fascinating details about each of them. 

1. Jeff Bezos (Net worth:$ 177 billion)

Jeff Bezos by Steve Jurvetson from

Despite temporarily relinquishing the title to Elon Musk in January, Bezos is the world’s wealthiest person for the fourth year in a row. The 57-year-old founder of Amazon will stand down as CEO in 2021. He currently controls just under 11% of the stock in the tech giant.

2. Elon Musk (Net worth $151 billion)

Elon Musk by Heisenberg Media from

We all know Elon Musk for his controversial nature and though a lot of people don’t really understand him or his genius brain the guy is super-rich as well as wealthy. Musk experimented in a variety of business activities before becoming famous as the flashy CEO of Tesla, from inventing games to running nightclubs out of a frat house. Musk graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor’s degree in physics and economics and went on to Stanford University to pursue a PhD before dropping out.

3. Bill Gates (Net worth $124 billion)

Bill Gates by Simon Davis from

Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft with his childhood friend Paul Allen when he was just 20 years old. The business went public just months before Gates’ 31st birthday, making him a billionaire. Until 2000, he was the company’s CEO, and until 2014, he was its chairman and major stakeholder. Gates is no longer actively involved in Microsoft, despite his position on the company’s board of directors.

Gates is not simply one of the world’s wealthiest people, but also one of the most charitable. Gates and his wife, Melinda, have led the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the world’s most influential organizations, since 1999. The foundation, which has a $46 billion endowment, aspires to raise millions of people out of poverty by focusing on eradicating HIV, malaria, and other infectious diseases.

The Gates Foundation recently partnered with Serum Institute, an Indian biomedical enterprise, to develop low-cost coronavirus vaccinations. The organization, along with Mastercard and Wellcome, pledged $125 million to combat the disease earlier this spring.

4. Mark Zuckerberg (Net worth $ 324 billion)

Mark Zuckerberg, then a 19-year-old Harvard sophomore, started TheFacebook.com, a basic version of the now-ubiquitous social network known as Facebook, in 2004. Facebook’s popularity skyrocketed after Zuckerberg stepped out of college to work full-time as its CEO. At the age of 36, Mark Zuckerberg is one of the world’s wealthiest persons.

In December 2015, Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced that they would give away 99 percent of their wealth during their lifetimes through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, though some critics pointed out that the organization was not a nonprofit charity and that the announcement was misleading.

In 2015, the pair gave $25 million to the fight against Ebola, as well as $100 million in Facebook shares to help improve a New Jersey public school system.

5. Warren Buffet (Net worth $96 Billion)

Warren Buffet by USA International Trade Administration from

Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, began his illustrious career as an investor at an early age. He distributed newspapers on his bike as a kid, and by the age of 11, the Nebraska native had bought his first stock — Cities Service Preferred at $38 per share — and sold it for a profit of $5.

After being rejected from Harvard Business School, Buffett enrolled at Columbia Business School, where he studied under legendary value investor Benjamin Graham, who would later become Buffett’s mentor. Before founding his own investment firm in the early 1950s, Buffett worked as a securities analyst. In 1969, he purchased Berkshire Hathaway, a textile company, and turned it into a holding company to store the several lucrative investments that helped him create his vast wealth and earn the moniker “The Oracle of Omaha.”

The diverse mix of firms and investments that made him wealthy may appear random — he’s invested in Coca-Cola, American Express, Geico, Fruit of the Loom, Dairy Queen, and General Motors, among others — but they’re all cash-generating machines with long-term worth.

Buffett’s $60 billion fortune is arguably most astonishing because it excludes the $37 billion he’s already given away. Buffett is a frugal man who enjoys junk food.

He’s close friends with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, with whom he co-founded the Giving Pledge, a pledge by billionaires to donate at least half of their wealth to charity.

6. Larry Page ( Net worth $91.5 Billion)

Larry Page, like several other tech millionaires on our list, began his journey to fame and money in a college dorm room. Page and his friend Sergey Brin came up with the idea of better internet data extraction while at Stanford University in 1995. The duo created “Backrub,” a new search engine technology named after its capacity to examine “backing links.” Page and Brin then went on to start Google in 1998, with Page serving as CEO until 2001, and then again between 2011 to 2019.

7. Sergey Brin (Net worth $89 Billion)

Sergey Brin was born in Moscow, Russia, and immigrated to the United States with his family in 1979 when he was six years old. Brin became Google’s president of technology when Eric Schmidt became CEO in 2001, after co-founding the company with Larry Page in 1998. After joining the Alphabet holding firm in 2015, he retained the same position until Sundar Pichai took over as CEO in 2019.

Brin spent most of 2019 focused on X, Alphabet’s research division responsible for cutting-edge technology such as Waymo self-driving cars and Google Glass smart glasses.

8. Steve Ballmer (Net worth $68.7 million)

Steve Ballmer by Jesús Gorriti-

After Bill Gates persuaded him to drop out of Stanford University’s MBA program, Steve Ballmer joined Microsoft in 1980. He was the company’s 30th employee. In the year 2000, Ballmer succeeded Gates as CEO of Microsoft. He maintained the role until 2014 when he stepped down. Ballmer led Microsoft’s $8.5 billion purchase of Skype in 2011.

During their time at Harvard University, Ballmer and Gates shared a dorm room. He has stated that their “brotherly” connection at Microsoft got strained when Ballmer began pushing Microsoft into products such as the Surface tablet and the Windows mobile phone.

Ballmer is Microsoft’s largest individual shareholder, with a 4 percent stake in the software firm. Ballmer bought the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team for $2 billion in 2014, shortly after stepping down as Microsoft CEO.

9. Larry Ellison (Net worth $97.7 billion)

Larry Ellison was born to a 19-year-old single mother in New York City. Ellison moved to California and worked as a computer programmer after dropping out of the University of Chicago in 1966. He started working for Ampex in 1973, where he met future partners Ed Oates and Bob Miner. Ellison then moved to Precision Instruments as vice president of research and development three years later.

Over the previous decade, Ellison, who is notorious for his excessive spending, has made significant investments in luxury real estate. The $300 million purchase of practically the whole Hawaiian island of Lanai in 2012, where the millionaire has lived since 2020, was maybe his single most stunning transaction.

On the island, Ellison has erected a hydroponics farm and a luxury spa. Ellison’s philanthropy has centred on medical research. He donated $200 million to the University of Southern California in 2016 to establish a new cancer research centre. In 2010 and 2013, Ellison founded the Oracle Outfit USA sailing team, which won America’s Cup racing series.

10. Alice Walton (Net worth $61.8 billion)

Alice_Walton by Walmart from

Walton and her siblings, together with other family members, hold over half of Walmart, the world’s largest retailer. The company’s stock has risen more than 5% since last year’s ranking, mainly to attempts to grow online sales in order to compete with Amazon Prime.

It is clear that most of the richest people’s wealth is either from inheritance or because of a company they started. A majority of the richest people are either in tech which is an ever-evolving industry or is in retail. All in all, if there’s a relevant lesson you should get from them is that investing and letting your money grow and work for you is the most important way to keep your wealth growing.