North America has been home to the world’s richest person in 29 of the past 31 years, according to Forbes’ annual rankings. Bill Gates alone accounts for 17 of those years, split across two separate stretches between 1996 and 2017. Only Bernard Arnault of France, Forbes’ top name in 2023 and 2024, has ever broken North America’s hold on the title in this span.
As of Forbes’ 2026 list, the gap at the top is enormous. Elon Musk’s estimated $839 billion is more than triple the net worth of Larry Page, the world’s second-richest person, and dwarfs every other continent’s leader by a wide margin (Forbes).
Continent
Richest person (2026)
Country
Net worth
North America
Elon Musk
United States
$839 billion
Europe
Bernard Arnault & family
France
$171 billion
Asia
Mukesh Ambani
India
$99.7 billion
South America
Eduardo Saverin
Brazil
$35.9 billion
Africa
Aliko Dangote
Nigeria
$28.5 billion
Oceania
Gina Rinehart
Australia
$25.5 billion
Only six people have held the global title across the 31 years the animated map below covers, and five of them are American. Gates lost the top spot to Warren Buffett in 2008, then lost four more years to Mexican telecom investor Carlos Slim Helu between 2010 and 2013, the only interruption from outside the United States until Arnault came along. Gates reclaimed the title through 2017, Jeff Bezos took over in 2018, and Musk first broke through in 2022 before two years of Arnault and Musk’s return in 2025. The closest call came earlier than any of that. The Sultan of Brunei’s fortune briefly topped Gates’s own in 1997, though Forbes excludes royalty from its official rankings, so the title never actually left Gates that year.
South America alone has cycled through twelve different continental leaders in that time. North America has only needed six. Africa, Asia, Oceania, and South America have never produced the world’s single richest person in this data set, even with Mukesh Ambani closing in on $100 billion this year.
