AI Made 100 Billionaires Richer While the Other 400 Argued About Who Pays for Lunch 🍴

The world's wealthiest technology figures gained a combined $845 billion through September, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, while the remaining billionaires outside tech lost a combined $62 billion over the same period. The figures track net worth, not stock returns, and include fortunes that would be tied to companies retail investors cannot directly buy.

Bloomberg News wealth reporter Dylan Sloan said approximately 100 of the world's 500 richest people owe their fortunes to technology. That concentration has translated into specific entries on the index. King Slide, a Taiwan-based company that began in the 1980s making drawer slides and now supplies hardware for data center server racks, saw its founder enter the ranking at $9.5 billion. Americans have held all 10 top spots on the index since Sept. 10, a first since Bloomberg began tracking billionaires in 2012. Sloan noted that more new entrants now come from China, including founders of artificial intelligence developers such as DeepSeek and MiniMax.

Bloomberg values private stakes with the same methodology used for public holdings, applying liquidity discounts in some cases. The index added all seven Anthropic co-founders in June after a funding round valued the company at $965 billion. Anthropic is not publicly traded. Research from S&P Global found that the 10 largest S&P 500 companies held almost 40% of the index by mid-2025, a concentration level last seen in the mid-1960s. Standard S&P 500 index funds track those weights by design.

Historically, that level of concentration has not guaranteed continued gains. The same S&P Global report found that the 10 largest companies in 1965, which then represented almost half the index, fared poorly over the following 60 years, even as the broader S&P 500 gained about 7.4% annually over that span excluding dividends. More recently, Lone Pine Capital's flagship hedge fund erased almost all of a 44% gain it had posted through June after AI-related bets reversed. Separately, Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio issued an AI bubble warning last week, citing AI-related debt and rising interest rates as risk factors.

The Bloomberg Billionaires Index records wealth accumulated, not returns yet to be earned, and the open question for index holders is whether the largest AI-linked stocks can continue to carry the S&P 500.