Richest 15 Centi-Billionaires See Wealth Surge 33 Percent over 2025, Double S&P 500 Rate
While most Americans face a worsening affordability crisis, a new analysis from the Institute for Policy Studies finds combined wealth of 935 U.S. billionaires surged to $8.1 trillion at the end of 2025, up from $6.7 trillion a year ago.
The biggest gains were among the top 15 U.S. billionaires, those with assets over $100 billion. This elite group saw their wealth surge to $3.2 trillion at the end of 2025, up from $2.4 trillion a year ago, a gain of 33 percent (more than double the S&P 500 increase of 16 percent).
Based on an Institute for Policy Studies analysis of data from the Forbes real time billionaire list from 2025, there are 935 billionaires in the United States with combined wealth totaling $8.1 trillion.
[Note: Bloomberg reported global billionaire wealth increased $2.2 trillion over 2025, in an analysis released several days before the market closed at 4 pm on December 31, 2025. The market fluctuated considerably in the final days of 2025.]
The top five current billionaires and their individual wealth are:
- Elon Musk of Tesla/X and SpaceX with $726 billion, up from $421 billion a year ago (Jan 1, 2025).
- Larry Page of Google, with $257 billion, up from $156 billion a year ago.
- Larry Ellison of Oracle fame with $245.billion, up from $209 billion a year ago.
- Jeff Bezos of Amazon with $242.billion, up from $233.5 billion a year ago.
- Sergey Brin of Google with $237 billion, up from $148.9 billion.
Meanwhile, millions of American families are facing the grueling costs of inflation, price gouging at the grocery store and the gas pump, higher health insurance premiums, and higher cost of living for communities across America. Nearly half of Americans said they find groceries, utility bills, health care, housing and transportation difficult to afford, according to a November 2025 POLITICO poll, and one in four Americans are skipping medical appointments and medication doses because they can’t afford the costs. The affordability crisis is set to worsen as devastating cuts to safety net programs like Medicaid and food stamps are due to hit in 2026.
“The affordability crisis is hitting ordinary Americans particularly hard as we head into the new year, but not everyone is feeling the pain: billionaires are raking in staggering profits off the backs of ordinary workers,” said Chuck Collins, director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies and author of the new book Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power are Ruining our Lives and Planet (The New Press). “These extreme concentrations of wealth and power undermine our daily lives and further rig our economy in favor of the ultra-rich and corporations, while ordinary Americans get a raw deal once again.”
“It’s not just that U.S. billionaires are entering 2026 with record-breaking increases in extreme wealth: it’s that they are also paying far less in taxes compared to the huge amount of wealth they amass. Average taxpayers like you and I pay income tax attriple the rateof the wealthiest Americans,” said Omar Ocampo, researcher at the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies. “Not only are a small number of Americans holding more wealth than the rest of America, but they’re also not paying their fair share in taxes.”
These staggering combined billionaire wealth totals come as the Trump-GOP budget bill passed in 2025 de-funded health insurance, food stamps, and other vital anti-poverty safety net programs, in order to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy and budget increases for militarism and mass deportations.
After poverty-reducing programs enacted in 2021 expired, child poverty more than doubled from 5.2% in 2021 to 13.4% in 2024, and the overall poverty rate has increased from 8% back to nearly 13% in 2024.
4 in 10 children in rural areas receive Medicaid and/or CHIP benefits. With over 700 rural hospitals at risk of closure, and over 300 more at risk due to Medicaid cuts, children in rural areas could lose access to health services.
Full analysis: https://ips-dc.org/resource-richest-15-u-s-centi-billionaires-see-wealth-surge-33-percent-to-3-2-trillion/
See our previous end-of-year billionaire wealth analysis for 2024 entering into 2025 for comparison.
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About the Institute for Policy Studies
For over sixty years, the Institute for Policy Studies has served as a leading multi-issue research organization that provides key fact-based support for bold policy solutions to urgent issues from rising inequality to the climate crisis. Highlights from IPS’s programs and research can be found on Facebook, Twitter/X, and Instagram.
