The Top 10 Billionaires Just Made More Money Than Walmart's Entire Market Cap — Here's Who Won Big in 2023

Talk about wealth inequality on steroids. In 2023, the world’s 10 richest people collectively added $465.4 billion to their net worth—more than Walmart’s entire valuation of $424.4 billion. Let that sink in.

The S&P 500 rallied 24% last year (bounce back from 2022’s 19% crash), and the mega-rich rode that wave hard:

The Big Winners:

• Elon Musk topped the list with $229B in total wealth, pocketing $92B in gains alone. The Tesla and X guy basically printed money.
• Mark Zuckerberg (+$82.5B) – Meta’s AI hype train really paid off
• Jeff Bezos (+$69.9B) – Amazon’s cloud dominance keeps printing
• Bill Gates (+$31.5B), Steve Ballmer (+$45B), Larry Page (+$43.5B) all cashed in on the tech boom

The Staggering Numbers:

• Combined wealth of top 10: $1.47 trillion (would rank as the 6th largest company globally)
• Average wealth per billionaire: $147.4 billion
• Average annual gain per billionaire: $46.5 billion

But not everyone had a banner year. Gautam Adani took the biggest L, losing $36.2 billion after short-seller reports tanked his companies. Among the top 50 richest, only 11 saw their wealth decline.

Meanwhile, Changpeng Zhao (former Binance CEO) still managed to gain $21.8B despite crypto’s rough 2023, now sitting at $34.4B. And Jensen Huang at Nvidia became one of the year’s biggest gainers as the chip giant’s market cap crossed $1 trillion.

Bottom line: The wealth concentration at the top is accelerating. Ten people added more value than a $400B+ retail behemoth. Tech stocks were the wealth machine in 2023, and if you owned big tech or founded one, you basically won the lottery.