America’s Billionaires Had a Good Year Because Lots of Investors Had a Good Year
The likely imminent election of Zohran Mamdani and his “the end goal of seizing the means of production” agenda in New York City is likely to stir a lot of talk about income inequality. Over in the U.K., The Guardian breathlessly reports, “the collective wealth of the top 10 U.S. billionaires has soared by $698 billion in the past year, according to a new report from Oxfam America published on Monday on the growing wealth divide.”
The top ten U.S. billionaires got richer over the past year? How could this possibly happen?
Well, Oxfam, Guardian, pull up a chair and I’ll help you understand.
Some of this jump in wealth comes from the value of these billionaires’ ownership of private companies. Elon Musk owns an estimated 42 percent share in SpaceX; when the value of SpaceX increases, the value of his share increases. While estimating the value of a privately held company has its challenges, every company has money coming in from contracts and money going out in the form of expenditures. Every time SpaceX has a successful rocket launch, people conclude that the value of the company is increasing, because they’re having success at doing something that is very difficult. You can find a list of SpaceX contracts here — NASA, the military, the European Space Agency, Turkish communication satellites. The same is true for Musk’s ownership shares in his other private companies, like X, xAI, Neuralink, and the Boring Company.
Tesla is a publicly traded company; if you want to own a small share of the electric carmaker and can afford it, you’re free to do so. Musk owns approximately 12.8 percent to 13 percent of Tesla’s shares, making him the largest shareholder.
On October 31, 2024, the price of a single share of Tesla stock closed at $249.85. This Friday, the stock price closed at $456.56. When a guy who owns the most shares in a particular company has the stock price nearly double over the course of a year, his net worth is going to take a significant jump.
Now, I know this is going to shock you, but when the stock market goes up, a whole lot of investments go up (but not all of them!). America’s top billionaires, who own many, many shares in their own companies and sometimes lots of other countries’ companies’ shares, have a lot more invested in the market than you and I do. So, it’s not exactly surprising that their net worth would increase a lot.
The Oxfam America report doesn’t bother to tell us who those ten billionaires are, or what their wealth level was on the day they started measuring, or what it was when they stopped measuring. Fellas, if that’s the big headline out of the report, I think that sort of information is worth mentioning.
If you investigate the footnotes of the report you find, “Billionaire wealth data are from the Forbes Real Time Billionaires List. Wealth gains were ascertained by comparing net worth on September 30, 2024, with net worth on September 30, 2025.”
So, looking at the list today, with their wealth listed as of this writing:
- Elon Musk: $497.4 billion
- Larry Ellison: $320 billion
- Jeff Bezos: $254.3 billion
- Larry Page: $232 billion
- Mark Zuckerberg: $222.4 billion
- Sergey Brin: $215.2 billion
- Jensen Huang: $175.7 billion
- Steve Ballmer: $155.9 billion
- Michael Dell: $154.5 billion
- Warren Buffett: $142.5 billion
(Note that Bernard Arnault and family are on the list at number seven, but he’s French, and this report is about U.S. billionaires.)
That adds up to $2.369 trillion.
Now, this is an imperfect comparison, because maybe these billionaires had a great October. But gaining $698 billion over the course of a year out of $2.3 trillion comes out to a 30 percent increase in their collective wealth.
That’s a really good year for any investor, but in the past year, a whole lot of investors have had good years, and some have had great years.
From October 31, 2024, to Friday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average increased from 41,763.46 to 47,562.87 — a gain of 13.89 percent.
The S&P 500 was valued at approximately 5,705.37 on October 31, 2024, and on Friday it closed at 6,840.20 — which comes out to an increase of about 20 percent over the past year.
And then there’s the NASDAQ composite. You often hear it referred to as “the tech-heavy NASQAQ,” and one of the reasons that the NASDAQ includes Intel, Microsoft, EBay, Alphabet (which owns Google), and a bunch of other tech stocks that are riding the AI boom this year. But the NASDAQ also includes Goodyear Tire and Rubber, Kimberly-Clark, Kraft-Heinz, and other big-name non-tech companies.
And the NASDAQ Composite has had a phenomenal year. It’s closing value on October 31, 2024, was approximately 18,095.15. On October 31, 2025, the NASDAQ Composite closed at about 23,204.87. That comes out to a gain of 28.3 percent.
The NASDAQ’s 28.3 percent gain of the past year isn’t all that far away from the 30 percent gain in the net worth of the top ten U.S. billionaires over the past year. If you had invested what you could afford to lose into the companies that make up the NASDAQ last Halloween, you wouldn’t have had the wealth of the ten richest billionaires in America by now, but you might have had a rate-of-return comparable to theirs.
I’m always amused by people who fume about the wealth of billionaires and insist that somehow the reason that they’re poor (or, more often, just not as wealthy as they wish they were) is because of those billionaires. What, did Elon Musk mug you on the street one day? Did Warren Buffett snatch your purse and run off with it? Did Larry Ellison and Larry Page break into your house and steal your flat-screen TV?
Some of these guys are billionaires because they built companies that make things that other people find useful and are willing to pay money to get. People like to buy their cool-looking electric cars, the Pentagon finds that SpaceX is a good way to launch satellites, people like being able to order any book in the world on Amazon, and even if we don’t hear from the “Dude, you’re getting a Dell!” guy any more, people still like buying that company’s computers.
Or, like Warren Buffett, these guys are billionaires because they’re sharp investors. Buffett’s had his share of misses over the years, but he’s built his fortune on searching for and finding good companies with good dividends that are worth holding for the long haul. In 2016, Apple was a well-known and successful company, but Buffett saw growth potential. If you had bought when Buffett did, by this spring, your investment would be worth about seven times what you bought.
Why would you hate this guy for having good judgment about which companies are going to succeed in the long run?
That Oxfam report only mentions just one of those ten billionaires: “Former member of the Trump administration and current world’s richest man, Elon Musk, and his ‘Department of Government Efficiency’, spearheaded layoffs and resignations of an estimated more than 200,000 federal workers dismantling a workforce that has traditionally had higher rates of unionization and provided decent jobs for women and historically marginalized groups.”
I notice that some people who really hate Musk don’t have comparable contempt for other billionaires. I can’t help but suspect if the Oxfam report had been entitled, “Isn’t it terrible that Larry Ellison, Jensen Huang, Steve Ballmer, and Michael Dell have made a lot of money in the past year?” I think a lot of people would have shrugged.
Jim Geraghty is the senior political correspondent of National Review.
Reprinted with Permission from The National Review – By Jim Geraghty
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.
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