Forbes 400 - The Super-Rich Get Much Richer In The Trump/GOP Economy

 The following is just part of an excellent article on the richest 400 people in the United States by Chase Peterson Within at Forbes.com.

Just how difficult is it to make the Forbes 400 list of America’s richest people these days? Consider this: There are now a record 590 American billionaires who are simply not rich enough.

With the AI and data center boom in full swing and the U.S. stock market near an all-time high, it now takes a record $4.4 billion to rank among the nation’s 400 wealthiest people. That’s $600 million more than last year and $2.7 billion more than a decade ago. In all, this year’s Forbes 400 is richer than ever, worth a combined $8 trillion, up from $6.6 trillion in 2025.

The massive gains start at the top of the list. Elon Musk was already the richest American of all-time last year, with a fortune of $428 billion. Since then, he has more than doubled his wealth over the past 12 months, getting $480 billion richer after taking his rocket maker SpaceX public in the biggest IPO in history in June (and briefly becoming the planet’s first-ever trillionaire). Musk is now worth an estimated $908 billion—a staggering $530 billion more than the list’s No. 2, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who himself is $137 billion wealthier than a year ago (and ranks two spots higher), thanks to a rise in the ecommerce giant’s stock and a much higher valuation of his own rocket firm, Blue Origin. The net worth difference between Musk and Bezos now spans more than three and a half Warren Buffetts, or the bottom 105 billionaires on this year’s Forbes 400 combined.

Alphabet cofounder Larry Page ranks third on this year’s list, worth $278 billion, thanks to a nearly 60% rise in shares of the Google parent company amid a strong year for Google Cloud and Google’s Gemini AI tools. His cofounder, the more charitable (and twice divorced) Sergey Brin ranks fifth, worth $256 billion. In between them, at No. 4, is Michael Dell, whose Dell Technologies is seeing a spike in AI server orders. Overall, the 20 very richest people in America have gotten nearly $1 trillion richer over the past year; as a group, they are now worth a record $4 trillion. Fifteen of them are centibillionaires, meaning someone with a net worth of at least $100 billion. Forbes calculated net worths using share prices from September 4, 2026.

Despite the record high bar for entry, 34 newcomers managed to wrest a spot on the list. Among the new faces are more than a dozen artificial intelligence moguls, including the youngest newcomer, 30-year-old Cognition AI cofounder Steven Hao ($5.8 billion); six cofounders of Claude developer Anthropic (estimated net worths: $15.5 billion each), including Daniela Amodei, who is now the second richest self-made woman in the nation; and Greg Brockman, the cofounder of ChatGPT giant OpenAI, who is the richest newcomer of all this year, worth an estimated $25.5 billion. But AI is far from the only path to super-riches these days. Other newcomers include David MacNeil ($5 billion), whose WeatherTech sells floormats, sunshades and other car accessories; Robert Low ($5.6 billion), who amassed a fortune in trucking and logistics; and U.S. commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, who steered his Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald into an investment in fast-growing crypto firm Tether before taking office and who is now worth an estimated $7.3 billion.

The biggest gainer in sheer dollars was Musk, but the biggest gainer in percentage terms was Josh Kushner, the venture capitalist son of real estate mogul Charles Kushner (and brother-in-law of Ivanka Trump), whose net worth has shot up by more than 220%, to $16.7 billion, this year thanks to his VC firm Thrive Capital nearly tripling its assets under management with smart bets on OpenAI and SpaceX.