Ever wondered what it takes to join the ranks of the rich lists? We don’t need to tell you that it’s a lot of money, nor that Elon Musk definitely qualifies. But, in the case of the list of America’s richest people, it turns out that there’s actually a minimum figure – and it’s gone up a hefty chunk since last year.
The list in question is the Forbes 400, a yearly ranking published by Forbes magazine of the wealthiest people in the United States. It takes into account not just cold hard cash, but other assets like stakes in companies, those big ol’ mega yacht and car collections, and even jewelry and art.
Getting onto the list this year required more of the above than ever – admission to this elite club came at the price of having a minimum net worth of $3.3 billion. That’s $400 million more than last year.
An extra $400 million might sound like an impossible target to reach for the vast majority of us, but it hasn’t stopped new people from joining the list. Though the very top is littered with the usual suspects – Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg – there are 23 new people on the list.
Just making the rankings (we say just, we mean by 100 million dollars, which isn’t exactly a small amount of money) are Bill, Susan, and Ted Alfond, siblings who are worth $3.4 billion dollars. Their fortune comes from their father, Harold Alfond, who sold the Dexter Shoe Company to America’s current fifth richest person, Warren Buffet.
Those are some of the newcomers, but who got kicked off the list by the new criteria? There were 10 people in total, including software firm Workday CEO and founder Aneel Bhusri, who fell off the list despite actually being worth more than he was in 2023.
In fact, the collective list has only become richer since last year, to the tune of nearly $1 trillion. With that amount of money, you wouldn’t just be able to buy a lot of Big Macs – you’d be able to buy the actual company of McDonald’s, as it’s worth today, four times over.
How do we know how much wealth all these people have? You could probably take a wild guess based on the companies they own or what you hear about them in the news, but this particular list gets into the details, using data like documents from the courts and the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as interviewing the list members themselves.
