America's richest technology executives have amassed more than $550 billion this year, with the combined net worth of the founders and executives of America's top 10 technology companies reaching nearly $2.5 trillion by Christmas Eve, as their fortunes soar amid the AI-powered market frenzy.
The staggering sum, up from $1.9 trillion at the start of the year, reflects Wall Street's all-out bet on artificial intelligence, according to Bloomberg data.
The surge came as the S&P 500 rose more than 18%, with gains concentrated in tech stocks related to AI chips, data centers and cloud infrastructure.
Despite worrying in recent months about a potential artificial intelligence investment bubble, Silicon Valley elites have been the main beneficiaries of the hundreds of billions of dollars poured into AI hardware and computing power around the world.
“This is all speculation and has a correlation to the success of AI,” Jason Furman, an economics professor at Harvard University and a consultant on OpenAI, told the Financial Times.
“There are big question marks about whether this will all work out, but investors are betting that it will.”
Elon Musk remains the world's richest person, with his net worth increasing by nearly 50% to $645 billion.
He briefly lost the top spot in September, but was able to regain the top spot thanks to Tesla's $1 trillion compensation deal approved by shareholders and SpaceX's valuation soaring to $800 billion.
Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were among this year's biggest winners, with their wealth increasing by 61% and 59%, respectively.
The search giant has made significant advances in its internal AI models and chips with a rapid upgrade to its Gemini model.
These combined gains convinced investors that Alphabet was back at the forefront of the AI race, fueling a soaring stock price and inflating Page and Brin's net worths.
Mr. Page ended the year with about $270 billion, while Mr. Brin remained close to $251 billion.
Oracle founder Larry Ellison also saw his wealth skyrocket after the company announced a $300 billion data center deal with OpenAI.
But the stock has since tumbled 40% from its September highs, paring some of that gain as investors questioned how Oracle would finance its massive expansion.
Another standout is NVIDIA boss Jensen Huang, whose company has become the world's most valuable publicly traded company with a market capitalization of over $4 trillion.
Hwang's net worth rose to $156 billion, even though filings showed he sold more than $1 billion worth of stocks this year.
In the process, several big tech companies cashed out.
Jeff Bezos sold about $5.7 billion worth of Amazon stock, and Michael Dell sold more than $2 billion worth of Dell Technologies stock. Earlier this month, he and his wife, Susan Dell, pledged a historic $6.25 billion to fund the so-called “Trump accounts” of 25 million American children.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has amassed more than $28 billion in wealth since the start of the year as of Friday, but still fell down the rankings as the company's stock tumbled as investors spooked over huge spending on AI infrastructure and big-ticket talent deals.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates was the only member of the group to end the year poorer than he started after continuing to sell stock to fund philanthropy.
