After ranking as runner-up the past two years, Elon Musk reclaims the No. 1 spot on Forbes’ 2025 World’s Billionaires list, our annual ranking of the planet’s wealthiest people.

The 53-year-old businessman, who has vaulted to political prominence as one of President Donald Trump’s closest advisors, boasts a net worth of $342 billion (as of March 7, when Forbes locked in net worths for the list), making him not just the richest person in the world, but the richest person Forbes has ever tracked. He’s $118 billion richer than second-place Mark Zuckerberg—a gap that is more than the entire net worth of Bill Gates and roughly equal to the market capitalization of Spotify. The man who took Musk’s title on the last two lists, LVMH’s Bernard Arnault, is now worth roughly half as much as Musk, at $178 billion.

Since last year’s ranking, Musk’s already enormous fortune has grown by 75%, or $147 billion. All of Musk’s largest assets have gone up in value. Even Tesla, which jumped 90% between the night before the election and the end of December before crashing, is up 50% since last year’s list, but SpaceX is now Musk’s most valuable asset for the first time in five years. The rocket and satellite company is worth $350 billion, nearly double its valuation from last year. (Musk owns an estimated 42% of SpaceX and 13% of Tesla excluding options.)

Musk’s artificial intelligence business, xAI, raised $6 billion from private investors at a $50 billion valuation in November, doubling its valuation from six months earlier. Even the social media company X is showing signs of life, though with a major assist from Musk’s financial engineering: Last Friday, Musk announced that xAI was acquiring X in an all-stock deal that valued X at an enterprise value of $45 billion: $33 billion of equity plus $12 billion of debt, or $1 billion more than what Musk paid for Twitter back in 2022. The deal appears to value xAI at $80 billion – a $30 billion bump from just three months ago – bringing the overall enterprise value of the newly combined xAI up to an astounding $113 billion.

This is Musk’s 14th consecutive appearance on Forbes’ annual World’s Billionaires ranking. He made his debut in 2012 with an estimated net worth of $2 billion. Back then, SpaceX was valued at just $1.8 billion and Tesla’s market capitalization was less than $4 billion. From 2015 until early 2020, Musk’s fortune grew slowly but steadily from $12 billion to $25 billion. Then, during Covid, it exploded, fueled by meme stock investors shooting Tesla’s stock to the moon. Musk’s net worth hit $151 billion on the 2021 list, then $219 billion a year later.

As Musk has gotten richer, he’s also used his fortune to become a political power player. He was Trump’s biggest campaign donor, spending nearly $300 million during the 2024 election cycle, while remaking X into a MAGA-friendly megaphone. It paid off hugely as he became the first person ever worth more than $400 billion in December, when Tesla’s market cap hit its all-time high of $1.5 trillion. As Trump’s top advisor and head of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Musk has exerted sweeping powers over the federal government, including in ways that have seemingly benefited his businesses. Starlink, the satellite internet service controlled by SpaceX, is reportedly on the verge of securing a $2.4 billion contract with the Federal Aviation Administration. The State Department planned to purchase $400 million of armored Tesla vehicles in September, according to a public document, before seemingly backing down amid public outcry.

Musk shows no signs of slowing his political involvement. As recently as last weekend he was in Wisconsin using his money in an attempt to influence Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race. On Sunday, Musk gave $1 million checks to two different people who had already cast their votes. Musk and groups aligned with him spent $20 million to influence the race.

He may be Earth’s richest person and one of its most powerful, but Musk still has one eye trained on a different celestial body altogether: Mars. In his inauguration speech, Trump vowed to bring American astronauts to the red planet. Or, as Musk later put it: “We’re going to take DOGE to Mars.”