Elon Musk’s net worth increased by nearly 50% to $645bn with founders of Google and Amazon also seeing huge wealth gains

A stock market boom in artificial intelligence companies has added more than half a trillion dollars to the wealth of America’s tech barons in the past year, data shows.

The top 10 US founders and bosses of some of the world’s largest technology companies saw their finances swell to nearly $2.5tn, up from $1.9tn, in the year to Christmas Eve, according to figures from Bloomberg.

Elon Musk, already the world’s richest man, has again proved to be one of biggest winners as the AI gold-rush has pushed US stock markets to record highs.

Musk’s net worth increased by nearly 50% year-on-year to $645bn. The tycoon, whose business interests include xAI, an artificial intelligence company, became the first person to have a net-worth of more than $500bn in October this year. He could become the world’s first trillionaire if he hits targets set by Tesla, the electric car company he runs.

Musk sits ahead of Google co-founder Larry Page and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in the overall rankings of the world’s wealthiest billionaires. Page is estimated to be worth $270bn, and Bezos $255bn.

  • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    3 hours ago

    I don’t even know who is paying for most of it, to be honest. I know some people that buy an LLM subscription. I know companies will pay for per-seat licenses to things like Copilot.

    But I see LLM use in Duckduckgo. I see it jammed into every product we are already paying for at work - MS stuff, Slack, hell, I lost track of all the places where some AI bubble has popped up saying how X product has added AI to help me summarize things. But who is really paying extra for any of that?

    And don’t get me started on how I can download and run various models via Ollama or the like on even older GPU(s) and get decent performance for a lot of problems, all without handing over a CC# to someone, along with all my data for them to mine.

    • HellsBelle@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      1·
      1 hour ago

      My 87 yr old landlord had looked up some info the other day. I looked over her shoulder and saw she was reading it from DDGs AI bubble, so then had to explain why she shouldn’t do that anymore.