- Warren Buffett has been a billionaire for nearly four decades.
- Yet the famed investor has only topped Forbes' list of the wealthiest Americans once, in 1993.
Warren Buffett has been a billionaire for nearly four decades – but only topped Forbes' annual list of the 400 richest Americans on one occasion, back in 1993.
Forbes published its annual wealth rankings this week, and included a chart showing who held the top spot every year going back to its inaugural list in 1982. Only eight people have ever been in first place.
They are shipping magnate Daniel Ludwig (1982), oil tycoon Gordon Getty (1983-4), Walmart founder Sam Walton (1985-88), media mogul John Kluge (1989-91), Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates (1992, 1994-2017), Buffett (1993), Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (2018-2021), and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk (2022-23).
Buffett ranked fourth in this year's rankings with a $121 billion fortune, ahead of Gates' $111 billion net worth, but behind Bezos ($161 billion) and Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison ($158 billion).
The famed investor and Berkshire Hathaway CEO was 55 when Forbes first recognized him as a billionaire in 1985, making him one of only 14 Americans in the three-comma club. Now 93, he's remained a fixture on rich lists ever since, even though he's donated more than half his Berkshire stock to good causes.
Gates has outshone Buffett on the wealth front. He has topped the Forbes list 25 times, including for 24 consecutive years between 1994 and 2017. Notably, his fortune swelled from $15 billion to $85 billion between 1995 and 1999 as the dot-com boom took hold, dropped below $60 billion for more than a decade once the bubble burst, and only surpassed $85 billion in 2017 – his last year in first place.
Buffett first met Gates in 1991, and was mainly interested in the computing pioneer "because he was known to be brilliant and because the two of them were neck-and-neck in the Forbes race," biographer Alice Schroder wrote in "The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life."
The pair have been close friends for decades, but the Berkshire chief might enjoy the fact that his sole number-one appearance on the Forbes list in 1993 interrupted what would have been 25 straight years of first-place finishes for Gates.
In 2010 Gates and Buffett cofounded The Giving Pledge along with Melinda French Gates, who was then married to the Microsoft cofounder. They got 40 of America's wealthiest people to agree to donate most of their fortunes to help some of society's most pressing problems – a number that's now risen to 241 individuals from 29 countries.
Separately, it's worth underscoring the magnitude of the richest Americans' wealth gains over the last four decades, and particularly the last six years. Individuals worth less than $10 billion topped Forbes' rankings every year between 1982 and 1994. The leader was worth below $90 billion each year until 2018, when Bezos ranked first with a $160 billion fortune. Forbes pegged Musk's fortune at an astounding $251 billion this year and last year.