These Billionaires Have Gotten The Richest Over The Past Year

Surging stock prices drove huge increases in the multi-billion dollar fortunes of Elon Musk, Ernest Garcia III, Judy Faulkner and other fortunate members of The Forbes 400.

^Despite the pandemic, America’s richest people are thriving. The members of this year’s Forbes 400 list, released today, are worth 8% more on average compared to a year ago. A select group of these billionaires have been even more fortunate: The 15 biggest gainers this year saw their already-massive net worths skyrocket by at least 40%. Forbes used closing stock prices from Friday July 24 to calculate the size of the fortunes on the list, our 39th annual ranking of the country’s richest people.

The year’s biggest gainer, in percentage terms, is Elon Musk, who’s an astounding 242% richer than he was on last year’s ranking. A lot has happened since then, including Musk raising more than $2 billion in new funding for his rocket company, SpaceX, and getting two enormous grants of Tesla stock options as part of the audacious compensation agreement he signed with the electric carmaker in 2018. Tesla stock has been on a tear, rising 520% by the time Forbes took a final measure of net worths on July 24 — helping add $48.1 billion to Musk’s net worth since last year’s list. He was the 23rd wealthiest person in America on the 2019 ranking, worth $19.9 billion; this year he’s up to number 7, worth $68 billion. (And he’s gotten even richer recently. At the end of August, when Tesla shares spiked after a 5-for-1 stock split, Musk officially crossed the $100 billion threshold to become the world’s fifth centibillionaire.)

The second-largest gainer this year: Nvidia cofounder and CEO Jensen Huang. Shares of the graphics microchip maker, which acquired Israeli-American networking-technology company Mellanox for $6.9 billion in April, more than doubled since last year amid a push beyond gaming into artificial intelligence and data centers. Thanks to the soaring Nvidia stock, Huang is worth $5.6 billion, or 133%, richer than last year.

Cybersecurity mogul Jay Chaudhry had a huge year as well, with shares of his cloud-based security firm ZScaler rising 90%. Chaudhry grew up in a village in the Himalayas without running water or electricity before immigrating to the U.S. in 1980. He and his family own about 45% of the company, which he took public on the Nasdaq in 2018. His net worth is up 92% this year to $6.9 billion.

Father-son duo Ernest Garcia II and Ernest Garcia III round out the top 5 biggest gainers in percentage terms. Garcia II is the mogul behind Drivetime, one of the nation’s largest used car dealers, but he owes his spot on the top gainers list to his son, Garcia III. The younger Garcia founded Carvana, an online platform for selling used cars and making auto loans, as a subsidiary of Drivetime. He later spun out the firm and took it public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2017. Shares are up more than 1,200% since then, including 77% over the past year — adding billions to the Garcias’ fortunes. Garcia II, Carvana’s largest shareholder, is worth $9.6 billion; his son is worth $4.2 billion.

Two women secured a spot among the year’s big gainers: MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of world’s richest person Jeff Bezos, and Judy Faulkner, founder of Epic, America’s leading medical-record software provider. Thanks to the continued rise of Amazon stock, Scott is 58% richer this year — despite giving nearly $1.7 billion to 116 nonprofits.. She has pledged to eventually give away at least half her fortune. Faulkner, meanwhile, is up 45% as her Wisconsin-based firm faced the Covid-19 Pandemic head-on. The $3.2 billion (2019 sales) company is working to identify labs that could help with testing and distributing protective equipment in Wisconsin, in addition to giving away its telehealth and remote monitoring software. Faulkner founded Epic in a basement in 1979 and serves as CEO.

Here are the 15 biggest gainers, measured by percentage of net worth, on the 2020 Forbes 400 list:

Data are as of July 24, 2020

Elon Musk

NET WORTH: $68 billion (+$48.1 billion, +242%)

Tesla stock rose more than five-fold since last year’s list, making Musk the biggest gainer in percentage terms. His meteoric rise, helped along by two massive grants of Tesla shares as part of his CEO compensation, continued after Forbes finalized net worths for this year’s list in late July. He broke the $100 billion mark in late August, less than two months after Tesla overtook Toyota as the world’s most valuable automaker.

Jensen Huang

NET WORTH: $9.8 billion (+$5.6 billion, +133%)

Nvidia shares are up some 25,000% since Huang took the chipmaker public in 1999, including a 128% jump since last year’s list. Huang, who’s been chief executive since cofounding Nvidia in 1993, owns about 3.6% of its stock.

Jay Chaudhry

NET WORTH: $6.9 billion (+$3.3 billion, +92%)

Before founding cybersecurity firm ZScaler, whose shares have risen 90% since last year, Chaudhry launched four other tech companies that were all acquired. He and his wife, Jyoti, both quit their jobs and used their life savings to start the first of these firms, cybersecurity startup SecureIT.

Ernest Garcia III

NET WORTH: $4.2 billion (+$1.9 billion, +83%)

Garcia III was an executive at his father’s used car dealer and financer DriveTime Automotive Group before cofounding online used car seller Carvana in 2012. Billed as the “Amazon of cars,” Carvana’s stock is up 77% since last year’s list.

Ernest Garcia II

NET WORTH: $9.6 billion (+$3.9 billion, +68%)

His DriveTime operates 127 dealerships across the U.S. and has financed more than 4 million car buyers. The elder Garcia helped fund Carvana, which operated as part of DriveTime before the Garcias spun it out and took it public in 2017.

Peter Gassner

NET WORTH: $4.5 billion (+$1.8 billion, +67%)

Shares of Veeva Systems, the cloud software provider for pharmaceutical and biotech companies that he founded and runs as CEO, are up 60% since last year.

Robert Pera

NET WORTH: $10.5 billion (+$4.1 billion, +64%)

The founder and CEO of wireless equipment maker Ubiquiti Networks, Pera’s fortune is up thanks to a 58% rise in Ubiquiti’s stock since last year. He owns about three-quarters of the publicly traded company.

Jack Dorsey

NET WORTH: $6.8 billion (+$2.6 billion, +62%)

The Twitter cofounder and CEO is richer this year thanks to a 96% bump in the share price of his other company, payments processor Square. That increase more than covers Dorsey’s pledge to give $1 billion of his Square stock to #startsmall, a new philanthropic entity he says will focus on Covid-19 relief, women’s health and education and lobbying for a universal basic income.

MacKenzie Scott

NET WORTH: $57 billion (+$20.9 billion, +58%)

In July, along with her announcement of nearly $1.7 billion in donations to 116 nonprofits, Jeff Bezos’ publicity-shy ex wife said she changed her last name from Bezos to her middle name, Scott. Her fortune is still largely tied up in soaring Amazon stock.

Jeff Bezos

NET WORTH: $179 billion (+$65 billion, +57%)

America’s richest person had a great year, despite some bad headlines — including coronavirus-related protests by Amazon workers and a big-tech antitrust investigation by Congress. With the quarantining world turning to online shopping, Amazon shares climbed by 64% over the past year.

Chase Coleman

NET WORTH: $6.9 billion (+$2.4 billion, +53%)

His investment firm Tiger Global Management is betting big on tech and stay-at-home friendly stocks, which have been roaring through the pandemic.

Alan Trefler

NET WORTH: $4.1 billion (+$1.3 billion, +46%)

Shares of Pegasystems, the software company he started in 1983, which focuses on streamlining business and enhancing customer engagement, are up 42% since last year.

Judy Faulkner

NET WORTH: $5.5 billion (+$1.7 billion, +45%)

In addition to providing telehealth and remote monitoring software to help with the Covid crisis, her software giant Epic supports the medical records of over 250 million patients and is used by top medical centers such as Johns Hopkins and Mayo Clinic. Sales grew 10%, to $3.2 billion, in 2019.

Reed Hastings

NET WORTH: $5 billion (+$1.5 billion, +43%)

Quarantine essential Netflix, which Hastings cofounded and leads as co-CEO, has been cashing in on a world at home, with hits like Tiger King and Extraction. Netflix stock is up 66% since last year

John Doerr

NET WORTH: $10.5 billion (+$3 billion, +40%)

The chairman of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins holds big stakes in high-flying tech giants like Amazon and Google-parent Alphabet, where he serves on the board.