There are plenty of paths to the list of the richest Americans, but some routes have better odds at making you a billionaire than others.
Billionaires have gotten super rich from all sorts of things, including web hosting, video games and Beanie Babies. But some paths are more likely than others to land you on The Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest people in America.
In fact, nearly half of this elite club accumulated their fortunes in one of just two industries: finance and investments or technology. Those two sectors dominated the list this year, just as they did in 2021.
Making money for others is a good way to make money for yourself. Moguls in finance and investments—which includes investors and those in money management, private equity and hedge funds—account for 108 billionaires on the 2022 ranking. That’s up from 103 last year. Long-established members continue to reign, like Charles Schwab, who founded the brokerage firm that bears his name in 1971, and Carl Icahn, the activist shareholder who has been buying big stakes in companies and agitating for change for more than 40 years. Warren Buffett, who made the first ever Forbes 400 list in 1982, is the richest person in finance and investments, with an estimated net worth of $97 billion. These legends appear among America’s richest today alongside others who made their billions in ways that couldn’t even be fathomed four decades ago. Sam Bankman-Fried, 30, and Gary Wang, 29, for instance, founded cryptocurrency exchange FTX together and are now the youngest members of the Forbes 400, and two of four crypto billionaires in the ranks.
Other finance and investments newcomers include trading and investments billionaire Arthur Dantchik, investor and sports mogul Todd Boehly, fintech tycoon Hayes Barnard and private equity billionaires Stephen Deckoff, Carl Thoma and Stephen Feinberg.
The second most common industry for Forbes 400 members is technology, with 65 billionaires, including six of the top ten richest people in America: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Steve Ballmer, the former CEO of Microsoft. Other notable tech billionaires include Melinda French Gates, the former wife of Bill Gates, who is worth an estimated $6.4 billion and MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, who is worth an estimated $37.7 billion—down from $58.5 billion last year, largely due to her accelerated philanthropic giving. Tech newcomers this year include Rick Cohen, the billionaire behind C&S Wholesale Grocers and warehouse automation firm Symbotic; Leo Koguan, founder of IT provider SHI International; and Hua Shen, who became wealthy producing semiconductors.
Nearly all the top 10 industries for members of The Forbes 400 this year were in the top 10 last year too. The one exception: the service industry, which includes billionaires like Carnival cruise line chairman Micky Arison and aircraft leasing pioneer Steven Udvar-Hazy. The service sector replaced healthcare, which lost five billionaires on the 400 this year, including Noubar Afeyan, Robert Langer and Timothy Springer, three billionaires behind Covid-19 vaccine-maker Moderna.