10 Richest CEOs in the World — Buffett, Musk and More
CEOs take on burdens in business we average people couldn’t imagine having to shoulder. While it makes sense they’d be paid accordingly, some CEOs seem to make more money than any one person could ever spend.
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When coupled with their investments, stock options and other benefits, CEOs can make more money than any of us can even try to calculate, much less imagine. However, the average CEO’s salary is just a pittance compared to the titans of the business world who inhabit the tippy top of the pyramid. They can and do gain and lose millions or billions of dollars in a single day depending on the price fluctuations of their company stock.
The following CEOs are part of that club. Several of them are household names — rock stars of the business world — and the companies they run are part of daily American life. In many cases, the CEOs are the very people who founded those companies. Here’s a look at the CEOs whose personal fortunes would be the envy of most corporations.
David A. Ricks
David A. Ricks has been with Eli Lilly, the US pharmaceutical company, for 25 years in departments including marketing, sales, drug development and operations. However, he ascended to CEO in 2017.
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The market cap of Eli Lilly is $578.3 billion and that has generously trickled down to its top executive. In 2022, Ricks earned nearly $22 million in total compensation. Of that amount, $1.5 million was salary, $2.7 million was a bonus, almost $17 million was stock and he also earned over $216,000 in other compensation.
Warren Buffett
Warren Buffett, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, a holding company that owns many other companies (including Geico, Duracell and Dairy Queen to name a few) is worth $114 billion. That’s Buffett himself, not the company.
Berkshire Hathaway has a market cap of $749.08 billion. Buffett has earned the moniker the “Oracle of Omaha” for his exceptional success as an investor and his frugality. He has also made a pledge to give away 99% of his wealth, and has already donated $55 billion, largely through the Gates Foundation and foundations run by his children.
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Elon Musk
Elon Musk, the controversial Tesla boss keeps bumping in and out of the No. 1 spot of richest CEO. His acquisition of Twitter (now called X) dropped his net worth somewhat, but as of March 10, 2023, he was back in that slot, according to Forbes.
Musk chased Amazon’s former CEO Jeff Bezos heels, with the former briefly eclipsing the latter before Bezos reclaimed his title as the world’s cash king. Musk’s net worth grew by an astonishing $150 billion in the short, chaotic time between March 2020, when the pandemic began and the turn of the next year. As of March 2023, Elon Musk was worth $180 billion.
Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg has always defied the expectations of what a CEO should be. The godfather of social media who co-founded Facebook (now Meta) made his first million when he was 22 years old and never dressed in the stuffy suits of his ilk. Just one year later, Zuckerberg became the youngest self-made billionaire in history at the age of 23.
He’s survived Facebook’s parent company name change to Meta and only seen his net worth grow. As of 2023, he was worth $111.6 billion and the company’s market cap is $823.4 billion.
Jensen Huang
Jensen Huang, who was born in Tawain and who grew up in Thailand, co-founded the graphics-chip maker NVIDIA in 1993 where he has served as its CEO and president ever since. He owns approximately 3% of NVIDIA, which has a total market cap of $1.05 trillion.
Though his net worth is an astonishing $36.55 billion, Huang is known for his philanthropy, not the least of which is giving Stanford University $30 million for an engineering center and another $50 million to Oregon State University for a research center in his name.
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Andy Jassy
Amazon CEO Andrew Jassy made less money in 2022 than in 2021 due to stock options that didn’t perform as well. Amazon, the e-commerce giant founded by Jeff Bezos, has struggled with losses and operating costs, which played a role. His compensation package in 2021 was around $212 million, but he only earned a salary of $1.3 million in 2022. Regardless of that, no need to feel sorry for Jassy, whose total net worth is somewhere around $400 million.
Sundar Pichai
Sundar Pichai was the CEO of Google for four years before his efforts got him promoted to boss of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, which owns the company that made internet searching into a verb (googling) and a whole bunch of other subsidiaries.
The market cap of Alphabet is currently a juicy $1.77 trillion. Pinchai was making $650,000 a year with $200 million in stock grants, according to Forbes. His new position gives him a hefty raise to $2 million a year with $250 million in equity awards if all incentives were met by 2022.
While many like Pinchai’s “softer” approach, he has recently been criticized for not taking a bold and visionary approach regarding new AI tools. It hasn’t messed with his net worth, however. He’s worth around $600 million.
Amin H. Nasser
Under the helm of Amin Nasser, the Saudi Arabian oil company, Saudi Aramco, has been one of the biggest providers of crude oil to the world since 2015. With a market cap of $2.16 trillion, the company is making record profits that are surely trickling down to its CEO. In 2021 alone, the company listed revenues of over $400.5 billion, and assets valued at $576.7 billion.
In addition to CEO, Nasser sits on the International Advisory Board of the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, the Board of Trustees for the King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST), the World Economic Forum’s International Business Council, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Presidential CEO Advisory Board and the JP Morgan International Council.
His net worth could not be found online, but it is guaranteed to be competitive or even surpassing the top paid CEOs in the world.
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Satya Nadella
Microsoft shifted gears when it hired Satya Nadella as CEO in 2014. He spent the ensuing years adding hundreds of billions of dollars to Microsoft’s market cap — which is now valued at $2.47 trillion — while revitalizing the brand and making the software giant relevant again.
Considering his track record, Nadella is one of the industry’s most underpaid CEOs, according to a salary analysis CNBC conducted in 2019 on Nadella’s five-year anniversary with Microsoft. Nadella has been known to prioritize innovations that help better the lives of people. He is worth around $1 billion.
Tim Cook
The richest CEO currently is Apple CEO Tim Cook. He didn’t become a billionaire until August 2020, right around the same time the company he heads approached a market value of $2 trillion.
Today, the company’s market cap is $2.77 trillion and thriving. It’s very rare for non-founder CEOs to become billionaires. While Steve Jobs founded Apple, it was Cook who built it into the world’s most valuable company. Cook is sitting pretty on a net worth of around $1.9 billion.
Andrew Lisa contributed to the reporting for this article.
Methodology: To find the richest CEOs in the world, GOBankingRates searched the top companies in the world by market cap as sourced from Companiesmarketcap. For each company a variety of factors were included such as; [1] company name, [2] market cap, [3] 10/17 stock price, [4] country of origin, [5] current CEO. All data was collected and is up-to-date as-of October 18th, 2023.
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