Global Rich List 2025: Elon Musk, World’s Richest, Has No Monthly Salary

In March 2025, Hurun Research brought out a Global Rich List 2025, which featured the top 10 world’s richest individuals. Elon Musk—CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and chairman of X (formerly Twitter), and founder of The Boring Company, Neuralink and xAI (rival to ChatGPT) — is yet again on top of the list.

In fact, Musk has retained his top spot since 2021 and his net worth, according to Forbes, is now $424.70 billion, as of May 2025.

 Musk is followed by Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Warren Buffett, Larry Page, Bernard Arnault, Steve Ballmer, Sergey Brin, and finally, Bill Gates, in a descending order.

Monthly Salary of the World's Richest Person

A recent article published by The Wall Street Journal discussed how much should the world’s richest man get paid. The article said that in 2024, Musk did not take any monthly salary from Tesla.

He was the lowest-paid chief executive of an S&P 500 company in 2024. His compensation for his $0 monthly salary from Tesla is essentially based on a huge stock-based deal, which was going through a legal battle for its validity. He does not take any salary from X, nor from SpaceX, despite being a CEO and founder of the former. Yet he still stands as the richest person in the world.

Musk owns around 12 per cent of Tesla, excluding options. For SpaceX, which was established in 2002, he owns around 42 per cent of stakes. For xAI, which is a rival to ChatGPT parent OnenAI, and was founded by him in 2023, his stake is around 54 per cent.

Jeff Bezos’ Monthly Salary

Jeff Bezos, the world’s second richest man, is best known as the founder, former president and CEO of the world’s largest e-commerce and cloud computing platform, Amazon. As of May 2025, he has a net worth of $266 billion.

According to Forbes and the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, Bezos was the wealthiest person from 2018 to 2021, despite earning a humble salary from Amazon. His yearly salary from Amazon, reported by New York Times, stands at $80,000, which is approximately Rs 67 lakh. This means that his monthly salary will be around $6,667 per month.

It is also to be noted that this $80,000 is only his fixed salary, not his overall income from all his stakes and stocks.

Mark Zuckerberg

Zuckerberg, on the other hand, has a base salary of $1 or approximately Rs 83.30 per year from Meta. Contrastingly, he is the third richest person in the world with a net worth of $242 billion.

Larry Ellison and Warren Buffett

Larry Ellison—the fourth richest person—takes away a nominal salary of $1 per month from Oracle. His net worth is $203 billion.

Warren Buffett, on the other hand, has a fixed annual salary of $100,000 at Berkshire Hathaway, which translates to $8,333 per month. He is the fifth richest person with a net worth of $167 billion.

Larry Page, Bernerd Arnault and Steve Ballmer

As a board member of Alphabet, Larry Page has an annual salary of $1. Nonetheless, his total net worth of $164 billion has been generated from his massive shareholdings in Alphabet and so on.

Bernerd Arnault, the CEO of luxury conglomerate LVMH, takes home a staggering annual salary of $10 million per year, which is around $27,000 per day.

Even though there is no recent data on the monthly salary of Steve Ballmer, but when he joined Microsoft in 1980, his monthly salary was $50,000 along with a 10 per cent commission on the profit generated by him.