The Rise & Fall of the Richest People in Tech (1987 - 2026)

Thirty-nine years of technology fortunes, as a bar chart race. David Packard led in 1987 with about $2 billion. Bill Gates passed him in 1990 and stayed on top for twenty-five years — through Windows, through the dot-com bubble, through the crash. Jeff Bezos took the lead in 2015. Elon Musk took it in 2021 and never gave it back; by 2026 he is at roughly $714 billion, more than three hundred times the leader of 1987. The real race is behind the leader. Masayoshi Son goes from $76 billion in 2000 to $5.6 billion in 2010. An Wang, Bob Galvin, Charles Wang, Ted Waitt and Hiroshi Yamauchi hold the board through the early years and then drop off it entirely. Jensen Huang appears near the bottom in 2017 and is seventh by 2026. 34 people · personal net worth in US dollars · no narration. CHAPTERS 0:00 PC Era Begins — Rise of Clones 0:21 Software Kings — Market Expands 0:44 Windows Rising — OS Dominance 1:09 Internet Dawn — Web 1.0 Starts 1:34 Netscape IPO — The Dotcom Boom 1:59 Broadband Era — Faster Access 2:26 The Bubble — Euphoria Peaks 2:53 Dotcom Crash — Market Resets 3:21 Web 2.0 Dawn — Social Media 4:05 Cloud Computing — AWS Launches 4:36 Mobile Era — App Stores 5:09 Tech Recovery — Silicon Valley 5:49 Social Giants — FB Goes Public 6:38 Big Data Era — Machine Learning 7:38 Trillion Valued — Tech Dominance 8:27 Pandemic Tech — Digital Shift 9:39 AI Revolution — Chatbots Rise 10:38 AI Integration — Space Economy PHOTO CREDITS All 23 portraits come from Wikimedia Commons and were cropped to a circle. Photographer / source — licence: Azim Premji — World Economic Forum — CC BY-SA 2.0 Bill Gates — Bogdan Hoyaux / European Union — CC BY 4.0 David Packard — Department of Defense Historical Office Public Affairs — Public domain Elon Musk — Gage Skidmore — CC BY-SA 4.0 Gordon Moore — Intel Free Press — CC BY-SA 2.0 H. Plattner — Epic-chair — CC BY-SA 3.0 Jack Ma — Foundations World Economic Forum — CC BY 2.0 Jeff Bezos — SECWAR — Public domain Jensen Huang — The White House — Public domain Larry Ellison — Oracle PR Hartmann Studios — CC BY 2.0 Larry Page — Stansfield PL — CC BY-SA 3.0 Lee Kun-hee — Republic of Korea — CC BY-SA 2.0 M. Zuckerberg — The White House — Public domain Ma Huateng — 中国新闻网 — CC BY 3.0 Marc Benioff — Salesforce. — CC BY-SA 2.0 Masayoshi Son — European Communities, 2025 / EC - Audiovisual Service — CC BY 4.0 Michael Dell — Village Global — CC BY 2.0 P. Omidyar — Joi 15:42, 2 August 2007 (UTC) — CC BY 2.0 Paul Allen — Miles Harris — CC BY-SA 3.0 Sergey Brin — Steve Jurvetson — CC BY 2.0 Shiv Nadar — Unknown authorUnknown author — CC BY-SA 4.0 Steve Ballmer — Steve_ballmer_2007_outdoors2.jpg: Martin Olsson (usernam — CC BY-SA 3.0 Steve Jobs — Matthew Yohe — CC BY-SA 3.0 LOGOS The 11 people with no freely-licensed portrait are shown by their company mark: Bill Hewlett — HP William Ding — NetEase Colin Huang — Pinduoduo An Wang — Wang Laboratories Charles Wang — CA H. Yamauchi — Nintendo Bob Galvin — Motorola J. Morgridge — Cisco Ted Waitt — Gateway 2000 MacKenzie Scott — Amazon Zhang Yiming — ByteDance Music: Epic Pride; Bizet, L'Arlesienne Suite No. 1 - Prelude. Figures are well-known approximations, for entertainment, not research. #barchartrace #techbillionaires #networth #datavisualization #techhistory