Meet The 34 Newcomers To The 2026 Forbes 400 List
I t has never been harder to make the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans. With markets booming, the net worth threshold for joining the country’s ultra-wealthy club rose to a record $4.4 billion in 2026, up $600 million from last year. Technology drove the surge as AI companies' valuations skyrocketed and machine intelligence made its way into everything from robotics to biotech and software.
Yet despite the high bar, 34 billionaires managed to muscle their way onto the list for the first time this year, up from 14 newcomers last year. It was the third best year for new Forbes 400 members in the past two decades, behind only 2007, when a pre-financial crisis stock market boom propelled a record 45 new names onto the list, and 2021, when 44 new faces joined amid the pandemic-rebound tech and crypto frenzy.
This year’s 34 newcomers are worth a collective $321 billion, nearly three times as much as last year’s group of first timers. The class of 2026 ranges in age from a 30-year-old AI whiz to a 76-year-old trucking magnate.
T echnology has mainly driven the surge, with 15 of the 34 new names (and nearly 60% of all newcomers' wealth) coming from the sector—mainly from AI giants or AI-related ventures. Leading the cohort is OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman, whose estimated $25.5 billion fortune makes him the richest new face on the ranking and the 45th-richest person in America. Brockman disclosed in May as part of the company’s legal battle with Elon Musk that his stake in OpenAI is worth more than $25 billion.
The Definitive Ranking Of America’s Richest People 2026
Not far behind is robotics entrepreneur Brett Adcock, who debuts on the list with an estimated $23.4 billion net worth after Figure, his AI-powered robotics company announced that it was valued by private investors at $39 billion in 2025. Meanwhile, $93 billion of all the newcomers' wealth comes from six Anthropic cofounders: Daniela Amodei, Dario Amodei, Tom Brown, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan and Sam McCandlish, who are each worth an estimated $15.5 billion. The group left competitor OpenAI in 2021 to start Anthropic and have since established the company as a major player in the AI race, partly due to the popularity of its chatbot, Claude. The cofounders (including a seventh, who is a Canadian citizen) added billions to their net worths in May, when they closed a major funding round that more than doubled the value of their estimated 1.6% individual stakes.
Other AI newcomers include Colossal Biosciences cofounder Ben Lamm (estimated net worth: $5.7 billion), who is best known for his quest to bring back the woolly mammoth . In August, Lamm spun his new AI venture, Astromech, out of Colossal at a $3.8 billion valuation. Astromech uses artificial intelligence to predict biological and evolutionary changes, while Colossal continues its genetic engineering efforts to replicate extinct animals.
Also hailing from the tech world are Databricks cofounders Ali Ghodsi (estimated fortune: $7.6 billion), Ion Stoica ($7 billion) and Matei Zaharia ($7 billion). Private investors valued their software startup at $100 billion last September, $134 billion in February and $190 billion in August, nearly tripling the three cofounders’ fortunes, and propelling them onto The Forbes 400 for the first time.
Palmer Luckey (estimated fortune: $5.9 billion) also joins the ranks this year, 12 years after selling his VR headset maker Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion in 2014. That’s mainly thanks to Anduril, the defense tech startup Luckey cofounded in 2017, which was valued at $61 billion in a May funding round. Other tech additions include Steven Hao ($5.8 billion), cofounder and chief technology officer of AI startup Cognition, and Ratmir Timashev ($5.4 billion), an American-Cypriot citizen who renounced his Russian citizenship in protest of the Ukraine War, founded Ohio-based data management company Veeam Software in 2006 and sold it for $5 billion in 2020.
S everal of this year’s new Forbes 400 members have Elon Musk (at least partly) to thank for their spots on the ranking. The prospectus for SpaceX’s blockbuster June IPO revealed that PayPal cofounder turned venture capitalist Luke Nosek (estimated fortune: $5.5 billion) holds a 0.2% stake in the company worth $4.8 billion. Health tech founder Keith Dunleavy’s self-funded investment firm Apandion was also a pre-IPO backer of SpaceX, helping propel Dunleavy into the club this year, too. Then there’s Antonio Gracias ($17.1 billion), whose Valor Equity Partners was an early backer of multiple Musk companies, including SpaceX, making Gracias one of the biggest winners of the rocketmaker’s IPO—and the third-richest newcomer this year, behind Brockman and Adcock.
Gracias is one of seven finance and investment billionaires who joined The Forbes 400 for the first time in 2026, ranking the sector second in terms of newcomers behind tech. Others include Peter Mallouk ($16.5 billion), CEO and majority owner of wealth management firm Creative Planning, and U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick ($7.3 billion), who spent decades leading investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald before transitioning into politics in 2024 and transferring his equity in Cantor—which made a very lucrative investment in crypto stablecoin giant Tether that same year—to his adult children. Jennifer Gilbert ($4.7 billion), the ex-wife of Rocket Mortgage billionaire Dan Gilbert and one of only four female newcomers to The Forbes 400, made the cut after she and her ex-husband announced their divorce in late 2025.
T hen there are the sports team owners. Dragoneer Investment Group founder Marc Stad ($5.3 billion) debuts on the list after leading a deal to acquire control of the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves and the WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx for $4.5 billion. Cal McNair ($7.7 billion), meanwhile, joins the ranking after inheriting his late mother Janice McNair’s (d. July 2026) 80% stake in the NFL’s Houston Texans.
Other newcomers got rich in everything from concrete (Mike Hollingshead, estimated fortune: $7.2 billion) to construction (Robert Clark, $7 billion) to car accessories (David MacNeil, $5 billion).
Anthropic’s Amodei siblings aren’t the only family members who made their Forbes 400 debut this year. Three second-generation family members of Medline’s founding family–cousins Charlie Mills ($11 billion) and Andy Mills ($5.5 billion) joined the ranks after taking the medical supplies giant their late fathers founded (and which Charlie still chairs) public in the largest IPO of 2025. Andy’s sister Wendy Abrams ($4.7 billion) is also a newcomer, while his cousin Nancy and his other sister Margaret are billionaires but sit below the $4.4 billion cut due to their lower stakes in the company.
In addition to these 34 new faces, six alumni of the list also climbed their way back into the ranks after dropping off in a previous year: investors Clifford Asness ($8 billion), Stephen Mandel Jr. ($5.7 billion), Daniel Sundheim ($4.5 billion) and Pablo Legorreta ($5.6 billion), as well as semiconductor company cofounder Weili Dai ($4.8 billion) and U-Haul chairman E. Joe Shoen ($4.4 billion).
