Top 10 Richest People in New York 2026 : Billionaires Who Rule the Empire State

Top 10 Richest People in New York 2026 : New York is the undisputed financial capital of the world. From the towering skyscrapers of Manhattan to the trading floors of Wall Street, from the boardrooms of the world’s most powerful private equity firms to the hedge fund offices of Midtown and the Upper East Side, New York has produced more billionaires per square mile than any other city on earth. It is a city where ambition is the currency of survival, where the most brilliant financial minds on the planet compete for supremacy, and where extraordinary wealth is built, compounded, inherited, and multiplied at a speed and scale that leaves the rest of the world in a state of perpetual awe.

In 2026, New York State is home to 154 billionaires with a combined fortune of nearly $975.7 billion a staggering concentration of wealth equivalent to 18.2% of the state’s entire GDP. Over the past year alone, the wealth of the ten richest New Yorkers grew by an extraordinary $42.4 billion, an average of $4.2 billion each equivalent to $2 million per hour, every hour of every day. To put that figure in human terms, it would take the typical New York private-sector worker 82,863 years to earn what these ten individuals made in a single twelve-month period.

These are not merely rich people. They are the architects of financial empires, media dynasties, fashion houses, hedge funds, and private equity behemoths that shape the global economy. Their decisions move markets, influence governments, fund scientific research, and determine the financial trajectories of millions of people around the world. This article tells the story of the ten richest people in New York in 2026 who they are, how they built their fortunes, what they own, and why their wealth continues to grow at a pace that defies ordinary comprehension.

Quick Overview Table

All net worth figures sourced from Forbes data as of May 2026.

1. Michael Bloomberg Net Worth: $109.4 Billion

Michael Bloomberg is the richest person in New York, the richest person in the history of the city, and one of the most consequential businessmen, politicians, and philanthropists the United States has ever produced. His story is one of the most extraordinary in the annals of American capitalism a man who was fired from a Wall Street job at the age of 39 and, rather than seeking another position, channelled his redundancy payment and his intellectual ingenuity into building a financial data company that would go on to become one of the most indispensable pieces of infrastructure in the entire global financial system. In 2026, that company Bloomberg LP has made him worth an estimated $109.4 billion, more than double his net worth just six years ago in 2020.

Michael Rubens Bloomberg was born on Valentine’s Day 1942 in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up in a modest middle-class family in Medford. His father was a bookkeeper, and Bloomberg famously worked in a parking lot to help fund his education. He attended Johns Hopkins University, earning a degree in electrical engineering, before completing an MBA at Harvard Business School in 1966. Armed with his education and an exceptional analytical mind, he joined Salomon Brothers one of Wall Street’s most powerful investment banks where he spent fifteen years rising through the ranks to become a partner.

His dismissal from Salomon Brothers in 1981, when the firm was acquired by commodity trading company Phibro, proved to be the defining moment of his life. Armed with a $10 million severance package and the accumulated knowledge of fifteen years on Wall Street, Bloomberg identified a gap in the market that no one else had fully addressed: financial professionals needed faster, more comprehensive, and more analytical access to market data than anything currently available. He founded Innovative Market Systems later renamed Bloomberg LP and developed the Bloomberg Terminal, a specialised computer system that delivered real-time market data, financial analytics, and trading tools directly to traders’ desks.

The Bloomberg Terminal was immediately transformative. Merrill Lynch became the first client, ordering 22 terminals in 1982, and the product spread through Wall Street with the speed of revelation. Today, Bloomberg LP operates more than 325,000 terminals globally each charging a subscription fee of approximately $24,000 per year generating annual revenues estimated at close to $15 billion. Bloomberg owns 88% of the privately held company, and the extraordinary, compounding growth of that stake over four decades of expansion has built his fortune to a level that places him comfortably among the twenty richest people on earth.

Bloomberg served three terms as Mayor of New York City from 2002 to 2013 controversially lobbying for a change in term limits to enable the third and ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, spending over $1 billion of his own money on that campaign. He has pledged to give away the majority of his wealth through the Giving Pledge and has already donated billions to public health initiatives, gun control advocacy, climate change action, and educational causes. His philanthropic giving is among the largest by any living individual in American history.

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2. Julia Koch & Family Net Worth: $81.2 Billion

Julia Koch is the richest woman in New York, the richest woman in American business, and one of the wealthiest individuals of any gender anywhere on earth. Her fortune was inherited from her husband David Koch, one of the two brothers who owned Koch Industries widely regarded as the second largest privately held company in the United States who passed away in August 2019 at the age of 79. Upon his death, Julia and her three children inherited David’s 42% stake in Koch Industries, transforming her overnight into one of the most financially powerful women in the world. She has since proven herself to be a sophisticated steward of that wealth, making major investment decisions most notably a reported $1 billion purchase of a 10% stake in the New York Giants NFL franchise that demonstrate both financial acumen and a strategic vision for her family’s long-term economic legacy.

Born in Iowa and raised in Arkansas, Julia Flesher studied fashion design and moved to New York in the 1980s to pursue a career in the fashion industry. She worked as an assistant to designer Adolfo before meeting David Koch at a party in the late 1980s. They married in 1996, and Julia spent much of her married life as a prominent figure in New York City’s elite social, philanthropic, and cultural worlds, co-chairing major charity galas, supporting arts institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York City Ballet, and building a reputation as one of the city’s most influential philanthropic figures.

Koch Industries, the source of the family’s colossal fortune, is a sprawling, privately held conglomerate with operations across oil refining, chemical manufacturing, paper products, consumer goods, financial trading, and numerous other sectors. The company employs approximately 120,000 people worldwide and generates revenues estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually, though exact figures are never publicly disclosed as it remains entirely privately held. The breadth and scale of Koch Industries’ operations means that the family’s wealth is deeply diversified across industries, geographies, and economic cycles in a way that provides extraordinary stability and resilience.

Julia and her three children David Jr., John, and Mary Julia maintain a significant real estate portfolio in New York City, including a famous duplex at 740 Park Avenue, one of the most prestigious residential addresses in the world. Their combined fortune of $81.2 billion makes them the second wealthiest family based in New York by a margin of nearly $30 billion over their nearest rival.

3. Stephen Schwarzman Net Worth: $40.3 Billion

Stephen Schwarzman is one of the most powerful financiers in the history of Wall Street and the architect of the world’s largest private equity firm Blackstone Group which he co-founded with fellow billionaire Peter Peterson in 1985 with a starting capital of just $400,000. In the four decades since, Schwarzman has built Blackstone into a financial colossus managing over $1 trillion in assets, making it the largest alternative asset management firm in the world by any meaningful measure. His personal fortune of $40.3 billion places him third among New York’s richest individuals and makes him one of the most influential private investors alive.

Born in Philadelphia in 1947 to a family that owned a dry goods store, Schwarzman attended Yale University before completing his MBA at Harvard Business School. He began his Wall Street career at Lehman Brothers, where he worked alongside future co-founder Peter Peterson, and it was through that partnership that the vision for Blackstone was born. The firm’s initial focus on mergers, acquisitions, and leveraged buyouts gradually expanded into real estate, credit, hedge funds, and infrastructure an extraordinarily diversified platform that now touches virtually every major sector of the global economy.

Blackstone’s most famous and profitable investments include the purchase and transformation of Hilton Hotels acquired for $26 billion in 2007 and eventually generating a profit reported to be approximately $14 billion when the company was relisted and numerous real estate investments across office, residential, logistics, and hospitality properties worldwide. The firm’s real estate portfolio alone, which includes the iconic Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village residential complex in Manhattan, represents one of the largest private property ownership portfolios anywhere on earth.

Schwarzman is a significant philanthropist who has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to educational institutions including MIT, Yale, and Oxford University, where the Schwarzman Centre at the University of Oxford bears his name following a landmark £150 million donation. He has also donated $350 million to MIT for AI research and $100 million to Yale for a student centre. His book “What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence” became a New York Times bestseller and provides rare insight into his management philosophy and the principles that built his extraordinary career.

4. Alain Wertheimer Net Worth: $39.4 Billion

Alain Wertheimer is one of the most quietly powerful billionaires in New York a man who guards his privacy with the same meticulous care that his family’s company applies to protecting the mystique of the world’s most legendary luxury brand. As the co-owner and chairman of Chanel alongside his brother Gerard, Alain controls one of the most profitable and culturally significant fashion houses in the history of luxury goods a brand so powerful that it operates entirely without advertising to most of the world, relying instead on decades of accumulated prestige, scarcity, and the enduring genius of Coco Chanel’s original vision.

Alain and Gerard Wertheimer are the grandsons of Pierre Wertheimer, a French businessman who became Coco Chanel’s business partner in the 1920s when he provided the funding and distribution network that transformed her perfume idea into Chanel No. 5 the most famous fragrance in human history. Their partnership agreement gave the Wertheimer family a 70% stake in the Chanel perfume business, a share that later extended to the entire fashion house, while Chanel herself received only 10%. Pierre’s aggressive business acumen secured the family an extraordinarily valuable inheritance that has only appreciated in value across a century of compound luxury brand growth.

Chanel is estimated to generate annual revenues of approximately $20 billion, placing it among the most profitable luxury brands in the world. Unlike most of its competitors LVMH, Kering, Richemont Chanel remains entirely privately held, with no public shareholders, no quarterly earnings calls, and no obligation to disclose its financial performance to anyone outside the family. This extraordinary privacy makes it virtually impossible for outside observers to value the business precisely, but estimates consistently place it among the most valuable fashion companies on earth.

Both brothers reside in New York, having based themselves in the United States for decades, and their combined fortune of $78.8 billion $39.4 billion each reflects the staggering value embedded in a brand that has defined luxury fashion for over a century.

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5. Gerard Wertheimer Net Worth: $39.4 Billion

Gerard Wertheimer shares the fifth position on this list with an identical net worth to his brother Alain, as the two men jointly own and control Chanel in an equal partnership that has governed one of the world’s most valuable private companies for decades. While Alain is more closely associated with the strategic and operational leadership of the business, Gerard is understood to focus particularly on the watchmaking and jewellery divisions of the Chanel empire, including the Chanel Horlogerie operation and the brand’s fine jewellery collections, which have grown dramatically in commercial significance over the past two decades.

Gerard, like his brother, lives in New York and maintains an extremely private personal profile that contrasts dramatically with the public visibility of the brand his family controls. He has given very few interviews throughout his career, appears rarely at public events despite Chanel’s enormous presence on the global cultural calendar, and has cultivated a reputation for extreme discretion that is widely respected within the luxury industry. His personal life his family, his interests, his investments beyond Chanel is almost entirely unknown to the outside world, a privacy achievement that is extraordinarily difficult to maintain for anyone of his wealth and influence.

The two Wertheimer brothers together represent the wealthiest European heritage in New York City and the most powerful family in global luxury fashion a dynasty built on a grandmother’s brilliant fashion instinct, a grandfather’s shrewd business partnership, and three generations of stewardship that have kept one of capitalism’s most remarkable brands not just alive but perpetually thriving.

6. Marilyn Simons & Family Net Worth: $32.5 Billion

Marilyn Simons is the widow of James “Jim” Simons widely regarded as the greatest investor in the history of financial markets who passed away in May 2024 at the age of 86. Together with her family, she inherited a fortune built through Renaissance Technologies, the hedge fund that Jim Simons founded in 1982 and which has delivered the most extraordinary investment returns in the history of finance. The Medallion Fund, Renaissance’s flagship vehicle available only to employees and insiders, has averaged annual returns of approximately 66% before fees a performance that no other investment vehicle in the world has come close to replicating over any comparable time period.

Jim Simons was unlike any other Wall Street titan. A mathematician of genuine distinction before he turned to finance, he had cracked Soviet codes as a codebreaker during the Cold War, earned a PhD from Berkeley, and made significant contributions to differential geometry the branch of mathematics that underpins string theory and much of modern theoretical physics before deciding in his forties that the same mathematical and computational approaches that solved abstract problems in pure mathematics could be applied to financial markets. He was correct to a degree that stunned the financial world.

Renaissance Technologies pioneered quantitative investing using mathematical models, statistical analysis, and vast computational power to identify patterns in market data invisible to human analysts. This approach, revolutionary in the 1980s and now widely imitated, generated returns so consistently extraordinary that the financial world has never fully explained them. The fund’s secrecy is legendary its algorithms and models are among the most closely guarded intellectual properties in the world, with employees required to sign non-disclosure agreements that persist for years after their departure.

Marilyn Simons and her family are significant philanthropists, with the Simons Foundation which Jim established and which Marilyn now chairs being one of the largest private funders of scientific research in the United States, focused particularly on mathematics, physics, biology, and autism research.

7. Israel Englander Net Worth: $25.8 Billion

Israel Englander is one of the most financially successful and least publicly recognised billionaires in New York a quantitative hedge fund pioneer who built Millennium Management from a $35 million startup in 1989 into one of the world’s largest and most sophisticated alternative asset management firms, currently managing approximately $70 billion in assets and executing more than ten million trades on an average trading day. His net worth of $25.8 billion places him seventh among New York’s richest individuals and makes him one of the most successful investors of his generation.

Born in Brooklyn in 1948, Englander grew up in a working-class New York family and developed his interest in financial markets from an early age. He began his career trading options on the American Stock Exchange before founding Millennium Management with co-founder Ronald Shear, initially focusing on equity arbitrage strategies. Over the decades, Millennium evolved into a vastly more complex and sophisticated operation employing thousands of portfolio managers, analysts, and quantitative researchers working simultaneously on thousands of independent trading strategies across every major asset class and geography.

Millennium’s defining characteristic is its unique organisational structure rather than operating as a single unified fund making concentrated bets, it functions as a vast network of semi-autonomous trading teams, each running their own strategies within strict risk parameters set by Englander and his senior team. This multi-manager, multi-strategy approach provides extraordinary diversification and has enabled Millennium to deliver consistently strong risk-adjusted returns across multiple market environments, including periods of extreme volatility that have devastated more conventionally structured hedge funds.

8. Rupert Murdoch & Family Net Worth: $24.8 Billion

Rupert Murdoch is the most controversial and influential media proprietor in the history of modern journalism a man whose newspapers, television networks, and digital platforms have shaped political discourse, influenced elections, and changed the cultural landscape of the English-speaking world across seven decades of relentless, aggressive, and brilliantly opportunistic expansion. At 95 years old, the Australian-born media titan remains a figure of extraordinary power and endless fascination, his New York residence making him and his family the eighth richest household in the city with a combined fortune of $24.8 billion.

Born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1931 as the son of Sir Keith Murdoch a prominent Australian newspaper proprietor Rupert inherited his father’s Adelaide-based newspaper business in 1952 at just 21 years old and immediately demonstrated the aggressive, deal-hungry instincts that would define his entire career. He transformed a regional Australian newspaper publisher into a global media empire through a series of acquisitions that accelerated decade by decade British newspapers including The Times and The Sun, American tabloids, 20th Century Fox, the creation of Fox News, the launch of BSkyB satellite television in Britain, and the purchase of The Wall Street Journal for $5 billion in 2007.

Fox News, launched in 1996, became perhaps the single most consequential commercial and political achievement of his career a cable news channel that captured a vast, underserved conservative audience in the United States and grew to be the most watched cable news network in American television history. Its combination of political influence and commercial profitability made it the most valuable asset in the News Corp empire. In recent years, Murdoch’s succession planning became a global media saga in its own right, with the family’s internal disputes over control of the empire playing out in courts and boardrooms alike. In 2023, he announced his retirement from the roles of chairman of Fox Corporation and News Corp, handing operational control to his son Lachlan while retaining substantial personal wealth.

9. Leonard Lauder Net Worth: $24.2 Billion

Leonard Lauder is the chairman emeritus of Estée Lauder Companies the global cosmetics and beauty conglomerate founded by his mother Estée Lauder in 1946 that has grown to become one of the most powerful beauty companies in the world, with a portfolio of brands including Clinique, MAC, Bobbi Brown, La Mer, Jo Malone, and dozens of others generating combined revenues in excess of $15 billion annually across more than 150 countries. His personal fortune of $24.2 billion represents the accumulated value of decades of leadership that transformed his mother’s kitchen-table cosmetics operation into a genuinely global luxury beauty empire.

Born in New York City in 1933, Leonard grew up working in his mother’s fledgling business from a young age, developing an instinctive understanding of the beauty industry and the consumer psychology that drives it. After completing his MBA and serving in the US Navy, he joined Estée Lauder full-time in 1958 and spent the next decades building the company’s international presence, its department store distribution strategy, and its approach to brand building pioneering what became known as the “gift with purchase” promotional strategy that transformed beauty marketing industry-wide.

Under Leonard’s leadership as CEO from 1982 to 1999 and then chairman through the 2000s, Estée Lauder expanded from a primarily American company into a global luxury beauty empire, acquiring prestigious brands and building the portfolio diversification that has made the company resilient across economic cycles. He stepped back from day-to-day leadership to focus on his extraordinary art collection one of the finest private Cubist art collections in the world, featuring works by Picasso, Braque, and Léger and on philanthropy through the Lauder Foundation and his significant donations to institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art.

10. Donald Newhouse Net Worth: $15.6 Billion

Donald Newhouse is the least publicly visible individual on this list and arguably the most influential media owner that most people have never heard of. As the sole surviving member of the Newhouse family that controls Advance Publications the privately held media conglomerate that publishes some of America’s most widely read magazines, newspapers, and digital media Donald has spent decades quietly building and stewarding a media empire whose scale and influence are dramatically underappreciated by the general public.

Advance Publications, the company Donald controls, owns Condé Nast the publisher of Vogue, The New Yorker, GQ, Vanity Fair, Wired, Architectural Digest, Pitchfork, and many of the most prestigious magazine brands in the world. It also holds a significant stake in Reddit the social media platform that has become one of the most trafficked websites in the United States and historically owned a vast network of American regional newspapers. The combination of premium editorial brands, digital assets, and strategic media investments has made Advance Publications one of the most valuable private media companies in the country.

Born in 1929, Donald is the son of S.I. Newhouse Sr., who built the original Newhouse newspaper empire through aggressive acquisitions across American regional markets. Donald and his late brother S.I. Newhouse Jr. the legendary Condé Nast chairman who died in 2017 transformed the company from a newspaper-focused operation into a global luxury media powerhouse. At 96 years old, Donald maintains control of the family’s business interests and his $15.6 billion fortune reflects the enduring commercial value of the premium editorial brands his family has cultivated across generations.

What Makes New York the World Capital of Billionaire Wealth?

The extraordinary concentration of wealth in New York is not accidental. It is the product of a specific, self-reinforcing ecosystem that has been developing for over a century and that continues to generate new fortunes even as old ones compound. Several factors explain why New York produces and retains more billionaires than any other city on earth.

The first and most important is Wall Street and the financial services industry. New York is the headquarters of the global capital markets the place where stocks, bonds, derivatives, currencies, and commodities are traded, priced, and distributed to investors around the world. The financial industry generates wealth through management fees, performance incentives, proprietary trading profits, and advisory fees at a scale that no other industry can match. Hedge funds, private equity firms, investment banks, and asset managers based in New York collectively manage tens of trillions of dollars in assets, and the compensation structures of those industries mean that a relatively small number of individuals at the very top capture an extraordinary share of the returns.

The second factor is New York’s status as the global capital of media, advertising, fashion, and culture. The Wertheimer brothers’ Chanel fortune, Leonard Lauder’s Estée Lauder empire, and Rupert Murdoch’s media dynasty all reflect New York’s position as the creative and commercial epicentre of industries that generate enormous global revenues. The third factor is the city’s role as a magnet for the world’s most ambitious and talented people a self-selecting concentration of human capital that generates innovation, deal flow, and competitive intensity at a level no other city can match.

The fourth and increasingly important factor is the role of private business ownership. Eight of the ten fortunes on this list were built through privately held companies Bloomberg LP, Koch Industries, Chanel, Millennium Management, Advance Publications that have never been subjected to the dilution, volatility, and short-term pressures of public ownership. Keeping a company private allows its owners to compound wealth across decades without selling shares, paying dividends, or exposing their business strategies to public scrutiny.

The ten richest people in New York in 2026 represent a cross-section of the most powerful economic forces in the modern world financial engineering at Blackstone and Millennium Management, media domination at Bloomberg LP and Murdoch’s empire, luxury brand stewardship at Chanel and Estée Lauder, industrial inheritance at Koch Industries, and the mathematical genius that built Renaissance Technologies. Together, they hold wealth that exceeds the GDP of most countries and exercise influence that extends far beyond any single city, industry, or nation.

New York’s billionaire class is not a static entity. It grows, evolves, and renews itself with each generation of extraordinary talent that the city attracts and rewards. The names at the top of this list in 2036 will include some of the same families and some entirely new arrivals perhaps from artificial intelligence, biotechnology, climate technology, or financial innovation that does not yet exist. Whatever the source of the next generation of New York wealth, the city’s unique combination of ambition, infrastructure, talent, and capital markets means it will almost certainly remain the richest square mile on earth for generations to come.

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