America’s Billionaires: The 400 Richest Americans In 2017

Bill Gates leads the pack as the richest American in 2017, followed closely by another Seattle-area billionaire, Jeff Bezos. Though the Amazon CEO came in at second place on the Forbes 400 list released Tuesday, Bezos did for a brief few hours have the distinction of being richer than Gates over the summer thanks to a surge in Amazon stock.

Forbes noted that the price of admission to the list jumped nearly 18 percent to $2 billion. There were 26 billionaires on the 2016 list who fell off, and 22 newcomers made the list for the first time. One of the notable names that fell of the list is Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank.

To come up with the rankings of the 400 richest Americans, Forbes journalists started with a list of about 600 people considered strong candidates. Forbes looked at public records, news stories and when possible interviewed the candidates in person or via phone. All types of assets were taken into account, and Forbes also factored in debt.

One of the notable losers on the list was President Donald Trump, Forbes says. According to Forbes, Trump’s fortune fell $600 million to $3.1 billion. Trump’s Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross fell off the list altogether when he filed disclosure forms showing he had a net worth of less than $1 billion.

According to Forbes, these are the 10 richest Americans in 2017:

Bill Gates, net worth $89 billion, Microsoft (1)
Jeff Bezos, net worth $81.5 billion, Amazon (2)
Warren Buffett, net worth $78 billion, Berkshire Hathaway (3)
Mark Zuckerberg, net worth $71 billion, Facebook (4)
Larry Ellison, net worth $59 billion, software (5)
Charles Koch, net worth $48.5 billion, diversified (6)
David Koch, net worth $48.5 billion, diversified (6)
Michael Bloomberg, net worth $46.8 billion, Bloomberg LP (8)
Larry Page, net worth $44.6 billion, Google (9)
Sergey Brin, net worth $43.4 billion, Google (10)

>>> Click here to see the full list.

Photo by Marty Lederhandler/Associated Press