The list of Black billionaires around the world continues to grow. Last year Forbes found 23. Now, there are 27, thanks to a few high-profile new members of the three-comma club.

Hip-hop legend Dr. Dre joins the list more than a decade after selling the Beats headphones business he co-founded with record executive Jimmy Iovine to Apple in a $3 billion-plus deal. Now he’s making a big push into cocktails with spirits company Gin & Juice, co-founded alongside Snoop Dogg.

“I’m always thinking forward,” Dre, who Forbes now estimates to be worth $1 billion, said in a 2024 interview with Stephen A. Smith. “I don’t live my life with a rearview mirror.”

He is one of 390 newcomers to Forbes’ World’s Billionaires list this year, which features a record 3,428 billionaires around the planet, including five new or returnee Black billionaires.

In addition to Dre, another superstar—Beyoncé Knowles-Carter—joins the ranks after performing her way onto the billionaires list, with an estimated $1 billion fortune. Her husband Jay-Z is separately worth $2.8 billion and has been a billionaire since 2019.

Two lower profile Black private equity billionaires—David Grain ($2.3 billion), of Grain Management, and Stefan Kaluzny ($1.3 billion), of Sycamore Partners—are also newcomers as well as ForbesBLK 50 listers. And Robert Johnson, the co-founder of the BET network, is a returnee to the billionaires ranks. (One person, Michael Lee-Chin, of the National Commercial Bank of Jamaica, dropped below the $1 billion mark.)

In all, the world’s 27 Black billionaires have a combined net worth of $121 billion, up from 23 worth a combined $96 billion last year. They mainly earned their fortunes in the finance, entertainment and technology sectors.

Aliko Dangote, the founder and CEO of the Dangote Group, the largest conglomerate in West Africa, remains the richest Black person on the planet. He is worth an estimated $28.5 billion, and ranks as the 86th-richest person on the 2026 list.

Rounding out the top three are Palantir Technologies co-founder and CEO Alexander Karp, with an estimated net worth of $13.4 billion, and David Steward, an American IT entrepreneur worth an estimated $12.4 billion.

Here are the 27 Black billionaires on the 2026 World’s Billionaires list.

NET WORTHS ARE AS OF MARCH 1, 2026.

Net worth: $28.5 billion | Source of wealth: Cement, sugar | Citizenship: Nigeria

The founder of Dangote Group, his wealth increased by $4.6 billion over the past year. In 2013, Dangote started the process of converting a Nigerian marshland into the seventh-largest refinery in the world. The cost: $23 billion. Among the challenges of converting a jungle were moving 365 million cubic meters of sand from the sea, building a private port and private roads and booking a 5,000-ton crane, one of only three in the world. “It was the biggest risk of my life,” Dangote told Forbes in 2025. “If this didn’t work, I was dead.”

Net worth: $13.4 billion |Source of wealth: Software firm | Citizenship: U.S.

Karp is the co-founder and CEO of Palantir Technologies, a data mining company used by the FBI, CIA, the Department of Defense and other government agencies. In 2025, Karp’s net worth quadrupled thanks to a........

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