An interesting thing happened with the global distribution of wealth at the beginning of this year. If, before, the list of the richest people was more or less stable, then now there has been a real upheaval—an actual overturn. Tech entrepreneurs are literally rewriting the rules of the game.

Who is the richest person in the world? Elon Musk has pulled away from the competition by a historic distance. $726 billion is just wild numbers. No one had ever reached such a level of personal wealth before. The growth is driven by the surge in SpaceX valuations, the expansion of Starlink, plus Tesla and his bets on AI and neurotechnology. It’s simply insane growth.

Next come other tech giants. Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, is in second place with $270 billion—Alphabet dominates in AI. Jeff Bezos is third with $255 billion; AWS and Amazon logistics run like clockwork. Then come Sergey Brin, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg—all of them are from the tech sector.

In general, if you look at the full top 10 richest people on the planet, it’s mostly tech people there. Bernard Arnault with his luxury, Steve Ballmer, Jensen Huang from Nvidia, and Warren Buffett closes the list with $151 billion. Everyone else is someone who bet on the future.

What’s driving this boom? First, the exponential growth of artificial intelligence and cloud computing. Second, space and semiconductors have skyrocketed in price. Third, American tech companies simply dominate globally. And most importantly, these are long-term bets that the founders made decades ago—and that are now paying off because they held on to their shares.

The main takeaway: who is the richest today is people who understood early on where technology was heading. And it seems this trend will continue for some time longer.