New Zealand’s wealthiest people are collectively worth $129 billion, up from $102 billion a year ago, as a surge in technology fortunes pushed the country’s billionaire count to 26, eight more than last year. The figures come from the 2026 National Business Review Rich List, the annual stocktake of the country’s biggest private fortunes, which this year tells a story of money piling up fastest in software, space and start-ups.
The jump of $27 billion in a single year is one of the largest the list has recorded. Almost all of it traces back to the same place. Of the 19 people who debuted on the list, 11 made their money in technology and services, a category that more than doubled in value from $14.64 billion to $31.93 billion. The newcomers alone are worth a combined $10.22 billion, a sign that the wealth being created at the top is increasingly coming from companies that barely existed a decade ago.
Holding the top spot for another year are brothers Nick and Mat Mowbray, the founders of toy company Zuru, whose fortune is put at $20 billion. The pair built their business from a shed in the Waikato into a global manufacturer, and they remain comfortably clear of the rest of the field. The top ten names on the list control $64 billion between them, roughly half of all the wealth counted.
The most dramatic single move belongs to Sir Peter Beck, the Invercargill-raised founder of Rocket Lab. His estimated wealth climbed from about $650 million to roughly $11 billion over the year, lifted by the soaring value of his Nasdaq-listed launch company. Beck has said the company’s American sharemarket listing has created hundreds of millionaires among its staff and early backers, a reminder that the gains at the very top tend to ripple out to the people who got in early. Rocket Lab has also backed other New Zealand ventures, including the farming technology firm Halter.
Halter’s own founder, Craig Piggott, is among the most striking new entries, debuting with an estimated $3.4 billion. His company makes solar-powered smart collars that let farmers fence and move cattle from a phone, and it has grown quickly across New Zealand, Australia and the United States. Other debutants include Paul Copplestone, a co-founder of the database software company Supabase, and Skipp Williamson, who sold her consulting firm Partners in Performance to Accenture for a reported $450 million or so.
Williamson is one of just three women to feature on the list in their own right, alongside payments entrepreneur Lucy Liu and Anna Mowbray. The thinness of female representation at the very top remains one of the list’s most persistent features, even in a year when the overall numbers grew so sharply.
The full list runs to 150 names. The average net worth of an individual on it is $984 million, while those who appear as duos average $1.68 billion. To make the cut at all now requires a fortune well into the hundreds of millions, a threshold that keeps climbing as the biggest fortunes pull further ahead of the pack.
NBR co-editor Hamish McNicol said the technology sector was driving much of the change. “Many talk up New Zealand’s opportunity to become a tech-export hub, and there is a lot of momentum in the sector to build on,” he told RNZ, pointing to a string of large capital raises by local technology firms over the past year. The optimism reflects a genuine shift. For most of the list’s history the biggest fortunes were made in property, retail and primary industries. Software and space are now doing a growing share of the heavy lifting.
The timing is awkward. The Rich List has swelled in a year when the rest of the economy has been anything but uniform. Rural New Zealand is enjoying a bumper season, with Fonterra forecasting a near-record farmgate milk price and farm exports running at record levels, yet the main cities have been shedding jobs and households have been squeezed by a fuel shock and a stubborn cost of living. Consumer confidence recently slumped to its lowest in three years even as business confidence sat at multi-year highs, a split that has come to define the recovery.
That contrast is likely to feed the long-running debate about wealth and inequality in New Zealand. The country does not tax capital gains or wealth, and a large part of the increases recorded on the Rich List come from rising company valuations rather than cash in the bank. Supporters argue the list is a roll call of risk-takers and job creators whose success benefits the wider economy. Critics see a widening gap between the people whose assets are compounding and the households watching their grocery bills climb.
What is not in doubt is the direction. A year ago New Zealand had 18 billionaires. It now has 26, and the engine of that growth is no longer the farm or the shopping mall but the laptop and the launch pad. Whether that wealth stays and reinvests at home, or follows its founders offshore, may matter more to the country’s future than the headline number itself.
What do you make of the country’s growing band of billionaires, and is a tech-export boom something to celebrate or worry about? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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