Where the Forbes 400 Belong: The Private Clubs of America’s Richest (2026)

The most exclusive membership roster in America isn’t a club at all — it’s the Forbes 400, where the price of admission is measured in billions and rises every year. But look closely at where the people on that list actually spend their leisure hours, and a pattern emerges that every club leader should study: billionaires private clubs concentrate around a remarkably small set of institutions. The Forbes 400 could theoretically join thousands of clubs. In practice, the same fifteen or twenty names come up again and again — and increasingly, when the right invitation doesn’t come fast enough, the wealthiest simply build their own. Understanding why is a masterclass in what the top of the market actually values, and it’s not the longest amenity list.

The Short List: Golf Clubs That Keep Appearing Behind the Forbes 400

Start with golf, because golf remains the gravitational center of elite club life in America. According to the Club Benchmarking, CMAA, and National Club Association economic impact study, 82% of the private clubs measured in the U.S. are golf and country clubs — and the apex of that category is where billionaire membership clusters.

• Augusta National Golf Club (Augusta, GA) — The most famous invitation in golf. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are among its most widely reported members, and the roster has long functioned as a who’s-who of American business leadership. There is no application; the club finds you.
• Cypress Point Club (Pebble Beach, CA) — A tiny membership on one of the most photographed stretches of coastline in golf. Its scarcity is the product: the club has famously resisted growth for decades.
• Seminole Golf Club (Juno Beach, FL) — The winter anchor for Wall Street and Palm Beach wealth, benefiting from the migration of financial fortunes to South Florida.
• Shinnecock Hills and National Golf Links (Southampton, NY) — The Hamptons pair that serves as the summer counterpart to Seminole for Northeast finance families.
• Liberty National Golf Club (Jersey City, NJ) — Built by billionaire Paul Fireman for a reported $250 million, according to Forbes, on a reclaimed landfill, Liberty National caps membership at 300 and requires every prospective member to sit for a personal interview conducted by Fireman’s son, Dan. “It’s something that we keep very private,” Fireman has said — and the roster, which includes Robert Kraft, Ken Langone, and David Simon, backs that up. The club hosted the 2017 Presidents Cup and multiple PGA Tour Barclays events.
• The Grove XXIII (Hobe Sound, FL) — Michael Jordan’s own club, notable because it represents the newest pattern at the very top: when the invitation doesn’t come fast enough, billionaires now build their own.

Beyond Golf: How Billionaires Private Clubs Are Being Built From Scratch

The Yellowstone Club in Big Sky, Montana shows how far the model extends beyond fairways. The residential resort club, where Bill Gates has long been reported to own property, recently expanded into a second membership property. According to High Country News, the club is converting Crazy Mountain Ranch into a private membership experience featuring a luxury spa and a new 18-hole golf course, while holding the property-ownership requirement firmly in place alongside a $400,000 initiation deposit, according to Forbes. The club now spans about 15,200 acres with 2,900 acres of skiable terrain, and it landed on Forbes’ 2024 definitive membership list alongside Bill Gates, Tom Brady, and Justin Timberlake. As one Yellowstone executive put it: “What we offer is not replicated anywhere.”

Urban social clubs tell a parallel story. New York’s Zero Bond, founded by Scott Sartiano, built its membership-committee vetting process around curated community rather than pure wealth signaling — deliberately capping growth to protect the member experience. “I didn’t want to create a place that was just for rich people to spend a lot of money,” Sartiano has said, and the approach has drawn Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, and Taylor Swift, with the model now expanding into new Zero Bond locations. CORE Club, founded by Jennie Enterprise, runs a tiered structure — up to $100,000 for a Founding membership plus $15,000–$18,000 in annual dues — and has used it to expand internationally into Milan and San Francisco, positioning itself, in Enterprise’s words, as “a global brand with a global community and a global sensibility.” And at the Aman Club inside Vladislav Doronin’s Crown Building redevelopment — reported by Wallpaper* at a $1.45 billion total cost — a tiered membership program — a $100,000 founding fee pre-opening, later $200,000 plus $15,000 in annual dues, per the same Wallpaper* interview — bundles a three-story wellness facility, complete with a cryochamber and Pilates studio, with members-only restaurants and terraces. Doronin has framed the bet directly: “There’s a big difference between us and everybody else… they’re also going to feel very happy with the value they’ve received by the time they check out.”

Yacht clubs round out the picture. They’re the smallest slice of the industry — just 7% of U.S. private clubs, per the Club Benchmarking/CMAA study — but disproportionately represented among coastal fortunes, from the New York Yacht Club to the San Francisco Bay institutions favored by tech wealth.

A note on sourcing: clubs at this level do not publish member rosters, and the individuals involved do not confirm them. The memberships above are the ones consistently and credibly reported over years — which is itself a lesson in how well billionaires private clubs guard privacy.

Why the Pool of Candidates Keeps Growing

The supply of ultra-wealthy prospective members has never been larger. Knight Frank’s Wealth Report 2025, produced in collaboration with Forbes, conducted a detailed analysis of the more than 2,700 billionaires on Forbes’ annual wealth list. Two findings from that analysis matter directly for American clubs.

First, the money is here. According to the report, almost 40% of the world’s HNWI population lives in the United States, compared with 20% for its nearest rival, China. BCG’s Global Wealth Report 2025 reinforces the point, finding that nearly half of global HNWI wealth is held in North America, ahead of Europe and Asia-Pacific. No other country comes close to the density of club-eligible wealth that exists in the American market.

Second, the industries producing that wealth map neatly onto club geography. The Knight Frank analysis found that finance and investment lead all industries, accounting for 427 of the billionaires on Forbes’ list — including Warren Buffett and Michael Bloomberg — while tech dominates in total wealth. That is precisely why the Seminole–Shinnecock axis (finance) and the Northern California clubs (tech) function as the two poles of American elite golf. The report also notes the list is changing shape: women account for 13% of the billionaire list and hold US$1.78 trillion, led by L’Oréal heiress Françoise Bettencourt Meyers at US$99.5 billion. Clubs whose culture and governance were built for an all-male membership class of 1985 are increasingly out of step with who actually holds the wealth in 2026.

The Economics of Extreme Exclusivity

Here is the context most coverage of billionaires private clubs misses: these institutions sit atop a genuinely large industry. The Club Benchmarking/CMAA/NCA research identified 5,659 private clubs in the United States, and the 3,887 clubs measured in depth generated an estimated $32.6 billion in revenue in 2023, with $17.4 billion in payroll and 573,000 employees — a workforce larger than FedEx’s 529,000 or UPS’s 500,000, as the report notes.

The clubs of the Forbes 400 are a rounding error within those totals — perhaps two dozen institutions out of nearly 5,700. Yet they set the aspirational ceiling for the entire industry, and their scarcity model is working in an environment where demand is unusually strong. The NGCOA’s 2025 key trends research found that 58% of operators report membership increases, and 53% report full memberships and/or a waiting list for new members. When even the broad market has waiting lists, the apex clubs can be as selective as they wish.

What the elite tier does not compete on is amenity breadth. GGA Partners’ 2024 Club Leaders’ Perspectives report shows how the wider industry has stacked amenities: 73% of clubs offer a golf practice facility, 70% a swimming pool, 64% tennis, 56% pickleball, 36% golf simulators, and 24% spa/wellness. Augusta National and Cypress Point win on none of those counts. They compete on the only two assets that cannot be bought or built: the membership itself, and the mythology of the institution.

What Club Leaders Can Actually Use From This

Your club is almost certainly not recruiting from the Forbes 400. But the behavior at the top of the market reveals what discretionary wealth values at every tier, and four lessons transfer directly.

• Scarcity is a strategy, not an accident. The apex clubs cap membership and let the waiting list do the marketing. With 53% of operators already reporting full rosters or waitlists per NGCOA, mid-market clubs have a rare window to formalize caps, tighten sponsorship requirements, and reposition from “accepting applications” to “considering candidates.” That reframing changes everything about perceived value — and pricing power.
• Vetting is a feature, not friction. Liberty National’s model — a personal interview for every prospective member — and Zero Bond’s committee-driven approach both treat the admissions process itself as part of the product. A club that screens for fit, not just funds, signals a higher caliber of community than one that simply screens for a credit check.
• The membership is the amenity. Billionaires who could build any facility they want join Augusta for the room, not the range. Invest in curating who joins and how members connect — orientation, introductions, deliberately mixed events — with the same seriousness you’d bring to a course renovation.
• Privacy is a luxury good. The clubs that hold onto ultra-wealthy members longest, from Yellowstone to Aman, treat discretion as a designed feature of the member experience, not a policy afterthought — and they market it accordingly, even while staying quiet about who actually belongs.

The Forbes 400 will publish its 2026 list in the weeks ahead, and when it does, the clubs above will once again be the ones journalists call first. Club leaders don’t need billionaire members to borrow the playbook. If your club is ready to rethink its own admissions story, membership economics, or brand positioning against the scarcity model the top of the market has already proven out, Private Club Marketing can help you build it. Talk to our team about a membership strategy audit.