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, and the price of admission just went up again: when Forbes published its 2026 list on September 15, the cutoff had risen to a record $4.4 billion, the 400 members were worth a combined $8 trillion, and a record 590 American billionaires were not rich enough to make it. Look at where the people on that list spend their leisure hours and a pattern emerges that every club leader should study. The Forbes 400 could join any of thousands of clubs. In practice, the same short list of names comes up again and again, and a growing number of the wealthiest have stopped joining and started building. What the top of the market values turns out to have very little to do with the length of the amenity list.

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

Start with golf, because golf remains the center of gravity 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 top of that category is where billionaire membership clusters.

• Augusta National Golf Club (Augusta, GA). The most famous invitation in golf. Warren Buffett (No. 10 on the 2026 list) and Bill Gates (No. 14) 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.
• Liberty National Golf Club (Jersey City, NJ). Built by Reebok founder Paul Fireman for a reported $250 million, according to Forbes, on a reclaimed landfill across the harbor from Lower Manhattan. Liberty National caps membership at 300 and requires every prospective member to sit for a personal interview with Fireman’s son, Dan. “It’s something that we keep very private,” Fireman has said. The reported roster includes two members of the 2026 Forbes 400, Robert Kraft (No. 81) and Ken Langone (No. 151), along with Simon Property Group CEO David Simon. The club hosted the 2017 Presidents Cup and four PGA Tour playoff events between 2009 and 2021.
• The Grove XXIII (Hobe Sound, FL). Michael Jordan (No. 367, at $4.7 billion) was reportedly frustrated by the pace of play at his previous club, so he built his own. The Grove XXIII opened in 2019 with a routing designed for fast play and a guest list he controls. It is the clearest example of the newest pattern at the top: a billionaire who wants a specific experience no longer waits for an existing club to provide it.
• Cypress Point Club (Pebble Beach, CA), Seminole Golf Club (Juno Beach, FL), Shinnecock Hills and National Golf Links of America (Southampton, NY). These four belong on any short list by reputation: Cypress Point for a membership it has refused to grow for decades, Seminole as the winter home of Wall Street and Palm Beach money, and the Southampton pair as its summer counterpart. We are not attaching individual names to them, because none of the four publishes a membership roster and we could not source individual memberships to the standard used elsewhere in this article. Their boards are a different matter — as tax-exempt clubs they file an annual Form 990 that lists officers and directors, and those filings are public — but a board seat is not a roster. That gap is the point. These clubs have kept their membership out of print for a century.

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

The Yellowstone Club in Big Sky, Montana is the best-documented billionaire club in the country, because membership requires owning property there and property records are public. In October 2024, Forbes combed Montana records for more than 300 club properties and identified 19 billionaire members; one local source estimated the real number at 50 to 80. Six of the people Forbes named are on the 2026 Forbes 400: Mark Zuckerberg (No. 6), Eric Schmidt (No. 26), Melinda French Gates (No. 30), Robert Kraft (No. 81), Jimmy Haslam (No. 114), and Bill Ackman (No. 142). (The Gates home at Yellowstone went to French Gates in the couple’s 2021 divorce, according to Forbes.) Members who don’t make the 400 include Tom Brady and Justin Timberlake. Forbes put the cost of entry at a $500,000 refundable deposit and $78,000 in annual dues on top of real estate that starts near $7 million, for one of 885 memberships across 15,000 acres with 2,900 skiable acres. The model is still expanding: according to High Country News, the club’s owner is converting Crazy Mountain Ranch into a private membership property with a luxury spa and a new 18-hole golf course. As CrossHarbor Capital managing partner Sam Byrne told Forbes: “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 around curated community rather than wealth signaling, and deliberately capped 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. The club has reportedly drawn Elon Musk (No. 1) and Sergey Brin (No. 5) along with Taylor Swift, whom Forbes lists among the billionaires who missed this year’s cutoff, and the model is now expanding to new locations. CORE Club, founded by Jennie Enterprise, runs a tiered structure of up to $100,000 for a Founding membership plus $15,000 to $18,000 in annual dues, and has used it to expand into Milan and San Francisco, positioning itself, in Enterprise’s words, as “a global brand with a global community and a global sensibility.” At the Aman Club inside Vladislav Doronin’s Crown Building redevelopment, reported by Wallpaper* at a $1.45 billion total cost, founding members paid $100,000 before opening; the fee later rose to $200,000 plus $15,000 in annual dues, per the same Wallpaper* report. Membership bundles a three-story wellness facility, including a cryochamber and Pilates studio, with members-only restaurants and terraces.

Yacht clubs round out the picture. They are the smallest slice of the industry, just 7% of U.S. private clubs per the Club Benchmarking/CMAA study, but they are 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 rarely confirm them. Every membership named above comes from published reporting or public property records, and every Forbes 400 rank was checked against the 2026 list published September 15, 2026. Where we could not source a name, we left it out.

Why the Pool of Candidates Keeps Growing

The supply of ultra-wealthy prospective members has never been larger. Knight Frank’s Wealth Report 2025 found that 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 in the American market.

Within the U.S., that wealth is concentrated in the same places the apex clubs are. By our count of the 2026 list, four states are home to 231 of the 400 members, or 58%: California (85), New York (54), Florida (49), and Texas (43). Florida now nearly matches New York, which is the migration of financial fortunes to Palm Beach County showing up in the data, and it explains why Seminole, The Grove XXIII, and their neighbors carry the weight they do.

The list is also changing shape. Forbes counts 62 women on the 2026 Forbes 400, about 16% of the list, worth a combined $954 billion, led by Alice Walton at $118 billion. Clubs whose culture and governance were built for the all-male membership class of 1985 are increasingly out of step with who holds the wealth in 2026.

The Economics of Extreme Exclusivity

Most coverage of billionaires’ private clubs leaves out the industry underneath them. 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. That is a larger workforce 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. They still set the aspirational ceiling for the entire industry, and their scarcity model is operating in a market 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. Neither Augusta National nor Cypress Point would win an amenity count against a well-capitalized suburban country club, and neither needs to. They compete on the 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 behavior at the top of the market shows what discretionary wealth values at every tier, and four lessons transfer directly.

• Treat scarcity as a decision. 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 move from “accepting applications” to “considering candidates.” That shift raises perceived value and, with it, pricing power.
• Make vetting part of the product. Liberty National interviews every prospective member. Zero Bond runs every candidate through a committee. Both treat admissions as something the member experiences and remembers. A club that screens for fit signals a stronger community than one that only runs a credit check.
• The membership is the amenity. Billionaires who could build any facility they want join Augusta for the room, not the range. Put the same seriousness into who joins and how members meet each other (orientation, introductions, deliberately mixed events) that you would put into a course renovation.
• Privacy is a luxury good. The clubs that keep ultra-wealthy members longest design discretion into the member experience. The best evidence is how little of this article could be sourced: four of the most important clubs in American golf appear here without a single member’s name attached.

Forbes will keep ranking the 400, and every year the same short list of clubs will sit quietly behind it. Club leaders don’t need billionaire members to borrow the playbook. If your club is ready to rethink its admissions story, membership economics, or brand positioning, Private Club Marketing can help you build it. Talk to our team about a membership strategy audit.