Billionaires Predicted The Stock Market’s Performance In 2025. Most Were Wrong |
Even market masters can’t predict the future. In early 2025, we polled 34 billionaires, asking how each thought the S&P 500 would fare over the year. More than half of them were way off.
The S&P ended the year up the year up 16%. That’s an above average return for the index, which has returned around 10% annually over the past seven decades, though lower than 23% and 24% in 2024 and 2023, respectively. The billionaires, however, were less bullish. Nearly half thought the market would be flat or down in 2025. Another 35%—the largest group of all—thought the market would be up, but only by single digits. Only 7 billionaires of the 34 polled, or 21%, correctly guessed that the S&P would end the year up between 10% and 20%.
“I'm very optimistic about AI generally–and that's why I thought that the benefits of AI were going to come much earlier than predicted,” says investor Samir Mane, Albania’s first billionaire, who accurately predicted the range of the S&P’s return this year.Megacap growth stocks like Alphabet and Nvidia, in addition to other AI beneficiaries such as Broadcom and Palantir, have powered the bull market’s boom. AI-related stocks have been responsible for around 75% of S&P 500 total returns,