KEY POINTS

• Forbes has valued Aliko Dangote at $30.3 billion for the first time, narrowing a long-standing gap with Bloomberg’s $33.2 billion estimate.
• The shift comes after the Dangote Petroleum Refinery hit full capacity of 650,000 barrels per day and started exporting jet fuel to Europe.
• A planned pan-African IPO of 5 to 10 percent of the refinery would imply a standalone valuation of $40 billion to $50 billion.

Aliko Dangote has crossed the $30 billion mark on Forbes for the first time. The Nigerian industrialist’s net worth now sits at $30.3 billion on the magazine’s real-time tracker, a milestone that arrived years later on Forbes than on Bloomberg and reflects the deep methodological gap between the world’s two top wealth trackers.

As of Tuesday, Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, which updates every business day after New York close, has Dangote at $33.2 billion. The $2.9 billion gap between the two figures is the narrowest in years.

A shrinking chasm

As recently as November 2025, Bloomberg pegged Dangote at $30.6 billion while Forbes had him at $26.2 billion, a $4.4 billion divide. That spread has compressed by more than a third in roughly five months. Specifically, the compression is no accident. The shift tracks directly with what the Dangote Petroleum Refinery has become.

The Dangote Petroleum Refinery hit full nameplate capacity of 650,000 barrels per day in February 2026. In March, Nigeria exported about 44,000 barrels of petrol per day, narrowly outpacing imports and turning into a net exporter of refined fuel for the first time in decades.

Furthermore, the refinery dispatched 12 cargoes of refined petroleum products totaling 456,000 metric tons to Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Tanzania, Ghana and Togo in March alone. It has since been supplying jet fuel to European buyers as the US-Iran conflict has cut Middle Eastern aviation fuel supplies.

A refinery selling petrol to West Africa and jet fuel to Europe is no longer a speculative asset. Notably, both Forbes and Bloomberg are moving in the same direction as the operational evidence accumulates.

Why Forbes was conservative

Forbes publishes an annual list each spring and runs a real-time tracker that updates less granularly. It has historically applied conservative estimates to private and unlisted assets, and for most of the refinery’s existence, that conservatism had a reasonable basis.

Specifically, valuing a construction project at its cost before it produces revenue is a debatable choice. A facility absorbing capital without generating cashflow is worth less than its completion cost on any fair market basis. The Forbes annual Africa list in March 2026 put Dangote at $28.5 billion. The real-time tracker has since climbed to $30.3 billion.

The IPO that will set the price

Dangote has announced plans to list 5 to 10 percent of the refinery on multiple African stock exchanges in a pan-African IPO targeting a June or July 2026 debut. The implied valuation for that transaction is $40 billion to $50 billion for the refinery as a standalone entity.

At $40 billion and his 92.3 percent stake, Dangote’s refinery position alone would be worth $36.9 billion. At $50 billion, $46.2 billion. Either figure would make the combined estimates from Forbes and Bloomberg look conservative simultaneously, for the first time in the refinery’s existence.

Dangote first appeared on the Forbes Billionaires List in 2008 at $3.3 billion. He became the first African to hit $20 billion on Forbes in June 2013. With Forbes now at $30.3 billion and Bloomberg at $33.2 billion, the two trackers agree, for the first time in years, on a number that places Africa’s richest man comfortably above the $30 billion threshold.