Hurun Research Institute released the Global Unicorn Index 2024 in Guangzhou on Tuesday (April 9), listing the world's non-listed companies with a value of more than US$1 billion that were established after 2000. The list found that SpaceX, led by billionaire Musk, underperformed the top ByteDance, while Ant Group and Binance ranked in the top 10.
There are currently 1,453 unicorn companies in the world, distributed in 53 countries and 291 cities, of which 171 are new unicorns, with a new unicorn being born almost every two days.
The deadline for valuation calculation of Hurun's "2024 Global Unicorn List" is January 1, 2024.
Statistics show that the total value of unicorn companies worldwide is 4.6 trillion US dollars.
The world’s unicorns can now be divided into three parts: the United States, China, and the rest of the world.
The United States has nearly 50% of the world's known unicorns, mainly from the software services, fintech and artificial intelligence (AI) industries. China has 25%, mainly from AI, semiconductors and new energy. The rest of the world has another 25%, mainly from fintech and e-commerce.
ByteDance remains the world's most valuable unicorn, worth 1.56 trillion yuan.

Musk's rocket and satellite company SpaceX ranked second with a value of 1.28 trillion yuan.
The best performing unicorn in the world in the past year was OpenAI, whose value increased by nearly 570 billion yuan to 710 billion yuan, ranking among the top three in the world, replacing Ant Group.
In January this year, the People's Bank of China issued the "Announcement on the Licensing Information of Major Changes of Non-Bank Payment Institutions (as of December 2023)". The approval content showed that it had agreed to change Alipay (China) Network Technology Co., Ltd. to "no actual controller".
This means that the original controller, Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba Group, has officially withdrawn from the decision-making of Alipay. After the adjustment of Ant Group, there is no longer any situation where any direct or indirect shareholder solely or jointly controls Ant Group.
Despite paying a huge fine of $4.3 billion to the United States, Binance's value increased by nearly 100 billion yuan to 240 billion yuan, ranking among the top ten.
Binance is the only blockchain company in the top 10 list and is also the youngest one.