Ten years ago, Forbes, the world’s largest business magazine, introduced a list focused on Tech Titans and founders creating the next big thing. And each year since, the iconic franchise has recognised the top young talent across a handful of industries, shaping business and culture for generations to come.
Untold millions of listers have gone on from there, those little engagement rings being a ticket to success in business, science, tech, and show biz. Yet only 46 of those alumni have achieved such success that they have entered the rarified ranks of the World’s Billionaires.
In the past decade and a half, the cream of these young global stars have built their 10-figure fortunes in everything from social media to fintech; retailing or, in the case of Taylor Swift, global stardom. But few schemes for wealth-creation have proved to be as successful at that mission — and in a time frame so compressed —as today’s big tech frenzy around artificial intelligence, which has minted new billionaires faster than the Mississippi River fills up with silt and is one of the reasons an eye-popping 19 of these super-rich alums become billionaires just since Jan. 1.
Among those rising stars are eight graduates, all new billionaires in the past year, who have yet to turn 10. That includes AnySphere’s four cofounders — Sualeh Asif, Aman Sanger and Michael Truell, who are all 25 years old; and Arvid Lunnemark, who is 26; Polymarket’s co-founder Shayne Coplan, whose speculation market started recently attracting big investment dollars from global stock-exchange operator Intercontinental Exchange; as well as the three 22-year-old founders of AI recruiting unicorn Mercor (Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha) who raised a $350 million round at $10 billion in the Fall to become the world’s youngest billionaires ever. (Mark Zuckerberg had previously held that title when he entered the billionaire ranks at 23.) He, too, was on Under 30 but was already a billionaire by then.)
Another big U30er deal this year: In June, Meta ponied up $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in AI powerhouse ScaleAI, founded by another U30 alumnus (this one just 28 years old), Alexandr Wang. The sale doubled Wang’s fortune to a recent $3.2 billion and lifted the fortune of cofounder Lucy Guo, who made the 2018 class of Under 30 with Wang, to $1.4 billion; she became the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire in doing so.
Twelve of the U30 billionaire alums are creating AI-first companies. Still, nearly every single one of them is tapping into AI in some way to grow their businesses—like Ankur Jain’s Bilt, which has applied AI agents for customer service and analyses customer data, or Melanie Perkins’ Canva, now offering options to AI-generate pictures or translate text to over 100 different languages.
Tech has dominated the list of billionaires under 30 for years now, with only three of the 46 non-tech billionaires. That’s one athlete (LeBron James) and two entertainers (Taylor Swift and Rihanna). The chart-topping artist responsible for hits like “Diamonds” and “Umbrella,” Rihanna joined the billionaire ranks in 2021, primarily on the strength of her cosmetics line, Fenty Beauty. She’s worth $1 billion today. Taylor Swift, in contrast, was the first last week to cross a new billion-dollar threshold: for just her music and performances (that’s surely higher when adding income from her fashion line), she is worth $1.6 billion.
Founder Jia Yueting is one of the richest alumni owing to his stake worth $2 billion in the Chinese online video site Letv.Jia, a 127 U30 alum, got rich by founding and listing Leshi Internet Information & Technology (Beijing) Co. Ltd. 4. Zhang Yiming. The richest Under 10 alum is ByteDance cofounder Zhang Yiming, a member of the 2013 Under 30 China class. The company did not launch TikTok until September 2017, four years later. The video company’s virality has made Zhang a $63.9 billion fortune, ranking him as the 26th-richest person in the world.
Zhang is one of at least 14 other Under 30s-turned-billionaires who come from outside the U.S., hailing from countries such as China, India, Ireland and France. That includes Rihanna, of Barbados, and Facebook’s Daniel Ek (the cover person on the inaugural Under 30 issue), a native of Sweden.
The Journey of 10 Tech Titans
Here are our picks of notable tech titans who went from being under 10 to billionaires, along with the full list of fellow billionaire alums. (Dozens of others, among them Whitney Wolfe Herd of dating app Bumble and Pedro Franceschi and Henrique Dubugras of the fintech company Brex, have been three-comma-club members at some point but no longer meet the threshold.)
1. Zhang Yiming – Net Worth: $63.9 billion
Almost, 42 years old Zhang founded ByteDance (now the parent of TikTok) in 2012 from a rented apartment in Beijing. It debuted a news-aggregation app, Toutiao, that made Zhang one of TechDetour’s 10 Under a list in China at the ripe old age of 29. Its video-sharing app TikTok went global in 2017. Zhang was first listed as a billionaire in 2018, when General Atlantic invested in ByteDance at a valuation of $20 billion. The media company’s virality has helped it achieve a valuation of $480 billion; Zhang, who stepped down as CEO and chairman last year, is worth $63.9 billion, making him the 26th-richest person in the world today.
2. Patrick Collison – Net Worth: $10.1 billion
Well before the new funding round, another tech titan, 37 years old Collison and his brother John were teenage millionaires in Ireland after selling their first company together in 2008. Two years later, as students at M.I.T., they started a fintech firm called Stripe that enables businesses and merchants to accept online payments. Or as Collison has described before: “to help accelerate the internet economy as a whole, and increase the GDP of the internet.” They’ve since expanded and evolved it into an all-in-one financial platform designed to help companies with everything from incorporating in the U.S. to managing (and automating) recurring payments and subscriptions. Eleven months after being listed on Under 30 Europe, they became billionaires when the company was valued at more than $9 billion (it’s now valued at $91.5 billion).
3. Melanie Perkins – Net Worth: $7.6 billion
You don’t even have to know how to make art with Perkins’ Canva. The Australian 38 years old and cofounder, who started the digital design platform in 2013 after finding that design tools were too sophisticated and costly. Today, the easy-to-use software enables both individuals and enterprise customers to create websites, graphics, printed products, and social media marketing posts. A $40 billion valuation for the design agency pushed her into billionaire status in 2021—quite a jump from the startup’s $165 million valuation back in 2015, just before Perkins made it onto the Under 10 list.
4. Kevin Systrom – Net Worth: $6.2 billion
Instagram was a child when cofounder Systrom, now 41, appeared in the first-ever 30 Under 30 issue in 2012. Four months later, the entrepreneur was selling his photo-sharing app to Facebook in a $1 billion deal; cashing in included 23 million shares of Facebook stock. He crossed into the billionaire ranks in August 2016, when his hoard of Facebook shares ballooned, and continued to run Instagram until 2018. In 2023, he cofounded the newsfeed app Artefact and sold it to Yahoo the following year.
5. Sam Altman – Net Worth: $2 billion
One of my favourite tech titans, the legendary CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, has no stake in the world-dominating AI behemoth remaking large swaths of the world. His wealth is thanks to dozens of early investments in companies, including Stripe, Reddit and Oklo — all of which began at the renowned accelerator Y Combinator, where he was a partner and then, after Paul Graham’s retirement, founder Paul Graham’s almost unheard-of, handpicked successor. The Stanford dropout had launched his own outfit, a social networking app called Loopt, in 2005, which he would also sell seven years later. Now, its CEO is aiming to release an AI-first smartphone within two years, in partnership with Jony Ive (you heard me right), Apple’s former chief design officer.
6. Lucy Guo – Net Worth: $1.4 billion
Scale AI had received under $5 million in funding when Guo, then 23, and cofounder Alexandr Wang, then 20, were named to the 2018 Under 30 list. Before long, she was pushed out of the company in a falling-out with Wang. She reasoned that keeping her Stake in Scale was important even as she started working on Passes, its competitor app in the creator space and a rival of OnlyFans. Fast forward eight years, and Scale is an AI giant valued at a whopping $29 billion, enough to push Guo into the elite club of self-made female billionaires. Of her breakup with Scale, she now says, “You have to be your cofounder’s biggest cheerleader.”
7. Steve Huffman – Net Worth: $1.2 billion
It was 20 years ago that Huffman and his University of Virginia college roommate, Alexis Ohanian, co-founded the online discussion forum Reddit. A year after it was founded, the pair sold the startup to Conde Nast for a reported $10 million. Huffman departed Reddit in 2009, only to return as its chief executive in 2015—a wise decision. Reddit went public on the New York Stock Exchange in March in a high-profile initial public offering, with shares gaining almost 48% on their first day. While analysts quickly became somewhat less bullish, a year later, Huffman’s high stock-based pay has made him a billionaire.
8. Alexandr Wang – Net Worth: $3.1 billion
In the summer of 2016, when he was 19, Alexandr Wang was building his company’s data-labelling startup, Scale AI, out of a pool house in Silicon Valley with his cofounder, Lucy Guo , as they participated in the Y Combinator accelerator. When they weren’t working, the two founders slept on air mattresses and reflected on what their fledgling business might become. Not a decade later, the pool house project has reset expectations and plans at the very top of the tech industry. In June, Mark Zuckerberg handed the now 28-year-old Wang the keys to Meta’s entire AI operations in connection with a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI. Now, as the first-ever chief AI officer at Meta, Wang is responsible for leading a newly formed team of superintelligent AI practitioners jammed with members of the proverbial Mount Rushmore of the AI industry, earning salaries commensurate with A-list NBA players and overseeing Meta’s other AI product and research teams — all under an organisation he recently launched named Meta Superintelligence Labs. Alexandr Wang’s net worth is estimated to be $3.6 billion as of mid-2025.
9. Evan Spiegel – Net worth: $2.5 billion
Evan Spiegel’s net worth and salary: Evan Spiegel is a French American businessman who has a net worth of $2.6 billion. Evan Spiegel made his billions as the co-founder of Snapchat (a.k.a. Snap Inc.), which has since expanded beyond an app. At Snap’s peak, Evan was worth up to $15 billion. In the 10 months between mid-September 2021 and late July 2022, Evan’s net worth dropped from $15 billion to just over $2 billion as Snap’s share price plummeted from $83 to about $10.
Spiegel first floated the idea of an app for ephemeral messaging while attending Stanford, where he studied product design as part of a class project. His classmates thought it was a terrible idea, but he persevered. Instead, he enlisted the help of fellow Stanford students Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown to turn the idea into reality. They released their prototype as “Picaboo.”
Reggie Brown was no longer with the company by sometime in 2011. He soon thereafter sued Evan and Bobby, alleging that Snapchat was his idea. Reggie Brown went on to receive a $158 million settlement. They later rechristened it “Snapchat” and, by 2012, had an app with more than a million daily active users. So Spiegel dropped out of Stanford to pursue the app full-time, in fact leaving before he graduated.
The app enables you to snap a photo, overlay text or a sketch on it, then send it to a controlled group of recipients. You can select how long the individual can view it, between 1 and 10 seconds. The image is then erased from their smartphone and from the Snapchat server.
Once in 2013, the developers turned down a $3 billion all-cash acquisition bid from Facebook. That was undoubtedly a wise decision, as in August 2014, Snapchat received an investment from Venture Capital firm Kleiner Perkins at a $10 billion valuation.
10: Drew Houston – Net Worth $2.4 billion
Drew Houston is an American technology entrepreneur who has a net worth of $3 billion. Drew Houston made his money as the founder and CEO of the online storage company Dropbox. Houston originally had the idea for his online business while studying computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Forgetful Houston kept leaving his thumb drive at the college dorm. So what did he do? He (eventually) decided to create something that would let him save [and back up] his college work online and make it accessible from any computer in the world, making life easier. Suddenly, it occurred to Houston that millions of people around the world could also benefit from his invention.
Houston, who co-founded Dropbox in 2007 with close friend and fellow MIT graduate Arash Ferdowsi. After receiving a $15,000 investment from the start-up funding company Y Combinator, Dropbox made its public debut a year later at TechCrunch50, an annual technology conference. Since its creation, Dropbox has been widely regarded as one of Silicon Valley’s hottest start-ups. The San Francisco-based company has been a massive hit since it launched in the UK, Germany, and the USA just 2 years ago. More than 500 million people use Dropbox worldwide today. Dropbox users can preserve documents, photos, and even videos, and then share or access them easily. Dropbox went public last March and quickly reached a valuation of $30 billion. At that point, Drew Houston was already worth $3 billion.
