AI Boom Creates Over 50 New Billionaires as Startup Investment Surges Past $200 Billion

The New Billionaires of the A.I. Boom

The artificial intelligence boom has turned high-profile billionaires like Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the chip maker Nvidia, and Sam Altman, the chief executive of the ChatGPT maker OpenAI, into even richer billionaires. It has also produced a crop of new billionaires -- at least on paper -- from smaller start-ups. These individuals may become future Silicon Valley power brokers like the wealthy executives created by past tech booms, including the late-1990s dot-com frenzy, who then invested in or helped steer later waves of technology. The new A.I. billionaires include Alexandr Wang and Lucy Guo, who founded Scale AI, a data-labeling start-up that received a $14.3 billion investment from Meta in June. The founders of the A.I. coding start-up Cursor -- Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Aman Sanger and Arvid Lunnemark -- entered the billionaire ranks when their company was valued at $27 billion in a funding round last month. The entrepreneurs behind Perplexity (an A.I. search engine), Mercor (an A.I. data start-up), Figure AI (a maker of humanoid robots), Safe Superintelligence (an A.I. lab), Harvey (an A.I. legal software start-up) and Thinking Machines Lab (an A.I. lab) are in the nine-figure club as well, according to the companies or people close to the start-ups, as well as data from the start-up tracker PitchBook and news reports. Most reached that point after the valuations of their privately held companies soared this year, turning their company stock into gold mines. Jai Das, a partner at Sapphire Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, likened the new billionaires to the railroad barons of the 1890s Gilded Age who leaned into that era's technology boom. But he cautioned that their wealth could be fleeting if the start-ups did not live up to their promise. "The question is which of these companies is going to survive," Mr. Das said. "And which of these founders can actually end up really being true billionaires and not just paper billionaires." Here's what to know about them. They became billionaires quickly. Elon Musk's journey to billionaire took years. After becoming a millionaire when one of his early ventures was sold to eBay in 2002, the tech entrepreneur did not turn into a billionaire until he was leading the electric carmaker Tesla and had started the rocket company SpaceX. In contrast, most of the new A.I. billionaires founded their companies less than three years ago after OpenAI released ChatGPT, and then saw investors rapidly bid up the values of their firms. Mira Murati, 37, a former top executive at OpenAI, announced her A.I. start-up, Thinking Machines Lab, only in February. By June, the start-up had hit a $10 billion valuation without releasing a single product. (The start-up, which declined to comment, has since released one.) Ilya Sutskever, 39, another former top OpenAI executive, launched Safe Superintelligence in June 2024. The company has not unveiled a product but is valued at $32 billion after raising $2 billion this year, according to PitchBook. Safe Superintelligence declined to comment. Brett Adcock, 39, the chief executive of Figure AI, founded the company in 2022. His net worth stands at $19.5 billion, Figure AI said. Aravind Srinivas, 31, the chief executive of Perplexity, also created his company in 2022; it is valued at about $20 billion, according to PitchBook. Perplexity said Mr. Srinivas was not focused on his wealth and "prefers to live modestly," adding that the company (The New York Times has sued OpenAI, Microsoft and Perplexity, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The companies have denied the claims.) The wealth accumulation has been especially rapid this year. Harvey, which is based in San Francisco, raised money in February, June and this month. Each time, the company's valuation soared, reaching $8 billion from $3 billion in February. That catapulted the wealth of Harvey's founders, Winston Weinberg and Gabe Pereyra. Mr. Weinberg, 30, who lives with Mr. Pereyra, 34, and a third roommate, said he did not think much about riches. "Yeah, sure it's in the billions, but it's on paper," he said. The exception to the speed is Scale AI, which grew relatively quietly until Meta's investment. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive, tapped Scale AI's Mr. Wang, 28, to be his chief A.I. officer. Ms. Guo, 31, left the start-up in 2018 and has started a venture capital firm and Passes, a platform for influencers to make money from their content. Scale AI and Meta declined to comment, and Ms. Guo did not respond to a request for comment. They are under 40 years old. Youth is a hallmark of tech booms. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were in their 20s when they founded Google in 1998. Mr. Zuckerberg was 19 when he founded Facebook in 2004. The latest A.I. billionaires are also youthful. "Like the original Gilded Age and like the dot-com boom, this A.I. moment is making some very young people very, very, very rich, very quickly," said Margaret O'Mara, a history professor at the University of Washington who focuses on the tech economy. Among them are the 22-year-old founders of Mercor. Brendan Foody, the chief executive, dropped out of Georgetown University in 2023 after founding the company with two high school friends, Adarsh Hiremath, the chief technology officer, and Surya Midha, the chairman. Mercor, which declined to comment, was valued at $10 billion in an October funding round. Other young billionaires include Mr. Truell, the 24-year-old chief executive of Cursor, and his co-founders, Mr. Asif, Mr. Sanger and Mr. Lunnemark, who are also in their 20s. They met at M.I.T. and dropped out in 2022. A $2.3 billion funding round last month brought the valuation of their start-up -- also known by its parent company's name, Anysphere -- to $27 billion, according to PitchBook. Cursor did not respond to requests for comment. Most are men. The A.I. boom has elevated mostly male founders to billionaire status, a pattern in tech cycles. Only a few women -- such as Ms. Guo and Ms. Murati -- have reached that wealth level. The A.I. craze has amplified the "homogeneity" of those who are part of this boom, Dr. O'Mara said.

AI created 50 new billionaires in 2025, startup investment pulled in more than $200 billion

Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. In context: The middle classes may be facing a depressed job market, high inflation, and a broader cost-of-living crisis, but the wealthiest one percent have never had it so good. The AI-driven stock market boom reportedly added more than $500 billion to the wealth of America's richest tech titans in 2025 and created over 50 new billionaires worldwide. According to Forbes, most of the new AI billionaires are either founders or senior executives of SaaS companies, foundation model firms, or businesses focused on replacing human workers with AI software in the service and manufacturing sectors. Among the notable additions to the billionaire club are former Facebook executive Bret Taylor and former Google executive Clay Bavor. Their AI startup, Sierra, raised $350 million earlier this year. At CES 2026, the duo is expected to showcase conversational AI agents designed to replace human customer service representatives for companies such as Rivian and The North Face. The three youngest members of the billionaire list are Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha, who founded the recruiting firm Mercor. The list also includes Liang Wenfeng, the founder of Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, with an estimated net worth of around $11.5 billion. As AI has become the dominant tech buzzword over the past few years, the sector has seen a massive influx of capital from both institutional and private investors. According to Forbes, $202.3 billion was invested in AI startups in 2025, about 75 percent more than the $114 billion that flowed into AI-related firms last year. A large share of that funding went to foundation model companies, which have raised $80 billion so far in 2025, accounting for roughly 40 percent of global AI investment. Two of the largest players in the space, OpenAI and Anthropic, together captured 14 percent of all global venture investment in AI this year. Musk, already the world's richest person, recorded an almost 50 percent jump in net worth to $645 billion, making him the first person in history to surpass $500 billion in personal wealth. Among the biggest beneficiaries of the AI boom are Elon Musk, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, and Jensen Huang, all of whom saw their net worth surge in 2025. Musk, already the world's richest person, recorded an almost 50 percent jump in net worth to $645 billion, making him the first person in history to surpass $500 billion in personal wealth. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's net worth rose by $41.8 billion to $159 billion as the company's valuation crossed $5 trillion, driven by growing demand for AI accelerators in data centers. Google co-founder Larry Page and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also saw substantial gains, with their net worth climbing to $270 billion and $255 billion, respectively.

More Than 50 People Became AI Billionaires in 2025

In 2023 and 2024 we drowned in blather about how tech companies were going to create an AI model so big it would annihilate and/or save humanity. In 2025, the volume got turned down on “AGI,†and the apocalyptic hype transformed into unbelievable amounts of money. Some of that money concentrated in the personal ledgers of AI startup founders, who discovered they were the proud owners of stakes worth ten-figure amounts. According to Forbes, this happened more than 50 times in 2025. Humanity now has over 50 brand new AI billionaires. As you might have noticed, the blessed title of billionaire has not been bestowed on the creators of a digital messiah. For the most part, the unicorns of the AI billionaire era are dreary enterprise SaaS firms, data labeling startups, or companies that promise to replace workers with their cost-saving AI “agents.†For instance, please congratulate Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor, the new billionaires who got that way by founding a startup called Sierra that replaces human customer service representatives with AI agents. There are exceptions to this rule of boringness. For instance, Polish founders Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski became billionaires via the success of ElevenLabs, whose entertainment-adjacent voice-generation tools have won backers like Matthew McConaughey and Michael Caine. Lucy Guo is the co-founder of a dreary AI SaaS company called Scale AI that annotates data, but her story is more fun than most because she briefly became the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire after Meta bought a large stake in her company. The detail that may have grabbed your attention was the fact that she “unseated†Taylor Swift as holder of that title. Then in December, the crown was snatched by Luana Lopes Lara, co-founder of the equally dreary non-AI startup Kalshi. Also, Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha, the three Thiel fellows who founded Mercor, a company that mass-recruits experts and converts their expertise into AI training, are notable because they were all 22 when they became billionaires. That means they broke the age record held by Mark Zuckerberg. According to the traditional metrics, the economy is, of course, booming, in case you didn’t know. Despite that, 75% of U.S. homes are rated unaffordable based on average U.S. income. And only 24% of house and condo sales for 2024, the last year with relevant data, were purchased by first-time homebuyersâ€"a steep decline from 50% in the year 2010. Also, the top 10 percent of earners account for about 50 percent of all consumer spending now. But I’m sure none of this is relevant. Congratulations to the 2025 class of AI billionaires! This party is definitely never going to end.

Meet the newly minted AI billionaires of 2025

In 2025, artificial intelligence became a billionaire-making machine. Investors poured more than $200 billion into AI startups during the year, capturing roughly half of all global venture funding -- up from a 34% share in 2024 -- according to startup data firm Crunchbase. As a result, more than 50 individuals building the infrastructure, models, and applications bringing AI to market became billionaires on paper, Forbes reports. The geography of this wealth creation was global: While many new billionaires emerged from established U.S. hubs, Chinese AI firms -- particularly those with competitive open-source models trained with far less compute -- also catapulted founders into the billionaire club. Here's who topped the list. Topping the list is Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, defending his status as the world's richest person. His net worth soared nearly 50% in 2025, to $645 billion. This year, Musk secured a $1 trillion pay deal with Tesla shareholders -- the largest remuneration package in history -- while the valuation of his rocket company SpaceX soared to $800 billion.

AI Boom Creates Over 50 New Billionaires Amid Record $202 Billion In Funding - Goldman Sachs Group (NYSE:GS), Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META)

The artificial intelligence sector generated unparalleled wealth in 2025, creating more than 50 new billionaires as investors poured billions into AI companies. Record Investments According to Crunchbase data, $202.3 billion was invested in AI startups, capturing 50% of all global funding, up 16% from 2024. The surge in investment, with valuations reaching historic levels across infrastructure, development tools, and data services, has propelled a new wave of self-made billionaires to the forefront. Chinese AI startup DeepSeek made founder Liang Wenfeng a billionaire with an estimated $11.5 billion net worth in January, according to Forbes data. Anthropic raised $16.5 billion in 2025, reaching a $183 billion valuation and making all seven cofounders billionaires. See Also: Top AI Infrastructure Stocks For 2026 Industrial Super-Cycle New AI Billionaires Emerge Across Sectors Edwin Chen, founder and CEO of Surge AI, holds a 75% stake worth an estimated $18 billion based on $1.2 billion in 2024 revenue, according to Forbes. Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ:META) acquired 49% of Scale AI for over $14 billion, making cofounder Lucy Guo the world's youngest self-made female billionaire, with a net worth of $1.4 billion. Mercer, the global consulting firm, saw its three 22-year-old cofounders, Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha, become billionaires following a $10 billion valuation, according to Forbes. The AI audio research and deployment company ElevenLabs also saw its cofounders, Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski, become billionaires at a $6.6 billion valuation. Investor Focus and Funding Strength Investors are shifting focus beyond AI infrastructure builders like Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) toward companies using AI to drive real productivity gains, highlighting how strategic bets are helping create the next wave of AI billionaires. Last week, Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) noted that nearly 90% of AI spending through 2026 is expected to be funded by corporate cash rather than debt, underscoring the sector's financial strength. Read Next: How to Profit from the AI Boom in 2026 Photo: Shutterstock Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. GSThe Goldman Sachs Group Inc$910.02-%OverviewMETAMeta Platforms Inc$666.31-%NVDANVIDIA Corp$188.05-%Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

AI boom creates wealth at record pace, minting 50 new billionaires in 2025 - VnExpress International

The AI boom of 2025 has created more than 50 new billionaires, with entrepreneurs driving innovations in AI models, infrastructure, and applications that are transforming everyday life. January marked a pivotal moment in the AI race when Chinese startup DeepSeek unveiled its open-source AI model, which was trained using far less computing power than models from major American firms. This breakthrough catapulted founder Liang Wenfeng to billionaire status, with his net worth now estimated at $11.5 billion, according to Forbes. Blockbuster funding rounds in 2025 for companies like Anthropic, Safe Superintelligence, OpenAI, and Anysphere have further fueled the rise of new billionaires, propelling their valuations to record levels. AI startups attracted more than $200 billion in investment in 2025, accounting for 50% of all global funding, up 16% from 2024, according to Crunchbase. The number of AI "unicorns", private companies valued at $1 billion or more, has surged to 498, with a combined value of $2.7 trillion, as reported by CNBC. Billions of dollars flowed into startups developing multimodal AI across image, video, and audio. Among them, ElevenLabs cofounders Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski became billionaires after the AI audio startup raised $100 million at a $6.6 billion valuation in October. AI-driven tools for business, including coding and data analysis, have also turned entrepreneurs into billionaires, including the cofounders of Anysphere, who helped secure a $29 billion valuation for the company in November. Driven by surging demand for data centers, companies supplying the core infrastructure for AI minted more than a dozen new billionaires in 2025. The race, however, extended beyond models and hardware into a fierce talent war. That competition peaked in June when Meta bought a 49% stake in data-labeling startup Scale AI for more than $14 billion. As part of the deal, 28-year-old CEO and cofounder Alexandr Wang, who first became a billionaire in 2022, joined Meta as chief AI officer. The transaction valued Scale AI at about $29 billion and briefly made Wang's cofounder Lucy Guo, 31, the world's youngest self-made woman billionaire, with an estimated net worth of $1.4 billion Last year also saw a record number of self-made billionaires in their 20s, with many capitalizing on AI's rapid growth, Fortune reported. For instance, 22-year-olds Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha co-founded Mercor, an AI-powered recruiting startup that connects talent with top AI labs in Silicon Valley. Similarly, 29-year-old Luana Lopes Lara became the world's youngest self-made female billionaire, pivoting from a professional ballerina career to launch prediction market startup Kalshi, which hit an $11 billion valuation earlier this month. Andrew McAfee, principal researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology university, told CNBC that AI is generating personal wealth at a pace that eclipses previous technology booms. "Going back over 100 years of data, we have never seen wealth created at this size and speed," McAfee said. "It's unprecedented."