These 30 Under 30 Alums Are Now Billionaires: How They Built Their Fortunes

InJanuary 2012, Forbes launched the inaugural 30 Under 30 list to highlight the founders and leaders building the next big thing. Every year since, the iconic franchise has celebrated the top young talent in 20 different industries who are shaping the future of business and culture.

Countless listers have since gone on to achieve stunning success in business, science, technology and show biz. But just 46 alumni have been so successful that they have leapt into the rarified ranks of the World’s Billionaires. Over the last 15 years the brightest of these young global stars have made their 10-figure fortunes in everything from social media and fintech to retail and, in Taylor Swift’s case, worldwide stardom. But nothing has created as much wealth at such an unprecedented rate as today’s AI fervor, which has minted new billionaires at an unprecedented rate, and is a big reason why a stunning 19 of these super-rich alums have become billionaires since the start of the year.

Among the breakout stars are eight alumni who all became billionaires in the past year and are still under 30 years old. That includes the four cofounders of AnySphere, the parent company behind AI coding tool cursor: Sualeh Asif, Aman Sanger and Michael Truell, all age 25, and Arvid Lunnemark, 26; Polymarket’s Shayne Coplan, of Polymarket, who recently landed a big investment from the global stock exchange operator Intercontinental Exchange; and the three 22-year-old cofounders of AI recruiting unicorn Mercor — Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha — who raised $350 million at a $10 billion valuation this Fall, making them the world’s youngest billionaires ever. (Mark Zuckerberg previously held that title when he debuted on the billionaire ranks at 23. He, too, appeared on Under 30 but was already a billionaire by then.)

Another notable deal involving U30 alums this year: Meta invested $14.3 billion into 28-year-old AI powerhouse Alexandr Wang’s ScaleAI in June in exchange for a 49% stake. The acquisition boosted Wang’s fortune by more than 50% to a recent $3.2 billion and pushed up the fortune of his cofounder Lucy Guo, who appeared with Wang on the 2018 Under 30 list, to $1.4 billion; she is now the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire.

Twelve of the U30 billionaire alums are building AI-first companies, but nearly all 46 of them are using AI in some way to evolve their businesses—think Ankur Jain’s Bilt, which has implemented AI agents to customer service and analyze customer data, or Melanie Perkins’ Canva, which now offers options to AI-generate images or translate text to more than 100 languages.

Only three of the 46 Under 30 billionaires come from industries outside of tech. That includes one athlete (LeBron James) and two entertainers (Taylor Swift and Rihanna). Famous for smash hits like “Diamonds” and “Umbrella,” Rihanna became a billionaire in 2021 thanks largely to her cosmetics company Fenty Beauty. She’s worth $1 billion today. Taylor Swift, on the other hand, crossed the billion-dollar threshold solely due to her music and performances, and is now worth $1.6 billion.

The richest Under 30 alum of all is ByteDance cofounder Zhang Yiming, who made the Under 30 China list in 2013, four years before the company launched TikTok. The video company’s virality has resulted in a $63.9 billion fortune for Zhang, making him the 26th-richest person in the world.

Zhang is one of at least 14 Under 30s-turned-billionaires who hail from outside the U.S., including from China, India, Ireland and France. That also includes Rihanna, who is from Barbados, and Spotify’s Daniel Ek, who appeared on the cover of the first Under 30 issue, who hails from Sweden.

In honor of the 15th annual Forbes 30 Under 30 list, here’s a look at our picks for 15 notable Under 30s-turned-billionaires followed by the complete list of billionaire alumni. (At least a dozen others, including Whitney Wolfe Herd of dating app Bumble, and Pedro Franceschi and Henrique Dubugras of fintech company Brex, were members of three comma club at some point but have since fallen below the threshold.) .

Gilles Sabrie/Bloomberg

In a rented apartment in Beijing, Zhang founded ByteDance (now TikTok’s parent company) in 2012. It first released a news-aggregation app called Toutiao—which landed Zhang a spot on the Forbes Under 30 China list in 2013, at age 29. By 2017, its video-sharing app TikTok launched globally.Zhang was first named a billionaire by Forbes in 2018 after an investment from General Atlantic valued ByteDance at $20 billion. The media company’s virality has pushed its valuation up to $480 billion; Zhang, who stepped down as CEO and chairman in 2021, is worth $63.9 billion, making him the 26th richest person in the world today.

Ethan Pines for Forbes

Collison and his brother John became millionaires as teenagers in Ireland when they sold their first company in 2008. Two years later, as students at MIT, they launched fintech startup Stripe to allow businesses and merchants to accept payments online. Or as Collison previously told Forbes, “to accelerate the internet economy as a whole, to increase the GDP of the internet.” They gradually evolved it into an all-in-one financial platform that helps companies with such tasks as incorporating in the U.S. and managing (and automating) recurring payments and subscriptions. Eleven months after appearing on the Under 30 Europe list, they became billionaires when the company was valued at more than $9 billion; it’s now valued at $91.5 billion.

Swedish music buff appeared on the first ever cover of Forbes Under 30 thanks to his streaming startup Spotify that was already then a global powerhouse. Ek had earlier sold his first analytics software company, Advertigo, for $2 billion in 2006. The newfound freedom—and money—to do whatever he wanted, led him to play music himself and eventually to try to solve the issues plaguing the music industry at the time: illegal piracy was off the charts, consumers weren’t shopping for CDs, and new digital platforms meant listeners could buy single songs instead of full albums. Spotify went public in 2018 and Ek became a billionaire soon after that; the company’s revenue hit $18 billion in 2024, helping push shares up 100% in the last year. He stepped down as CEO in 2025.

Anyone can be an artist with Perkins’ Canva. The Australian cofounder launched the digital design platform in 2013 after realizing that design tools were too complex and expensive. The user-friendly software now allows individuals and enterprise clients to build websites, create graphics, design and print products, and edit social media campaigns. A $40 billion valuation of the design firm bumped her into the billionaire ranks in 2021—that’s a far cry from the startup’s $165 million valuation in 2015, just prior to Perkins being named to the Under 30 list.

The son of two World Bank staffers, Tenev and his Stanford classmate Baiju Bhatt created a fun and easy-to-use no-commission trading model in 2013 meant to democratize the industry. Called Robinhood, it revolutionized the brokerage industry, but also causing a regulatory firestorm during the meme-stock trading frenzy. Both cofounders became billionaires after it went public in 2021 but soon fell out of the ranks. Now embracing AI-powered investing and tokenized stocks, his fortune is up six-fold in the past year. Up next: a beta version of finance-focused social platform, “Robinhood Social,” slated for 2026.

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Long before his brother Jared became his father-in-law Trump’s advisor (first term) and his father, real estate developer Charles Kushner, got tapped to be France’s ambassador, the Harvard MBA founded his own venture capital firm Thrive Capital in 2009. It has since become one of the most influential firms backing such companies as Instagram, Spotify, Stripe, and OpenAI. Thrive’s own investors include Disney CEO Bob Iger, KKR cofounder Henry Kravis and India’s richest person Mukesh Ambani. Kushner first appeared in the billionaire ranks in 2022.

The Long Beach California native who was homeschooled built his first virtual reality headset at age 16. He sold his startup Oculus VR to Facebook in 2014 for $2 billion in cash and stock and left two years later. His next venture Anduril, a defense-tech outfit that has armed Ukraine and is using AI to modernize the military. The firm was last valued at $30.5 billion in June 2025.

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Instagram was still in its infancy when cofounder Systrom, now 41, was featured in the inaugural 30 Under 30 issue in 2012. Four months later, the entrepreneur sold his photo-sharing app to Facebook in a $1 billion deal; his take included 23 million shares of Facebook stock. He crossed into the billionaire ranks in August 2016 as his stash of Facebook shares skyrocketed, and stayed on to run Instagram until 2018. He cofounded newsfeed app Artifact in 2023 and sold it a year later to Yahoo.

cody pickens for forbes

Foody cofounded Mercor, which hires experts to train AI systems, in 2023 with Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha, fellow members of his high school debate team. The San Francisco startup, whose customers include OpenAI and Google, raised $350 million in October at a $10 billion valuation. That made the trio, all of whom are 22, the youngest self-made billionaires ever, besting even Mark Zuckerberg, who first hit that status at 23. “It’s definitely crazy,” says Foody, who is Mercor’s CEO. “It feels very surreal. Obviously beyond our wildest imaginations.”

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The legendary CEO of OpenAI has no equity in the massive AI giant that is reshaping much of the world. His fortune comes from his dozens of early investments in companies like Stripe, Reddit and Oklo, all of which got started at the famous accelerator Y Combinator where he was a partner and later founder Paul Graham’s virtually unknown, handpicked successor. The Stanford dropout had started his own outfit, social networking Loopt in 2005, which he sold seven years later. The CEO now has his sights set on releasing an AI-first version of the iPhone in less than two years, joining forces with Jony Ive, former Apple chief design officer.

jamel toppin for forbes

The former presidential candidate and, briefly, DOGE co-head with Elon Musk is running for Ohio governor with Trump’s backing. Before politics, he traded biotech stocks for a hedge fund. In 2015, via a spin-off of his drug discovery and investment firm Roivant Sciences, he took public a speculative Alzheimer’s drug (which later failed) in a $3 billion IPO. Ramaswamy left in 2021 to write the bestseller Woke, Inc. and founded anti-woke investment firm Strive. He became a billionaire in 2024; his fortune has jumped since thanks to his stake in Roivant, which makes up the bulk of his fortune.

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When Swift was recognized on the Under 30 list, Forbes reported she pulled in some $45 million in earnings from her three albums at the time—all platinum. The stardom continued. Then, in 2019, her record label Big Machine Records sold the rights to her first six studio albums to private equity firm Shamrock Capital. She put up a (very public) fight and started rerecording her own music. Still, no biggie: Swift kept releasing new music, which led to her epic, record breaking “Era’s Tour” starting in 2023 , where she put on a nearly four-hour show for three nights every single weekend for two years, all across the globe. That tour—which broke Ticketmaster—grossed an unprecedented $2 billion in ticket sales and made her the world’s wealthiest female musician. She used some of that cash for revenge so sweet, buying back her first six records, estimated to be worth $360 million, this May.

ethan pines for forbes

Scale AI had raised less than $5 million when Guo, then 23, and cofounder Alexandr Wang, then 20, made the 2018 Under 30 list. Soon after, she was kicked out of the company amid a falling-out with Wang. She wisely held onto her Scale stake even as she began building Passes, a content platform for creators that competes with OnlyFans. Eight years later, Scale is an AI giant worth $29 billion—enough to make Guo the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire. “You have to be your cofounder’s biggest cheerleader,” she now says of her breakup with Scale.

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Exactly two decades ago, Huffman cofounded the online discussions forum Reddit with his University of Virginia college roommate Alexis Ohanian. A year after its founding, the pair sold the startup to Conde Nast for some $10 million. Huffman left Reddit in 2009, and then returned in 2015 as its CEO. A smart decision. Last March, Reddit went public on the New York Stock Exchange in what was a bullish IPO with shares climbing nearly 48% on the first day. Although analysts soon became a little more critical, Huffman’s hefty stock compensation package has made him a billionaire a year later.

guerin blask for forbes

Coplan came up with the idea of Polymarket in 2020: A platform where the average Joe can bet on literally anything, from sports games to entertainment awards—and even presidential elections. When he made the Under 30 list last year, Polymarket had been banned from the U.S. for operating unregistered markets. And when its crowd-driven forecasts accurately predicted Donald Trump’s presidential win, the FBI raided Coplan’s residences on suspicion that it had been allowing U.S. users to use its platform. Now a year later, Polymarket is boasting a $9 billion valuation after Jeff Sprecher’s Intercontinental Exchange invested $2 billion into the startup in October. Partnerships with Google are underway, but Polymarket still isn’t legal in the U.S.

John Collison, $10.1 bil, Stripe

Justin Sun, $8.5 bil, Cryptocurrency

Liu Jiangkang, $3.6 bil, Cameras

Ankur Jain, $3.4 bil, Rewards firm

Alexandr Wang, $3.2 bil, Artificial intelligence

Joe Lonsdale, $3.1 bil, Tech investments

Fred Ehrsam, $2.9 bil, Cryptocurrency exchange

Evan Spiegel, $2.5 bil, Snapchat

Drew Houston, $2.4 bil, Cloud storage software

Adarsh Hiremath, $2.2 bil, AI software

Surya Midha, $2.2 bil, AI software

Alex Bouaziz, $2 bil, HR software

Bobby Murphy, $1.9 bil, Snapchat

Byunghoon Kim, $1.9 bil, Beauty devices

Dylan Field, $1.8 bil, Software

Andy Fang, $1.5 bil, Food delivery app

Ben Silbermann, $1.5 bil, Social media

LeBron James, $1.3 bil, Basketball

Sualeh Asif, $1.3 bil, AI software

Arvid Lunnemark, $1.3 bil, AI software

Aman Sanger, $1.3 bil, AI software

Michael Truell, $1.3 bil, AI software

Apoorva Mehta, $1.2 bil, Grocery delivery service

Ryan Israel, $1.1 bil, Hedge funds

Piotr Dabkowski, $1.1 bil, AI software

Mati Staniszweski, $1.1 bil, AI software

Jacob DeWitte, $1.1 bil, Nuclear power

Stanley Tang, $1.1 bil, Food delivery app

Harshil Mathur, $1 bil, Fintech

Rihanna, $1 bil, Music, Cosmetics

Evan Wallace, $1 bil, Figma