Abstract:
According to Business Insider, Forbes released its annual list of the 400 richest people in the United States. This year the threshold for inclusion on the list rose to US$4.4 billion, a record high. The number of rich people under the age of 40 has increased from 4 last year to 10. Seven of them got their wealth from the AI boom, and most of them are founders.
Of these 7 AI tycoons, 4 are from the same company - Anthropic. This AI company was founded only five years ago and currently has a secondary market valuation of US$1.5 trillion. Anthropic's seven co-founders each pledged earlier this year to donate 80% of their personal wealth to charity. The remaining three are from Surge AI, OpenAI and Cognition.
The only person on the list who inherited his wealth is Lukas Walton, the grandson of Walmart founder Sam Walton. He is also one of two young rich people who do not live in California. The other is Edwin Chen who lives in New York.
Anduril Industries founder Palmer Luckey is one of the youngest billionaires in the United States
The 10 youngest billionaires in the United States
1. Lukas Walton, 39 years old, net worth $44.4 billion
Rob, Alice and Jim Walton are members of the wealthiest family in America. Lucas Walton, who is not shown in the picture, lives a low-key life, and there are very few photos of him online
Lucas, the richest man in Illinois, runs the impact investment group Builders Vision and serves as chairman of the Environmental Programs Committee of the Walton Family Foundation. As of 2024, he has donated at least US$150 million of his personal wealth to the family environmental project foundation. After his father, John T. Walton, died in a plane crash in 2005, he inherited about one-third of the estate. Forbes data shows that the Walton family’s total net worth is
475.6 billion U.S. dollars
.2. Tom Brown, 39 years old, net worth $15.5 billion
Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown, 39 years old, net worth $15.5 billion
Brown is one of the seven co-founders of Anthropic and serves as chief computing officer. He recently mediated Anthropic's standoff with the United States over Claude's AI models "Fable 5" and "Mythos 5." Previously, he served as head of research engineering at OpenAI, where he helped launch the GPT-3 language model. Brown graduated from MIT in 2010, studying computer science and cognitive science. In 2011, he co-founded the social club Grouper.
3. Daniela Amodei, 39 years old, net worth $15.5 billion
Anthropic President and Co-Founder Daniela Amoudi, 39, has a net worth of $15.5 billion
Daniela is President and Chairman of the Board of Directors at Anthropic. Like Brown, she left OpenAI in 2021 to found Anthropic with her brother Dario. She worked for the financial services company Stripe and graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2009 with a bachelor's degree in English literature and a minor in political science. She has said that she does not regret her college major and believes that artificial intelligence will enhance the importance of the humanities. "Critical thinking skills will be more important in the future, not less," she said in an interview earlier this year.
4. Vlad Tenev, 39 years old, net worth $7.1 billion
Robinhood Markets CEO Vlad Tenev founded the stock trading app when he was 26
Tenev was born in Bulgaria. In 2013, he co-founded the stock trading application Robinhood with Stanford classmate Baiju Bhatt. Bhatt is also on the Forbes 400 list this year. Robinhood went public in 2021 and is currently shifting most of its business to prediction markets, where users can buy and sell contracts related to future events such as weather, sports, elections, and Federal Reserve decisions. The company's market capitalization
107.7 billion U.S. dollars
. According to Forbes, Tenev holds about 6% of the company's shares. He is also co-founder and executive chairman of Harmonic, a company that builds AI systems that excel at advanced mathematical reasoning.5. Edwin Chen, 38 years old, net worth US$18 billion
Edwin Chen founded Surge AI, a data annotation and AI training company in 2020
Chen is the founder of Surge AI, a data annotation and AI training company with annual revenue exceeding US$1 billion. He holds about
75%
of companies whose clients include Google and Anthropic. He graduated from MIT where he studied mathematics, linguistics and computer science. Before founding Surge AI in 2020, he worked at Google, Facebook and Twitter. The son of Taiwanese immigrants, he is from Florida.6. Greg Brockman, 37 years old, net worth $25.5 billion
OpenAI President and Co-Founder Greg Brockman, 37 years old, net worth $25.5 billion
Brockman is a Harvard and MIT dropout. At 25, he became Stripe's chief technology officer. In 2015, he co-founded OpenAI with Elon Musk and Sam Altman. He currently serves as President of OpenAI, where he oversees the model’s infrastructure. Earlier this year, he said his stake in the company was close to
$30 billion
.7. Jack Clark, 37 years old, net worth $15.5 billion
Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark entered the artificial intelligence industry in 2016
Clark started out as a reporter covering artificial intelligence for Bloomberg and later became one of the best-known founders of the AI industry. In 2016, he joined OpenAI as Policy Director. Five years later, he co-founded Anthropic and now runs the company’s internal think tank, studying the impact of AI on society. He is a well-respected consultant in the field of AI security and also writes the email newsletter "Import AI", which many researchers follow. Clark has co-authored several AI research papers.
8. Sam McCandlish, 36 years old, net worth $15.5 billion
Anthropic co-founder Sam McCandlish lives a low-key life, and his photos on the Internet are limited
McCandlish is another Anthropic co-founder and originally worked at OpenAI. While at OpenAI, he studied the law of scaling, whereby AI systems become stronger as they are trained with more data and computing power. Now, he serves as Anthropic's chief architect, overseeing how models are built and trained. Previously, he served as Chief Technology Officer of Anthropic. In 2017, he received his PhD in theoretical physics from Stanford.
9. Palmer Luckey, 33 years old, net worth $5.9 billion
Palmer Luckey was only 19 years old when he founded the virtual reality company Oculus VR in 2012
Lucki built a VR headset as a teenager and founded a company in 2012 to sell the product. Two years later, he sold his company, Oculus, to Meta for $2 billion in cash and stock. Meta fired him in 2016 after donating to a group supporting Donald Trump, but Meta denied his departure was politically related. Lucki has since co-founded defense technology company Anduril, which builds AI software and autonomous military hardware. As of May, Anduril was valued at
$61 billion
.10. Steven Hao, 30 years old, net worth US$5.8 billion
Steven Hao is the youngest billionaire in the United States with limited photos on the Internet
Hao is the youngest billionaire in the United States. He left the data annotation startup Scale AI and co-founded Cognition with Scott Wu and Walden Yan in 2023. Cognition makes AI software that writes and repairs code. Its clients include Citibank and financial technology company Ramp. The company is valued at $48 billion.
. Hao is a former competitive programmer who won a gold medal at the International Informatics Olympiad, a global competitive programming championship.
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