August 14, 2011 - According to Quantum Bits, theAI unicornThe number of companies has reached 498, with a total valuation of $2.7 trillion - more than Google's $2.44 trillion market capitalization - and 100 of them are less than two years old. The wave has created dozens of new billionaires, concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The four private AI giants have produced more than a dozen billionaires with a combined net worth of about $38 billion. They are represented by Scale AI co-founders Alexander Wang ($3.6 billion), Lucy Kuo ($1 billion+), Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei ($1.2 billion+), CoreWeave CEO Michael Interlocute ($10 billion), DeepSeek CEO Leung Man Fung, Figure AI founder Brett Adcock, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, and former OpenAI CEO Aravind Srinivas. -Adcock, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, and former OpenAI executives Ilya Sutzkev and Mira Mulati, among others.
These companies generally remain private, rely on financing from venture capitalists, sovereign funds, etc., and have frequent mergers and acquisitions and equity transfers. Founders are more focused on wealth management and secondary market operations, such as equity-backed lending and investing in similar technology companies.
The Bay Area has become a concentration of wealth, with the number of billionaires reaching 82, surpassing New York's 66. Local housing prices, rents and high-end real estate transactions are all at record highs. This wave of AI may continue to give birth to more global and Chinese tech nouveau riches.