On December 31, according to The New York TimesAI The heat has made it known to the British CEO, Jensen Huang, and Openai CEO, Sam AltmanBillionaireGets richer. At the same time, it has made a batchFrom SmallEntrepreneurshipThe company's new young billionaireAt least on paper。
These young billionaires may become future Silicon Valley power figures, like the rich executives that were created by the technological heat. For example, in the late 1990s, when rich people emerged during the Internet bubble, they invested in or helped to lead the subsequent wave of technology。
The new AI billionaires, including the co-founders of Scale AI Wang and Lucy Guo, created the data label company that received $14.3 billion from Meta in June this year. The four founders of AI Cursor, Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Aman Sanger and Arvid Runnemark, were among the billions of billionaires in the corporate finance valuation of $27 billion last month。
According to businesses and knowledgeers close to these start-ups, the start-ups track data platform PitchBook and news reports, the founders of the AI search engine Perplexity, AI Data Entrepreneurship, Mercor, human robot manufacturer Figure AI, AI Laboratories Safe Superintelligence, AI Legal Software Enterprise Harvey, and AI Laboratories Thinking Machines Lab are among the nine-digitly rich clubs. The wealth of these entrepreneurs stems mainly from this year ' s surge in private corporate valuations, which turned their corporate shares into gold mines。
The partner of Silicon Valley Ventures, Jai Das, compared billionaires to a railway tycoon that emerged in the golden age of the 19th century. He cautioned, however, that if those start-ups failed to meet their development commitments, their wealth could also be lost in a moment。
“The question is, which of these companies can survive? And who are the founders who can really be billionaires, not just on paper.”Das。
Rapid enrichment
Elon Musk's billionaire road has been going on for years. The technology entrepreneur became a millionaire in 2002 after the early start-up project was bought by eBay, and only became a billionaire when he led the electric car manufacturer Tesla and created the rocket company SpaceX。
In contrast, most of the new AI billionaires have been set up in the company after OpenAI published ChatGPT, which is less than three years old. Investors then quickly pushed up their corporate valuations and quickly moved them into billionaires。
The 37-year-old Mira Murati was once executive director of OpenAI, and only in February this year announced the establishment of her AI entrepreneurship firm Thinking Machines Lab. In four monthsThis start-up company, which has not published any products, has valued $10 billion。The company subsequently issued a product and refused to comment on it。
Ilya Sutskever, a 39-year-old former executive of OpenAI, founded the Safe Superintellince in June 2024。Although the products have not yet been published, PitchBook data show that the company ' s estimate for this year ' s $2 billion financing has reached $32 billion。Safe Superintelligence refused to comment on this。
The 39-year-old Brett Adcock is the CEO of Figure AI, which was founded in 2022. Figure AI disclosed that its personal net assets amounted to $19.5 billion. Thirty-one-year-old Aravind Srinivas also created the AI Search Company Perplexity in 2022. According to PitchBook, the company valued about $20 billion。
In this regard, Sri Lanka is not concerned with personal wealth, preferring to maintain a simple way of life, and emphasizes the company's commitment to seeking wisdom, which “is far more important than pursuing wealth”。
THIS YEAR, THE ACCUMULATION OF WEALTH BY THESE AL-RICH PEOPLE HAS BEEN PARTICULARLY RAPID。San Francisco AI Legal Software Company Harvey completed successive rounds of financing in February, June and this month. The company's valuation then surged from $3 billion in February to $8 billion, bringing its co-founder Winston Weinberg and Gabe Pereyra to a sharp increase in wealth。
At 30, Weinberg lived with 34-year-old Pereira and another roommate. He stated that he had not paid too much attention to wealth figures. “Yes, it does, but it's just a number on paper.” He said。
Some exceptions are Scale AI. Before Meta ' s investment, the company developed relatively low. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has appointed 28-year-old Wang Tao as the chief AI officer of the company. The 31-year-old Guo intended to leave the business in 2018 and then set up a venture capital company and a platform to help content creators profit from their work, Passes。
Under 40
Young people have always been a prominent feature of the technological boom. In 1998, Larry Page and Sergei Brin founded Google at least twenty years ago. In 2004, Zuckerberg was only 19 years old when he created Facebook。
Now the newly emerged AI billionaires are just as powerful. “Just as in the early years of gold plating and the Internet bubbles, this wave of AI is making some very young people extremely rich.” Margaret O'Mara, a professor at Washington University who focuses on the economic history of technology and technology, points out that he is not the only one who has a history of technology。
The typical representative is a 22-year-old co-founder of AI Data Enterprise Mercor. The company CEO Brendan Foody co-founded it with two high school friends, the Chief Technical Officer Adarsh Hiremath and the Chairman of the Board, Surya Midha, and then dropped out of Georgetown University in 2023. Mercor, with an estimate of $10 billion in the October round of financing, refused to comment。
Other young rich people include 25-year-old CEO Truel of the AI Programming Enterprise Cursor and his co-founders Asif, Sangar and Lennamar, who are also in their early 20s. This founding team met at MIT and graduated in 2022. According to PitchBook, Cursor completed $2.3 billion last month, bringing its valuation to $27 billion。
Most men
AI, WHICH HAS BROUGHT MALE FOUNDERS TO THE THRONE OF BILLIONAIRES, HAS BECOME A REGULAR FEATURE OF THE TECHNOLOGY CYCLE. ONLY A FEW WOMEN HAVE REACHED THIS LEVEL OF WEALTH, SUCH AS GUO AND MURATI
DR. OMARA POINTS OUT THAT THE "HOMOGENIZATION" OF THE PARTICIPANTS IN THIS WAVE IS EXACERBATED BY THE HEAT OF AI。