Tarek Mansour is the co-founder and CEO of Kalshi, the first CFTC-regulated exchange for trading on the outcomes of real-world events. A Lebanese-American MIT graduate and former Goldman Sachs and Citadel trader, he turned a regulatory fight into a multibillion-dollar prediction market that lets anyone trade on elections, weather, economics and culture. In May 2026 Kalshi raised $1 billion in a Series F at a $22 billion valuation and became the first American firm to offer crypto perpetual futures under federal regulation.
Austin Russell founded Luminar Technologies at 16, built lidar hardware in his parents' garage, dropped out of Stanford after three months on a Thiel Fellowship, and briefly became the world's youngest self-made billionaire at 25 when Luminar went public in December 2020. His company's 1550nm lidar sensors were integrated into production vehicles from Volvo and Mercedes-Benz, representing a rare case of autonomous vehicle hardware reaching mass-market cars. After a highly publicized attempt to acquire Forbes magazine fell through in 2023, Russell resigned as Luminar's CEO in May 2025 following a board ethics inquiry, and the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December 2025.
Jay Chaudhry is the founder, chairman and CEO of Zscaler, the cloud security company he started in 2007 to replace corporate firewalls with a zero trust internet exchange. A serial founder of five security companies before Zscaler, he took the company public in 2018 and built it into a multi-billion-dollar pillar of the cybersecurity industry.
Adarsh Hiremath is the Co-Founder and CTO of Mercor, the AI-powered talent marketplace connecting domain experts with AI labs for model training, evaluation, and data creation. At 22, he dropped out of Harvard, received a Thiel Fellowship, and co-built Mercor from a São Paulo hackathon idea into a $10 billion company generating over $500 million in annual revenue - making him one of the world's youngest self-made billionaires alongside co-founders Brendan Foody and Surya Midha.
Brendan Foody is the 22-year-old co-founder and CEO of Mercor, the AI talent and data company that became a $10 billion decacorn in under two years. A Georgetown dropout and former Thiel Fellow from Menlo Park, California, Foody co-founded Mercor with high school debate teammates Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha at a São Paulo hackathon in early 2023. Mercor connects AI labs — including OpenAI, Meta, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic — with domain experts (scientists, doctors, lawyers, bankers) who train frontier AI models through human feedback, growing from $1M to $500M in annual run rate within 17 months and making Foody one of the world's youngest self-made billionaires.
Bret Taylor is the co-founder and CEO of Sierra, an enterprise AI agent platform valued at $15.8 billion following its $950M Series E in May 2026. A Stanford computer science graduate, he co-created Google Maps, helped invent Facebook's Like button, served as Facebook CTO, co-founded Quip (acquired by Salesforce), and rose to co-CEO of Salesforce before founding Sierra in 2023. He also chairs the OpenAI board, having stabilized the company after Sam Altman's brief ouster in November 2023. Forbes recognized him as a billionaire in 2025, and Silicon Valley has nicknamed him the 'Forrest Gump of Silicon Valley' for his uncanny presence at every landmark moment in the internet age.
Brett Adcock is a serial entrepreneur and founder of Figure AI, the humanoid robotics company valued at $39 billion after a $1B+ Series C in September 2025. Raised on a third-generation farm in central Illinois, Adcock built his first web companies at 16, co-founded and sold talent marketplace Vettery to Adecco for ~$100M in 2018, took eVTOL company Archer Aviation public on the NYSE at a $2.7B valuation, then pivoted to what he calls the hardest problem: building general-purpose humanoid robots. Figure's robots now work autonomously on BMW's production floor and have logged over 30,000 vehicles built. In 2025-2026, Adcock simultaneously launched Hark (personal AI hardware, $700M Series A at $6B valuation) and Cover (school weapon-detection tech). He is currently running three companies at once while publicly estimating his net worth at ~$19 billion.
Joe Gebbia co-founded Airbnb in 2008 out of a San Francisco living room - air mattresses, breakfast included - and turned a half-crazy idea into an $85B company. His current venture, Samara, builds factory-assembled, solar-ready backyard homes (ADUs) that go from permit to move-in in under seven months. In early 2025 he became America's first Chief Design Officer, tasked with redesigning the federal government's 27,000 websites. A Rhode Island School of Design graduate with dual majors in graphic and industrial design, Gebbia approaches every problem - housing affordability, government UX, refugee shelter - through the lens of democratic, empathetic design.
Surya Midha is a 22-year-old co-founder and Chairman of Mercor, the AI-powered talent platform valued at $10 billion. A Thiel Fellow, national debate champion, and Georgetown dropout, Midha co-built Mercor from a São Paulo hackathon into a company paying 30,000+ contractors over $1.5 million daily, matching elite human intelligence with AI labs including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind. In 2026, he became one of the youngest people ever to appear on the Forbes World's Billionaires List with a net worth of $2.2 billion.
Jimmy Donaldson, known globally as MrBeast, is the most-subscribed individual on YouTube with 487+ million subscribers. At 27, he runs Beast Industries, a $5 billion media and consumer goods conglomerate, produces Amazon Prime Video's most-watched unscripted series Beast Games, and has donated tens of millions through initiatives like Team Trees and Team Seas. He reinvests virtually all revenue back into his productions, calling YouTube his true obsession.
Michael Deng is the founder, Chairman, President, and CEO of ArcSoft, a Fremont, California-based computer vision and AI imaging company he started in 1994 with $150,000 from family and friends. Over three decades, he built ArcSoft into a global leader powering the cameras of Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi, Sony, and dozens more, then pivoted to automotive AI vision - driver monitoring, ADAS, and in-cabin sensing. When ArcSoft listed on Shanghai's STAR Market in 2021, Deng became a billionaire with a stake valued at roughly $1.1 billion. Today he's steering the company into AI glasses, XR headsets, robotics, and AIGC creative tools.
Edwin Chen is the Founder & CEO of Surge AI, the AI data infrastructure company that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon for model training and evaluation. A former ML scientist at Google, Twitter, Dropbox, and Facebook, Chen bootstrapped Surge AI from his San Francisco apartment in 2020 to over $1.2 billion in annual revenue with fewer than 110 employees - no venture capital, no sales team. TIME named him one of the 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2025, and Forbes put him on the 400 list as one of the youngest billionaires. Surge's platform powers RLHF, supervised fine-tuning, and custom evaluations for the world's leading AI labs.
Michael Truell is the 25-year-old co-founder and CEO of Anysphere, the company behind Cursor — the AI-native code editor that reached $2 billion ARR faster than any SaaS company in history. A former Google intern and MIT dropout who won the ACM/CSTA Cutler-Bell Prize and IOI medals in high school, Truell co-founded Cursor in 2022 with three MIT classmates, launching it publicly in March 2023. By November 2025, Cursor had raised $2.3 billion at a $29.3 billion valuation — and in April 2026, SpaceX secured an option to acquire the company for $60 billion. Truell's north star: replace coding itself with something better.
Douglas Leone is an Italian-born American billionaire venture capitalist and former Global Managing Partner of Sequoia Capital, one of the most storied VC firms in Silicon Valley history. He joined Sequoia in 1988 after stints at Sun Microsystems, HP, and Prime Computer, rose to Managing Partner in 1996, and led the firm's global expansion into China and India. With investments spanning ServiceNow, RingCentral, Nubank, Medallia, and Wiz, Leone helped shape the modern cloud and enterprise software landscape. He stepped back from the senior operational role in 2022 but remains a general partner. As of late 2025, his net worth is estimated at $10.8 billion.
Sualeh Asif is the 26-year-old co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Anysphere, the company behind Cursor - the AI-powered code editor that reached $2 billion in annual recurring revenue faster than any B2B company in history. Born in Karachi, Pakistan, he represented his country at the International Mathematical Olympiad three times before studying at MIT, where he and three classmates built the product that is now rewriting how software gets made. Valued at $1.3 billion on Forbes' 2026 Billionaires List, Asif went from teaching math to Karachi students to co-architecting the tool powering 50,000+ enterprises including Nvidia, Adobe, and Uber.
Taavet Hinrikus is an Estonian tech entrepreneur who became Skype's first employee, co-founded Wise (formerly TransferWise) in 2010 - growing it into Europe's largest fintech IPO via a 2021 direct listing at $11B - and now invests through Plural Platform alongside backing social initiatives like kood/Jõhvi coding school. One of Estonia's first billionaires, with a net worth around $1.35 billion, he is also a co-owner of the NBA's Portland Trail Blazers.
Jim McKelvey is the co-founder of Square (now Block, Inc.), a serial entrepreneur, master glassblower, author, and philanthropist from St. Louis. He built Square after losing a $2,000 sale at his glass studio because he couldn't accept American Express - and turned that frustration into a payments company that beat Amazon when it tried to copy them. He's also founded Invisibly, co-founded LaunchCode (a nonprofit that guarantees tech jobs), serves as an Operator Advisor at Redbud VC, and is a former Chair of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Thierry Cruanes is the co-founder and CTO of Snowflake, the cloud data platform that executed the largest software IPO in US history in September 2020. A French-born database architect with a PhD from Pierre and Marie Curie University, he spent 13 years at Oracle leading query optimization before betting everything on the cloud in 2012 - when Hadoop was supposed to win. He holds over 40 patents, writes code on weekends for fun, and helped architect the compute-storage separation that redefined modern data warehousing.
Elon Musk is the wealthiest person in recorded history and the founder or co-founder of nine major companies including SpaceX, Tesla, xAI, and Neuralink. Born in Pretoria, South Africa, he taught himself to code at 10, sold his first game at 12, and dropped out of a Stanford PhD after two days to chase the internet gold rush. His companies collectively own 65% of all operational Earth satellites, produce the world's best-selling electric vehicles, and are actively building brain-computer interfaces and rockets to colonize Mars. As of May 2026, his net worth stands at approximately $809 billion.
Hemant Taneja is the CEO of General Catalyst, a $40B+ venture capital firm, and one of tech's most unconventional thinkers. Born in Delhi, India, he earned five degrees from MIT before co-founding Livongo Health - sold to Teladoc for $18.5 billion, the largest digital health merger in history. As an early backer of Stripe, Snap, Anthropic, and Canva, and the architect behind GC's audacious move to acquire an actual hospital system, Taneja has spent two decades arguing that building responsibly isn't just the right thing to do - it's the winning strategy. He's signed the Giving Pledge, written four books on technology and capitalism, and is worth an estimated $3.6 billion.
John Doerr is the Chairman of Kleiner Perkins and one of Silicon Valley's most consequential venture capitalists. The man who backed Google and Amazon with early checks, taught the world OKRs through his bestselling book 'Measure What Matters', and bet $1.1 billion on Stanford to build the Doerr School of Sustainability. A Rice-trained electrical engineer turned Intel salesman turned legendary VC, Doerr has spent 45+ years turning missionary founders into category-defining companies - and is now directing that same energy toward solving the climate crisis.
Josh Kushner is the founder and managing partner of Thrive Capital, a New York-based venture firm he started at age 24 with $5 million and has since grown to $50+ billion in AUM across 10 funds. He made one of the most consequential single bets in VC history by providing the only term sheet OpenAI received in 2022 at a $29 billion valuation. Co-founder of Oscar Health and Cadre, minority owner of the Miami Heat and San Francisco Giants, and husband of supermodel and media entrepreneur Karlie Kloss, Kushner operates from the Puck Building in Manhattan where his apartment and office share the same address. Known for his low-key demeanor, obsessive work ethic, and a hiring process that famously takes eight months.
Theresia Gouw is a Chinese-Indonesian immigrant who became America's first female billionaire venture capitalist. A Brown-trained engineer turned Stanford MBA, she rose to become the first female investing partner at Accel Partners, where she helped back Facebook at a $98 million valuation in 2005. She co-founded Aspect Ventures and then Acrew Capital, managing ~$1.7 billion with a firm where 85% of employees are women or BIPOC. Beyond VC, she holds minority ownership stakes in the Buffalo Bills, Bay FC, and Golden State Warriors, and is Lead Investor and Executive Chair of an incoming Major League Volleyball franchise in Northern California.
Alexandr Wang is the co-founder of Scale AI and current Chief AI Officer at Meta Platforms. Born in 1997 to Chinese immigrant physicists in Los Alamos, New Mexico, he dropped out of MIT at 19 to build Scale AI, which became the backbone of AI training data infrastructure for companies like OpenAI, Google, Meta, and the U.S. Department of Defense. By 24, he was the world's youngest self-made billionaire. Scale AI grew to a ~$29B valuation after Meta's $14.8B strategic investment in 2025, and Wang now leads Meta's AI superintelligence efforts.
Aravind Srinivas is the co-founder and CEO of Perplexity AI, the citation-backed AI answer engine that reached a $21B+ valuation in under three years. Born in Chennai in 1994, he earned a dual degree from IIT Madras before completing a PhD at UC Berkeley, then worked as a researcher at OpenAI, DeepMind, and Google Brain before founding Perplexity in 2022. India's youngest billionaire at 31, he has positioned Perplexity as a direct challenger to Google Search by insisting that every AI-generated answer carry verifiable citations - a principle he lifted straight from academic paper standards.
Daniela Amodei is the President and Co-Founder of Anthropic, one of the world's most influential AI safety companies. A UC Santa Cruz English Literature graduate and former classical flute scholarship recipient, she pivoted from Capitol Hill communications to Stripe to OpenAI before co-founding Anthropic in 2021 alongside her brother Dario Amodei and six other OpenAI colleagues. At Anthropic, she runs all commercial, operational, and cultural operations while Dario leads research and technical strategy — a division of labor that has scaled the company to a $380 billion valuation, over 300,000 enterprise customers, and projected $10 billion in 2025 revenue. Named #1 on Fortune's Most Powerful Women list for 2025 and to TIME's 100 Most Influential People of 2026, Daniela champions a vision of AI safety as competitive advantage, humanities education as future-proof, and 'low politics, high integrity' as the only culture worth building.
Dustin Moskovitz co-founded Facebook in a Harvard dorm room in 2004, then quietly built Asana into a billion-dollar project management company while giving away billions through Open Philanthropy (now Coefficient Giving). The youngest self-made billionaire in the world when Forbes first named him in 2011, Moskovitz has spent the years since turning wealth into what he believes are the most high-impact charitable causes on Earth - from malaria nets to AI safety - alongside his wife Cari Tuna.
Henrique Dubugras is the Brazilian co-founder of Brex, the corporate card and spend management company he built from a Y Combinator pivot at age 21 into a $12.3B peak-valuation fintech unicorn - ultimately acquired by Capital One for $5.15 billion in 2026. He taught himself to code at 12 to avoid paying for a Korean MMO, sold his first payments company (Pagar.me) at 20 while processing $1.5B annually, dropped out of Stanford after 8 months, and found his billion-dollar idea by simply failing to get a credit card for his own startup. Now operating in stealth, he has said he found his 'calling' again.
John Collison is the President and co-founder of Stripe, the Irish-American payments giant he built with his brother Patrick from their rural Tipperary roots into a $159 billion fintech colossus processing $1.9 trillion annually. He sold his first company at 17, dropped out of Harvard at 19, and by 26 was the world's youngest self-made billionaire - all while maintaining the understated disposition of someone who grew up in a village of a few hundred people on Lough Derg.
Joe Gebbia is the co-founder of Airbnb and a designer-turned-billionaire who helped reshape how humanity thinks about trust between strangers. He graduated from RISD with dual degrees in graphic and industrial design, then turned air mattresses and a breakfast cereal stunt into a $100 billion company. After stepping back from Airbnb in 2022, he founded Samara - a prefab housing company - and in 2025 became America's first Chief Design Officer under the Trump administration, tasked with redesigning the federal government's 27,000+ websites to feel as intuitive as the Apple Store.