tech-billionaire
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Tony Xu
Tony Xu is the co-founder and CEO of DoorDash, the food delivery giant commanding roughly 60% of the U.S. market. Born Xu Xun in Nanjing, China, he immigrated to the United States at age four, grew up washing dishes alongside his mother, and turned that lived understanding of the service economy into a company now valued near $100 billion. He led DoorDash through its blockbuster 2020 IPO, the $8.1B acquisition of Wolt, and the $3.9B acquisition of Deliveroo, while also serving on Meta's board of directors.
Elon Musk
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.
Peter Thiel
Peter Andreas Thiel (born October 11, 1967 in Frankfurt, West Germany) is one of the most consequential and controversial figures in the history of technology and venture capital. A Stanford philosophy graduate and law school alumnus, Thiel co-founded PayPal in 1998, pioneering online digital payments before selling it to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. He then made what became arguably the greatest angel investment in tech history — a $500,000 bet on a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook in 2004 that ultimately returned over $1 billion. In 2003 he co-founded Palantir Technologies (now valued at over $400 billion), and in 2005 he launched Founders Fund, a venture capital firm managing approximately $17 billion that was among the first institutional investors in SpaceX, Palantir, Stripe, Airbnb, and Spotify. Thiel's 2014 book Zero to One became a defining text on startup theory, articulating his core belief that genuine innovation is far more valuable than incremental improvement. A self-described libertarian, Thiel surprised Silicon Valley when he endorsed Donald Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention. He is also known for secretly funding Hulk Hogan's lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker Media after the outlet outed him as gay. Through the Thiel Fellowship, which awards $250,000 to young people who skip or defer college, he has championed entrepreneurship over credentialism — producing billionaire alumni including Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin and Figma's Dylan Field. As of December 2025, Thiel's net worth is estimated at $27.5 billion.
Marc Benioff
Marc Benioff is the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Salesforce, the company that invented cloud-based CRM and pioneered the SaaS model. He built Salesforce from a San Francisco apartment in 1999 into the world's largest enterprise applications company, while simultaneously pioneering the 1-1-1 corporate philanthropy model that has been adopted by thousands of companies globally. Owner of Time magazine since 2018 and a vocal advocate for stakeholder capitalism, Benioff sits at the intersection of tech innovation, spiritual practice, and social activism — swimming with dolphins in Hawaii one day, staging fake protests outside competitor conferences the next.
Vinod Khosla
Vinod Khosla (born January 28, 1955, in Pune, India) is one of Silicon Valley's most influential entrepreneurs and venture capitalists - a self-made billionaire who co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982, then went on to back transformative companies including OpenAI, DoorDash, Instacart, Stripe, Affirm, and Impossible Foods through his firm Khosla Ventures, which manages approximately $15 billion in capital. Known for his contrarian, 'black swan' investment philosophy, uncompromising directness, and audacious predictions - including that AI will replace 80% of all jobs by 2030 and make core services like healthcare and education free by 2040 - Khosla frames his life's work not as wealth creation but as deploying technology to solve civilization-scale problems. A Giving Pledge signatory with a net worth of $13.4 billion (Forbes, January 2026), he is also a philanthropist whose wife Neeru's CK-12 Foundation has reached over 130 million learners globally, and who prefers the title 'venture assistant' to 'venture capitalist.'