Investment Floods In After ChatGPT Launch
Company Valuations Jump by Billions
The Formula for Wealth Becomes Younger and Faster
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom is rapidly reshaping the global landscape of wealth. Analysts note that, since the launch of ChatGPT, the speed at which AI startup founders are accumulating fortunes has become incomparable to the past, with some reaching billionaire status in just three years.
Logo image of the artificial intelligence (AI) application Perplexity, designed to assist in understanding articles. Photo by Reuters and Yonhap News.
The New York Times reported on December 29 (local time) that a wave of young, emerging billionaires is appearing in the AI industry. Since OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, there has been a surge in investment, resulting in early-stage companies being valued at billions of dollars in a very short period.
This stands in stark contrast to the path taken by Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and widely regarded as the world's richest person. Musk founded X.com in 1999, then went on to sell PayPal and establish SpaceX and Tesla, only making it onto the billionaire list in 2012.
By contrast, Mira Murati (37), formerly of OpenAI, achieved a $10 billion company valuation just four months after founding the startup Thinking Machines Lab in February. Ilya Sutskever (39), also formerly of OpenAI, founded Safe Superintelligence in June last year and, despite not having released a product yet, the company has already been valued at $32 billion.
Brett Adcock (39), who founded the robotics startup Figure AI in 2022, has seen his personal net worth grow to about $19.5 billion. Aravind Srinivas (31), who leads the AI search startup Perplexity, has also seen his company recognized with a $20 billion valuation. In the case of the legal AI company Harvey, its valuation soared from $3 billion at the beginning of this year to $8 billion recently, dramatically increasing the founders' wealth.
The New York Times analyzed this phenomenon by stating, "As investors compete to drive up company valuations, 'ultra-fast billionaires' are being created in a short period." Scale AI, which received investment from Meta, was cited as a relatively exceptional case. Scale AI, founded in 2016, is considered to have followed a more stable growth trajectory.
Another characteristic of these new AI billionaires is their youth. Michael Truell, CEO of the AI coding startup Cursor, became a billionaire in his twenties just three years after dropping out of MIT. Brendan Fudy, CEO of the recruitment platform Merco, also dropped out of college, founded his company, and quickly achieved a $10 billion valuation.
However, the issue of gender imbalance remains unresolved. Aside from Lucy Guo, co-founder of Scale AI, and Mira Murati, the majority of these emerging billionaires are men. Experts point out that the AI industry is reinforcing the structural biases already present in Silicon Valley.
There are also warnings that most of their wealth exists only as unrealized stock valuations, making them "paper billionaires." The venture capital industry notes that if these founders fail to deliver real results, both their company valuations and their fortunes could disappear just as quickly.
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