Faster Than Musk... AI Boom Drives Surge in Billionaires Under 40

Billionaire Status Achieved in Just Three Years, Even Without a Product
"Paper Billionaires"... The Key Question: Who Will Survive?

The New York Times (NYT) reported on December 29 (local time) that, fueled by the artificial intelligence (AI) boom led by companies like OpenAI, there has been a surge in wealthy individuals under the age of 40, and the time it takes for them to become billionaires has dramatically decreased.

It has been confirmed that the valuations of companies such as the data labeling startup Scale AI, the AI coding startup Cursor, the AI search engine Perplexity, the recruitment platform Mako, the humanoid robot manufacturer Figure AI, the AI research lab Safe Superintelligence, and the AI legal startup Harvey have all soared into the billions of dollars.

Perplexity logo. Photo by Reuters and Yonhap News Agency

The time it takes for the founders of these companies to join the ranks of billionaires is much shorter than that of Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and the world's richest person. Musk became a billionaire only in 2012, after founding X.com (the precursor to PayPal) in 1999, selling PayPal, founding SpaceX, and taking Tesla public.

In contrast, it has taken as little as four months for some of these young AI founders to become billionaires. Mira Murati (37), formerly of OpenAI, founded Thinking Machines Lab in February and reached a company valuation of 10 billion dollars (approximately 14.331 trillion won) in just four months.

Ilya Sutskever (39), also formerly of OpenAI, founded Safe Superintelligence in June last year. Although the company has not yet launched any products, its valuation has already reached 32 billion dollars.

Brett Adcock (39), who founded Figure AI in 2022, saw his personal net worth grow to 19.5 billion dollars within three years of founding the company. Similarly, Aravind Srinivas (31), who launched Perplexity in the same year, has seen the company's valuation approach 20 billion dollars.

Scale AI, which received investment from Meta in June last year, can be considered an exceptional case. Scale AI, founded in 2016 by Alexander Wang (28), Meta's Chief AI Officer (CAIO), has grown relatively quietly.

The NYT noted of these emerging billionaires, "Investors have competitively driven up company valuations, rapidly boosting their worth in a short period."

Another characteristic of these new AI billionaires is their youth. Michael Truell (24), CEO of Cursor, and his co-founders dropped out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2022, founded the company, and became billionaires within three years. Brendan Foody (22), CEO of Mako, also left Georgetown University in 2023, started the company with his high school friends, and built a company valued at 10 billion dollars.

However, there remains a gender imbalance. With the exception of Lucy Guo (31), co-founder of Scale AI, and Mira Murati, founder of Thinking Machines Lab, the vast majority of these new AI billionaires are men.

Margaret O'Mara, a professor of technology and economic history at the University of Washington, commented, "Like the early Gilded Age or the dot-com boom, this AI era is making young people extremely wealthy, very quickly," adding that the AI boom has amplified the homogeneity among those participating in it.

There are also criticisms that the wealth accumulated by these individuals is merely an unrealized paper valuation, making them "paper billionaires."

Jai Das, a partner at Sapphire Ventures, noted, "The key question is which of these companies will survive. And among these founders, who will become a true billionaire, not just a nominal one?" He pointed out that if startups fail to meet expectations, their wealth could disappear in an instant.