For the first time in 15 years, there are no self-made billionaires under the age of 30.
t’s a rare feat to become a billionaire, especially at a young age. The average billionaire is 66, and the oldest person in the ranks is 102. Still, a select few have gotten super-rich super young.
This year, the 25 youngest people on the Forbes’ World’s Billionaires list are all 33 or younger. Together they are worth $110 billion. A few are self-made, having built notable companies like Snap (Evan Spiegel, 33), Gymshark (Ben Francis, 31) and Oculus VR (Palmer Luckey, 31).
Most had a lot of help. For the first time since 2009, every billionaire under 30 inherited his or her fortune—the result of some self-made entrepreneurs aging into their 30s, and a sign that the “great wealth transfer” has begun.
Evan Spiegel*
Age: 33 | Citizenship: U.S. | Source of Wealth: Snapchat | Net Worth: $3.1 Billion
Spiegel dropped out of Stanford to start Snapchat with his fraternity brothers Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown in 2011 and became a billionaire by the age of 25. Now he and Murphy, 35, together own about a quarter of publicly traded Snap Inc., which generated $4.6 billion in revenue last year. He serves as CEO. In 2022, he paid off the student loan debt for the entire graduating class of the Otis College of Art and Design, where he’d taken classes during high school.
John Collison*
Age: 33 | Citizenship: Ireland | Source of Wealth: Stripe | Net Worth: $7.2 Billion
Born to scientist parents near Limerick, he and his brother Patrick, age 35, sold their first startup—the eBay management software Auctomatic, which they formed with brothers Harj and Kulveer Taggar—for $5 million in 2007, when John was in secondary school. It was just the beginning for the duo: After John enrolled and then dropped out of Harvard (Patrick went to neighboring MIT), they founded Stripe, a payment software whose investors have included Fidelity and Ireland’s sovereign development fund. In 2016, a funding round that valued the unicorn at $9.2 billion made him the world’s then-youngest self-made billionaire at 26. An employee tender offer in February valued the company at $65 billion.
Shunsaku Sagami*
Age: 33 | Citizenship: Japan | Source of Wealth: M&A Brokerage | Net Worth: $1.9 Billion
Moved by the experience of his grandfather, who was forced to close his real estate business because he didn’t have a successor, Sagami, who got his start in advertising, launched M&A Research Institute Holdings in 2018. The company uses AI to advise small- and medium-scale enterprises with aging owners who have no one lined up to take over. He became a billionaire last April, when M&A Research Institute Holdings’ share price skyrocketed thanks to spiking revenues and a surge of M&A activity in Japan.
Jonathan Kwok
Age: 32 | Citizenship: Hong Kong | Source of Wealth: Real Estate | Net Worth: $2.4 Billion
He and his brother Geoffrey, 38, owe their fortunes to the family’s Hong Kong real estate empire. After their father Walter Kwok’s death in 2018 at age 68, they inherited his stakes in Sun Hung Kai Properties—the territory’s largest property developer—and Empire Group Holdings, the developer Walter started after family feuding kicked him out of the SHKP chairmanship. Jonathan now runs Empire Group Holdings with his brother and is the youngest billionaire in Hong Kong.
Mark Mateschitz
Age: 31 | Citizenship: Austria | Source of Wealth: Red Bull | Net Worth: $39.6 Billion
He inherited 49% of Red Bull when his father Dietrich Mateschitz, who founded the business in 1984, died in 2022. Prior to his father’s death, he’d run the company’s organics division, but resigned because “I do not believe one should be both an employee and a shareholder of the same company,” according to a statement at the time. Red Bull generated $11.6 billion in revenue last year and sold 12.1 billion cans, enough for each person on earth to pep up with 1.5 energy drinks.
Ben Francis*
Age: 31 | Citizenship: United Kingdom | Source of Wealth: Gymshark | Net Worth: $1.3 Billion
When he was a 19-year-old college student with a Pizza Hut delivery job, he and his friend Lewis Morgan started a website they called Gymshark, which they used to sell supplements they’d bought in bulk for a small profit. When they transitioned into sewing and screen printing fitness clothing in Francis’ parents’ garage, their sportswear brand was born. Morgan offloaded his stake to private equity firm General Atlantic in a 2020 deal that valued the company at $1.5 billion. Francis still owns 70% of Gymshark and serves as CEO.
Andy Fang*
Age: 31 | Citizenship: U.S. | Source of Wealth: DoorDash | Net Worth: $1.2 Billion
He and his Stanford freshman dormmate Stanley Tang teamed up with MBA student Tony Xu (now 39) to launch DoorDash after noticing that the only food delivery options in the area were a local Chinese joint and Domino’s. They founded the company in 2013, while still at Stanford, and took it public in 2020. Fang currently runs DoorDash’s “LaunchPad” engineering team.
Michal Strnad
Age: 31 | Citizenship: Czech Republic | Source of Wealth: Weapons | Net Worth: $4.4 Billion
His father was a small town scrapyard owner who started out renovating ex-Soviet equipment at the end of the Cold War. He transformed the business into the $3.2 billion (2023 revenue) defense producer Czechoslovak Group, which Strnad has since taken over as owner and CEO. In his spare time, Strnad collects art, sports cars and historic vehicles.
Palmer Luckey*
Age: 31 | Citizenship: U.S. | Source of Wealth: Virtual Reality, Defense Technology | Net Worth: $2.3 Billion
The self-taught software engineer made his first fortune when he launched the startup Oculus VR, selling a virtual reality headset he’d made at age 16, then cashed out to Facebook in 2014 in a $2 billion deal. In 2017, he founded the defense technology company Anduril, which has been sending drones to Ukraine. A December 2022 funding round valued Anduril at $8.5 billion.
Stanley Tang*
Age: 31 | Citizenship: U.S. | Source of Wealth: DoorDash | Net Worth: $1.2 Billion
He and his DoorDash cofounder Andy Fang rejoin the billionaire ranks this year after a tough 2022, when the company’s big net losses sent its stock price tanking. DoorDash began 2023 with sizable layoffs, then managed to increase its revenue 31%, to $8.6 billion, and shrink its net loss by 59%, to $558 million, from 2022. It was enough to boost shareholders’ confidence: DoorDash stock is up 127% year over year. Tang heads the company’s robotics and automation arm, DoorDash Labs.
Gustav Magnar Witzøe
Age: 30 | Citizenship: Norway | Source of Wealth: Fish farming | Net Worth: $4.2 Billion
He was only 19 when his father gifted him nearly half of the fish farming behemoth SalMar. Eleven years later, his dad continues to operate the company while Gustav focuses on real estate and tech startup investments. SalMar’s share price has soared 800% over the past decade, inflating the younger Witzøe’s wealth along with it. He’s now Norway’s fifth-richest person and its biggest taxpayer, having given the government NOK 292.4 million—the equivalent of about $29.6 million—in 2022. Exporting to over 50 countries, SalMar is the world’s second largest salmon farmer. The company says it produces enough to feed every Norwegian a nightly fish dinner.
Sophie Luise Fielmann
Age: 29 | Citizenship: Germany | Source of Wealth: Optometry | Net Worth: $2.7 Billion
When Günther Fielmann, the entrepreneur known for bringing cheap eyeglasses to Germany, died in January at the age of 84, he left much of his fortune to his two children, Sophie and Marc. While Marc, age 34, has helmed Fielmann AG since 2019, Sophie has no role in the eyeglasses company but still owns about a third of its stock.
Leonardo Maria Del Vecchio
Age: 28 | Citizenship: Italy | Source of Wealth: Eyeglasses | Net Worth: $4.7 Billion
Katharina Andresen
Age: 28 | Citizenship: Norway | Source of Wealth: Investments | Net Worth: $1.7 Billion
Her great-great-great grandfather purchased the tobacco producer Tiedemanns Tobaksfabrik in 1849 and built it into a family cigarette empire that lasted until Andresen’s father sold it in 2005. Now the family focuses on its investment firm Ferd, which deals primarily in real estate and private Nordic companies, including the oil service business Interwell and Norway’s largest private medical laboratory. Andresen and her sister each own 42% stakes in Ferd. After gaining experience as a board observer for several years, she became a member of the board in June.
Alexandra Andresen
Age: 27 | Citizenship: Norway | Source of Wealth: Investments | Net Worth: $1.6 Billion
Like her sister Katharina, she holds a 42% stake in the investment company Ferd and currently sits on its board. But her biggest passions are equestrian. She owns the Oslo horse-breeding stable Andresen Dressage and herself rode horses competitively (she is a three-time junior Norwegian champion in dressage riding) until spinal stenosis-related back problems forced her to exit the ring.
Firoz Mistry
Age: 27 | Citizenship: Ireland | Source of Wealth: Diversified | Net Worth: $4.9 Billion
He and his brother Zahan are the richest of the 30-and-unders, thanks primarily to their 4.6% stakes in Tata Sons, the $150 billion (revenue) Indian conglomerate that owns 29 public companies, including Tata Consultancy and Tata Motors. Tata is considering its own IPO in the coming months. He and Zahan inherited their stakes during a 2022 marked by family tragedy, when their 54-year-old father died in a car accident less than three months after their grandfather, one-time chairman of Tata and its largest individual shareholder, died at the age of 93. Their uncle Shapoor Mistry holds the rest of the family’s 18.4% stake.
