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The World’s Youngest Billionaires 2021 Include A Teenager From Kerala, A Crypto Magnate And A Stanford Dropout

From an 18-year-old drugstore heir to founders of food delivery service DoorDash and electric vehicle parts maker Luminar, here are the ten billionaires still under the age of 30.
Austin Russell spent his teens doing research at the University of California at Irvine’s Beckman Laser Institute. The lanky 6-foot-4 entrepreneur dropped out of Stanford in 2012 to found laser lidar (an acronym for light, detection and ranging) startup Luminar Technologies after getting a $100,000 fellowship from billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel. Its sensors now help self-driving cars of such customers as Volvo, Toyota and Intel’s Mobileye see in 3D. The company listed via a SPAC merger in December 2020, catapulting him into the billionaire ranks overnight. At age 26, he is the world’s youngest self-made billionaire now that Kylie Jenner, 23, has fallen from the ranks.

He is also one of just four self-made billionaires in their 20s—all new—who made this year’s Forbes World’s Billionaires list. The others include Andy Fang and Stanley Tang, both 28, who joined the three comma club after the food delivery service that they founded in 2013, DoorDash, went public in December. They are worth $2 billion apiece.

MIT grad and former Wall Street trader Sam Bankman-Fried, 29, who founded and runs two crypto firms, Alameda Research and FTX, is by far the wealthiest twenty-something, with a net worth of $8.7 billion. FTX, a crypto derivative exchange, has proven to be particularly lucrative. As of March 5, Forbes estimated his equity in the company was worth nearly $2 billion, while his FTX tokens were worth more than $5.6 billion.

Altogether Forbes found just ten billionaires under the age 30—the same number as a year ago, despite the fact that the number of total billionaires increased by a net of 660 to 2,755. These ten young billionaires are worth a collective $29.5 billion, $13 billion more than a year ago.

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BILLIONAIRES 2021
The World’s Youngest Billionaires 2021 Include A Teenager From Germany, A Crypto Magnate And A Stanford Dropout
Apr 6, 2021,
06:00am EDT
|
139,421 views
The World’s Youngest Billionaires 2021 Include A Teenager From Germany, A Crypto Magnate And A Stanford Dropout

Ariel Shapiro
Forbes Staff
Business
Funny Money
Youngest Billionaires
Stanley Tang, Austin Russell, Andy Fang MICHAEL PRINCE FOR FORBES, DOOR DASH (2)
From an 18-year-old drugstore heir to founders of food delivery service DoorDash and electric vehicle parts maker Luminar, here are the ten billionaires still under the age of 30.
Austin Russell spent his teens doing research at the University of California at Irvine’s Beckman Laser Institute. The lanky 6-foot-4 entrepreneur dropped out of Stanford in 2012 to found laser lidar (an acronym for light, detection and ranging) startup Luminar Technologies after getting a $100,000 fellowship from billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel. Its sensors now help self-driving cars of such customers as Volvo, Toyota and Intel’s Mobileye see in 3D. The company listed via a SPAC merger in December 2020, catapulting him into the billionaire ranks overnight. At age 26, he is the world’s youngest self-made billionaire now that Kylie Jenner, 23, has fallen from the ranks.

He is also one of just four self-made billionaires in their 20s—all new—who made this year’s Forbes World’s Billionaires list. The others include Andy Fang and Stanley Tang, both 28, who joined the three comma club after the food delivery service that they founded in 2013, DoorDash, went public in December. They are worth $2 billion apiece.


MIT grad and former Wall Street trader Sam Bankman-Fried, 29, who founded and runs two crypto firms, Alameda Research and FTX, is by far the wealthiest twenty-something, with a net worth of $8.7 billion. FTX, a crypto derivative exchange, has proven to be particularly lucrative. As of March 5, Forbes estimated his equity in the company was worth nearly $2 billion, while his FTX tokens were worth more than $5.6 billion.

Altogether Forbes found just ten billionaires under the age 30—the same number as a year ago, despite the fact that the number of total billionaires increased by a net of 660 to 2,755. These ten young billionaires are worth a collective $29.5 billion, $13 billion more than a year ago.


The youngest billionaire on the planet is German heir Kevin David Lehmann, who is just 18. His father, Guenther Lehmann, transferred a stake in German drugstore chain drogerie markt to his son when he was 14, but it remained under a trusteeship until his 18th birthday, which was in September 2020. Not surprisingly, he is one of just a handful of billionaires to ever debut in the ranks while still a teenager. Others have included Norwegian heiress Alexandra Andresen, who made her debut at age 19 in 2016 and still ranks among the world’s youngest, and German Albert von Thurn und Taxis, the 12th prince in his family line, who officially inherited his fortune on his 18th birthday but later fell from the ranks following the 2008 financial crisis.