Ifwe’re in the middle of an AI market bubble, it’s still inflating. In January, Elon Musk’s SpaceX acquired xAI at a $250 billion valuation. Anthropic raised funds last month at a valuation of $380 billion. And, on February 27, billionaire Sam Altman’s OpenAI announced $110 billion in capital commitments as part of a fundraise that pegged the company at a mind-boggling $840 billion. Even companies with little revenue—and forget about profits—have become worth tens of billions of dollars, including AI robot startup Figure AI, AI model maker Z.ai and productless AI research firm Safe Superintelligence.

All of this has been very good for the cofounders, C-suite executives and investors behind these artificial intelligence companies. There are now at least 86 such AI billionaires on Forbes’ annual ranking of the world’s wealthiest people, worth a collective $2.9 trillion. Forty-five of them have become billionaires over just the past year.

The richest new AI billionaire of all is Surge AI founder Edwin Chen, worth an estimated $18 billion. His data labeling company isn’t necessarily worth that much more than its competitors, but by eschewing traditional venture capital he held onto a massive stake—more than 75%—of the firm. “I really do think that what we’re doing is so critical to all the AI models that without us, AGI [artificial general intelligence, tech lingo for when AI will match or surpass human capabilities] just won’t happen,” Chen told Forbes in September. “And I want it to happen.” The second richest is Liu Debing (estimated net worth: $9.1 billion), cofounder and chairman of Chinese AI firm Z.ai, which makes open AI models that compete with OpenAI and others. Debing became a billionaire after Z.ai’s explosive Hong Kong IPO in January. Third is Daniel Nadler ($7.6 billion) of OpenEvidence, which makes an AI search tool for doctors.

Some of this year’s fresh faces have become billionaires by driving deeper into the application layer—like Nadler and Qasar Younis, whose Applied Institution wants to bring AI not just to self-driving cars but to all vehicles. Ten new billionaires make this year’s list thanks to buzzy vibe coding—or, AI coding assistant—companies or other AI application software businesses, including the cofounders of Cursor, Lovable, Sierra, Harness and Cognition.........

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