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The World’s Youngest Billionaires 2026

16 0
10.03.2026

Huge funding rounds, AI mania and good old fashioned inheritance have made it just a little bit easier to become a super-young billionaire over the past year. There are a record 35 people who managed to hit ten digits before age 30 on Forbes’ latest World’s Billionaires list. That’s only 1% of the planet’s 3,428 billionaires—but up 0.4% from 2025. They got wealthy in everything from drugstores and plumbing supplies to prediction markets and AI vibe coding. While most were handed their fortunes, a record 12 are self-made.

The world’s youngest self-made billionaires are newcomers to the list: Surya Midha, Brendan Foody and Adarsh Hiremath, the trio behind AI recruiting startup Mercor, who are each 22 years old and worth $2.2 billion—or $100 million for every year they’ve been alive. “It’s definitely crazy,” Foody told Forbes last year. “It feels very surreal. Obviously beyond our wildest imaginations.” Midha, who is a couple months younger than his cofounders, is now the youngest self-made billionaire of all. He takes the title from ScaleAI’s Alexandr Wang on last year’s ranking. Midha and his cofounders and fellow Thiel Fellows are also the youngest self-made billionaires ever to make Forbes’ Billionaires list, beating out Mark Zuckerberg, who debuted at age 23 two decades ago.

There’s also a new youngest self-made woman billionaire: Luana Lopes Lara, a 29-year-old former ballerina and MIT grad who cofounded prediction market firm Kalshi. The Brazilian native unseated 31-year-old Scale AI cofounder Lucy Guo, who had taken the title from Taylor Swift in April. Lopes Lara’s cofounder Tarek Mansour also ranks among the 17 new under-30 billionaires this year, 11 (new) of whom are self-made. Many of them made their fortunes in AI, including Sweden’s Fabian Hedin, 26, who cofounded AI coding startup Lovable, and Cursor founders Michael Truell (25), Aman Sanger (25) and Arvid Lunnemark (who is 26 and no longer at the AI coding startup).

The world’s new youngest billionaire of all is Amelie Voigt Trejes, whose grandfather Werner Ricardo Voigt (d. 2016) cofounded the Brazilian industrial machinery giant WEG in 1961. At 20 years old, Amelie is younger than her twin brothers Pedro and Felipe Voigt Trejes—and seven weeks younger than Johannes von Baumbach, a German pharma heir, who is now second youngest. Other notable young billionaires who inherited their fortunes include the youngest heir to the Italian eyeglasses empire EssilorLuxottica Clemente Del Vecchio (21) and South Korean Kim Jung-youn (22), who, along with her older sister, inherited a fortune in online gaming.

Altogether 8 of the 35 billionaires who are under 30 are U.S. citizens, and an additional 3, including Lopes Lara, now live in the U.S. Another 13 live in Europe and 6 in Asia. All of the Americans are self-made, while nearly all of the Europeans (except for Hedin and Lunnemark) inherited their fortunes.

In all, these 35 super-rich super-youngsters are worth $92.4 billion, down from the $152.3 billion combined wealth of the 35 youngest members of last year’s list (which included then 32-year-old Red Bull heir Mark Mateschitz, then worth $40.6 billion, and then 34-year-old Stripe cofounder John Collison, then worth $10.1 billion).

Here are the 35 under-30 billionaires on the 2026 World’s Billionaires list, listed from oldest to youngest.

NET WORTHS ARE AS OF MARCH 1, 2026

*SELF-MADE FORTUNES ARE MARKED WITH AN ASTERISK

Age: 29 | Citizenship: United States | Source of wealth: Prediction markets | Net worth: $1.3 billion

Mansour is the cofounder and CEO of prediction markets firm Kalshi, which allows users to bet on everything from sports game results to political elections to entertainment awards. Mansour, who grew up in Lebanon and taught himself English while studying for the SATs, met his cofounder Lopes Lara at MIT. The pair both majored in computer science and were part of the same friend group of international students. Kalshi reached a $11 billion valuation in December 2025 following a $1 billion funding round. He owns an........

© Forbes