There is no better way to imagine the future than by looking at the people who are about to inherit it, and in America, very few vantage points are as revealing as the Forbes 400, the definitive ranking of the country’s richest people. For decades, this list has served as a mirror of American power, showing which industries dominate the economy and which individuals are shaping the national story. In the 1980s, it was oil and real estate; in the 1990s, media; in the 2000s, finance. Today, the mirror reflects something else: the artificial intelligence boom, and the super-young founders riding it into the nation’s most exclusive club at a dizzying rate. Last year, only four billionaires under the age of 40 were rich enough to make the Forbes 400. This year, there are ten. That leap is not a coincidence. The minimum net worth required to join the list climbed to a record $4.4 billion, and seven newcomers in their thirties cleared that bar on the strength of fortunes built entirely around AI. Four of those seven come from a single company: Anthropic, the AI lab founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees who walked away because they believed the company was racing too fast, without adequate safeguards for safety and trust. Their caution did not slow them down. Tom Brown, Daniela Amodei, Jack Clark and Sam McCandlish—cofounders of Anthropic—are all now tied at No. 75 on the Forbes 400, each worth an estimated $15.5 billion. Anthropic, the creator of the popular chatbot Claude, was valued at $965 billion after raising $65 billion in May. Earlier this year, all seven cofounders made a pledge to eventually give away 80 percent of their wealth, a rare act of collective generosity that underscores the idealistic—or at least conflicted—nature of this new generation of tech titans. They are not just building enormous fortunes; they are also wrestling with what those fortunes mean, and with the consequences of the technology they helped unleash.
The AI wave has lifted more than Anthropic’s founders. OpenAI, the company they left behind, is still thriving, and its cofounder and president, Greg Brockman, is now the richest new member of the Forbes 400, with an estimated fortune of $25.5 billion. Brockman, 38, joined the list after a stunning legal disclosure in May: while testifying under oath during the company’s legal battle with Elon Musk, he admitted that his stake in OpenAI is worth more than $20 billion. OpenAI reached a valuation of $852 billion in March, and both OpenAI and Anthropic have confidentially filed paperwork this summer with the intention of eventually going public. For someone who once left both Harvard and MIT without finishing his degree, Brockman’s journey is a reminder that the path to extraordinary wealth rarely follows a straight line. Then there is Palmer Luckey, who ranks as the second-youngest member of the entire Forbes 400. At just 33, Luckey has built a career as one of Silicon Valley’s most colorful and contrarian figures. He sold his first company, Oculus, to Facebook for $2 billion when he was 21, then left after political controversies, including his support for Donald Trump. He did not disappear. That same year, he founded Anduril, a defense startup that makes autonomous drones, sensors, and the AI-powered software that coordinates them. The U.S. Army awarded Anduril a ten-year contract worth up to $20 billion in March, and the company raised $5 billion at a $61 billion valuation in May. The youngest member of the Forbes 400 is even more extraordinary: Steven Hao, a 30-year-old cofounder and chief technology officer of Cognition, the maker of Devin, an AI software engineer. Cognition announced a $2 billion funding round in September at a $48 billion valuation, less than three years after it was founded. Hao’s rise from competitive programming prodigy to the top of America’s wealthiest list is a testament to how fast young talent can turn into world-changing companies.
The turnover among the youngest members of the Forbes 400 is a reminder of how quickly the wealth landscape is shifting. Only three billionaires who ranked among the ten youngest members of last year’s list managed to keep their spots this year: Edwin Chen, the 38-year-old founder of the AI training company Surge AI; Vlad Tenev, the 39-year-old cofounder of the trading app Robinhood; and Lukas Walton, also 39, an heir to the Walmart fortune. Walton, the only person in the group who inherited his money, is by far the richest of the ten, with a fortune estimated at $44.4 billion. His presence on the list offers a sharp contrast to the self-made AI founders around him—and a reminder that the American dream has more than one version. The overall numbers tell a curious story. In total, the ten youngest billionaires on this year’s Forbes 400 are worth $169 billion, down sharply from $357 billion in 2025. The decline does not mean the young are getting poorer; it simply means that a few very wealthy moguls aged out of the category. Mark Zuckerberg, the 42-year-old cofounder and CEO of Meta, is worth an estimated $212 billion, but he is no longer under 40. Josh Kushner, a 41-year-old venture capitalist worth $16.7 billion, also aged out, as did Nathan Blecharczyk, a 43-year-old cofounder of Airbnb with a fortune of $11.9 billion. Once you remove those three, the remaining young members of the list represent a still staggering pile of wealth. The Forbes 400 as a whole ranges in age from 30-year-old Hao all the way to 97-year-old timber baron Archie Aldis Emmerson, with an average age of 70. That gap of nearly seven decades is a vivid illustration of the many ways one can become enormously wealthy in America, and of how quickly the center of gravity can shift.
To understand who these young billionaires are, it helps to look at them one by one. Starting with the older end of the group, Lukas Walton, 39, is the grandson of Walmart founder Sam Walton and the only child of John Walton, who died in 2005. He inherited roughly a third of his father’s estate, mostly Walmart stock, and has spent much of his life trying to channel that wealth into something meaningful. He runs Builders Vision, a Chicago-based investment and philanthropy firm with more than $15 billion in assets, focused on clean energy, sustainable food, and ocean conservation. In June, he acquired a minority stake in the NBA’s Chicago Bulls, showing that old money can still mix with the modern world. Next is Vlad Tenev, also 39, who was born in Bulgaria to two World Bank staffers and later moved to the United States, where he studied at Stanford. In 2013, he and Baiju Bhatt, now a fellow Forbes 400 member, launched Robinhood, the trading app that made stock trading free and forced the entire brokerage industry to follow. Robinhood went public in 2021, and Tenev’s roughly six percent stake forms the backbone of his $7.1 billion fortune. Today, Robinhood’s most surprising growth area is prediction markets, where users buy contracts on future events like elections, Federal Reserve decisions, sports, and even the weather. Those markets generated more than $156 million in revenue in the second quarter of this year, surpassing both stock and crypto trading. Tenev also chairs Harmonic, an AI startup he founded in 2023 to focus on mathematical reasoning. Then there is Tom Brown, 39, who studied computer science and cognitive science at MIT and was one of OpenAI’s first twenty employees. Brown was the lead author of the 2020 paper that introduced GPT-3, the language model that proved AI could write fluently and triggered the current investment boom in artificial intelligence. In 2021, he left with six colleagues to found Anthropic, where he now oversees the computing infrastructure used to train its models. His story is one of restless intellect and deep concern about the dangers of the very technology he helped create.
The next group is equally fascinating. Daniela Amodei, 39, came to AI through a different door. After graduating from UC Santa Cruz, she worked at the payments company Stripe before joining OpenAI, where she oversaw safety and policy. In 2021, she left with her brother Dario—now Anthropic’s CEO and also a Forbes 400 newcomer at 43—and five other colleagues to found Anthropic. As president and board chair, she oversees research, engineering, product, and commercial operations, making her one of the most powerful women in technology, even as she and her colleagues have pledged to give away most of their wealth. Edwin Chen, 38, grew up in a small Florida town of 3,400 people, where his Taiwanese immigrant parents ran a Chinese-Thai restaurant. He made his way to MIT, studied math, linguistics, and computer science, then worked at Google, Facebook, and Twitter. In 2020, he founded Surge AI, a company that employs people to label data and rate AI-generated answers, helping train the very models transforming the world. Surge has quietly grown past $1 billion in annual revenue with no venture funding, and Chen owns roughly 75 percent of the company, making his fortune thoroughly self-made. Greg Brockman, 37, is a man who never quite fit into conventional academic boxes. He left Harvard, then left MIT, and became chief technology officer at Stripe at 25. At 28, he cofounded OpenAI with Elon Musk and Sam Altman as a nonprofit in 2015. As president, Brockman oversees the infrastructure behind OpenAI’s models and, since July, its product business as well, effectively making him the company’s second-in-command as it prepares for a possible IPO. His stake in the company, disclosed during the court battle with Musk, is worth more than $20 billion, and he also owns nearly $500 million of Stripe stock, along with small investments in semiconductor maker Cerebras and compute provider CoreWeave, both OpenAI suppliers.
The youngest five members of the group are just as remarkable. Jack Clark, 37, entered the AI world as a journalist, covering artificial intelligence for Bloomberg before joining OpenAI as policy director. He was part of the group that left to found Anthropic in 2021, and he has become one of the loudest voices in the industry calling for government regulation of AI. Today, he runs Anthropic’s in-house think tank, which studies the societal effects of the technology, and writes a widely read industry newsletter that has made him something of a philosopher-king of the movement. Sam McCandlish, 36, brings an even deeper scientific background. He earned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Stanford and joined OpenAI, where he worked on scaling laws—the insight that AI systems become predictably smarter when given more data and computing power. That discovery helped fuel the race to build ever-larger models. After cofounding Anthropic, he served as chief technology officer until October, when he moved to the role of chief architect, overseeing how the company’s models are built and trained. Palmer Luckey, 33, is the most provocative member of the group. A teenage tinkerer who built an early virtual reality headset in his parents’ garage, Luckey sold his company Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion at 21. He left in 2017 after controversy over his political views, but he did not disappear. That year, he founded Anduril, a defense startup making autonomous drones and sensors, and the AI software that coordinates them. The U.S. Army’s ten-year contract, worth up to $20 billion, and the company’s $61 billion valuation have made Luckey one of the most consequential young figures in American defense technology. Finally, there is Steven Hao, 30, the youngest member of the Forbes 400. Hao and his two Cognition cofounders each won gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics—Hao earned his in 2014—before he went on to work at Scale AI, a data labeling startup cofounded by 29-year-old billionaire Alex Wang. In 2023, Hao left to start Cognition. Its main product, Devin, is an AI agent that writes and repairs code, already used by clients like Citibank and fintech Ramp. In September, Cognition raised $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation, making all three cofounders billionaires. Hao, as CTO and the largest founder shareholder, is the only one rich enough to make the Forbes 400—but at 30, he has plenty of time ahead.
There is something deeply human about this list. Behind the enormous numbers are people who took unusual paths, made bold bets, and sometimes stumbled into controversy. The AI revolution has brought them immense wealth, but it has also forced them to confront hard questions about safety, regulation, ethics, and their own legacies. The fact that all seven Anthropic cofounders have pledged to give away 80 percent of their wealth, and that several of them worry publicly about the dangers of their own creations, suggests that this generation of billionaires is different from the tech titans of the past. They are not merely chasing money; they are chasing a future they hope to control. At the same time, the presence of Lukas Walton, who inherited his fortune, and the ever-changing nature of the list itself, remind us that wealth in America is both made and found, inherited and earned. The average Forbes 400 member is 70 years old, while the youngest is 30—a forty-year gap that mirrors the breadth of possibility in American life. The ten youngest members of this year’s list hold combined fortunes of $169 billion, enough to reshape entire industries, fund new companies, and influence politics. Whether they choose to hoard that power or spend it on the greater good is a story still being written. What is clear is that the old rules no longer apply. A 30-year-old can leap into the ranks of the richest Americans in under three years; a university dropout can become a billionaire many times over by helping build a nonprofit into a global force. The Forbes 400 has always been a mirror of American capitalism, and today it reflects a moment of breathtaking acceleration, where intelligence—both artificial and human—is the most valuable commodity on earth. The young people on this list are not just the future. They are already the present, and their decisions will shape the next century in ways we cannot yet imagine.
