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A record $4.4 billion was the minimum net worth needed to land on this year’s Forbes 400. Ten people under 40 cleared that bar, up from four a year ago, and together they are worth $169 billion. Seven are newcomers who owe their fortunes to the same booming industry. Nine built their wealth themselves. One received it. The richest of the group is not the one most readers will guess.
At 30, Steven Hao Is the Youngest Member of the Forbes 400 With $5.8 Billion
Age: 30
Net worth: $5.8 billion
State: California
Hao and his two Cognition cofounders each won gold at the International Olympiad in Informatics, the global competitive-programming championship. Hao took his in 2014, then worked as an engineer at Scale AI before starting Cognition in 2023. The company makes Devin, an AI agent that writes and repairs code for customers including Citibank and Ramp. In September, a $2 billion round valued it at $48 billion and turned all three cofounders into billionaires. Only one of them made this list.
Palmer Luckey Sold His Teenage Headset Company for $2 Billion at Age 21
Age: 33
Net worth: $5.9 billion
State: California
Luckey built an early virtual-reality headset as a teenager, then sold his company, Oculus, to Facebook for $2 billion in cash and stock. He left the business now called Meta in 2017 amid outcry over his support of Donald Trump. That same year he founded Anduril, which makes autonomous drones and sensors plus the AI software that coordinates them. In March, the US Army awarded Anduril a contract worth up to $20 billion. Two months later, investors poured in $5 billion.
Robinhood’s Vlad Tenev Owns About 6% of a Company Now Powered by Prediction Markets
Age: 39
Net worth: $7.1 billion
State: California
Born in Bulgaria to two World Bank staffers, Tenev met cofounder Baiju Bhatt at Stanford. Their 2013 app, Robinhood, eliminated stock trading commissions and pushed the rest of the brokerage industry to follow. The company went public in 2021, and Tenev’s roughly 6% stake makes up most of his fortune. Its fastest-growing business lets users buy contracts on elections, Federal Reserve decisions, sports and even the weather. Last quarter it earned more than $156 million, outpacing stock and crypto trading.
Physicist Sam McCandlish Studied Why AI Gets Smarter Before Cofounding Anthropic
Age: 36
Net worth: $15.5 billion
State: California
McCandlish earned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics at Stanford, then joined OpenAI to work on scaling laws, the discovery that AI systems grow predictably smarter as they receive more data and computing power. He left in 2021 with six colleagues to found Anthropic, served as its chief technology officer and now oversees how its models are built and trained as chief architect. Forbes gives three of his cofounders the exact same fortune.
Former Bloomberg Reporter Jack Clark Runs Anthropic’s In-House Think Tank
Age: 37
Net worth: $15.5 billion
State: California
Clark covered artificial intelligence as a Bloomberg reporter before joining OpenAI as its policy director. In 2021 he left with six colleagues who believed the company was building AI too fast, with too little regard for safety and trust. Together they founded Anthropic, maker of the Claude chatbot. Clark now leads its internal think tank on the technology’s effects on society and writes a widely read industry newsletter. He is also one of the sector’s most visible advocates for government regulation of AI.
Tom Brown, Lead Author of the 2020 GPT-3 Paper, Is Worth $15.5 Billion
Age: 39
Net worth: $15.5 billion
State: California
Brown studied computer science and cognitive science at MIT and became one of OpenAI’s first 20 employees. He led the 2020 paper introducing GPT-3, the language model that showed such systems could write fluently and helped set off today’s AI investment boom. At Anthropic, which Forbes says was valued at $965 billion after a $65 billion round in May, he oversees the computing infrastructure used to train Claude. All seven cofounders made a public promise about their money this year.
Daniela Amodei Studied English Literature and Now Runs Anthropic as Its President
Age: 39
Net worth: $15.5 billion
State: California
Amodei graduated from UC Santa Cruz, worked at the payments company Stripe, then joined OpenAI, where she oversaw safety and policy. She left in 2021 with her brother Dario, now Anthropic’s CEO and a Forbes 400 newcomer at 43. As president and board chair, she oversees research, engineering, product and commercial operations. In January, all seven cofounders pledged to give away 80% of their wealth. Applied to Forbes’s estimate of her fortune, that comes to roughly $12.4 billion.
Edwin Chen Owns Roughly 75% of Surge AI, a $1 Billion-a-Year Company With No Venture Funding
Age: 38
Net worth: $18 billion
State: New York
Chen grew up in a Florida town of 3,400, where his Taiwanese immigrant parents ran a Chinese-Thai restaurant. After studying math, linguistics and computer science at MIT, he worked at Google, Facebook and Twitter. In 2020 he founded Surge AI, which pays people to label data and to rate and correct AI-generated answers so models can learn from them. Google and Anthropic are among its customers, and annual revenue tops $1 billion. He owns an estimated 75% of the company.
Greg Brockman Left Harvard and MIT, Then Revealed Under Oath What His OpenAI Stake Is Worth
Age: 37
Net worth: $25.5 billion
State: California
Body: Brockman left both universities without a degree, became Stripe’s chief technology officer at 25 and cofounded OpenAI with Elon Musk and Sam Altman in 2015. As president, he oversees the infrastructure behind its models and, since July, its product business, making him second-in-command ahead of a possible IPO. In May, during Musk’s lawsuit over OpenAI’s for-profit conversion, he testified that his stake is worth more than $20 billion. Only one person on this list is richer.
Walmart Heir Lukas Walton Is the Richest of the Ten at $44.4 Billion and the Only One Who Inherited It
Age: 39
Net worth: $44.4 billion
State: Illinois
Walton 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. He now runs Chicago-based Builders Vision, an investment and philanthropy firm managing more than $15 billion across clean energy, sustainable food and ocean conservation. In June, he bought a minority stake in the NBA’s Chicago Bulls. His fortune is nearly three times the size of any other founder’s here.
The Youngest Forbes 400 Is Worth Less Than Last Year’s, but It Holds Far More People
Nine of the ten started companies, and seven arrived this year on the strength of AI, four of them from Anthropic alone. Their combined $169 billion is down from $357 billion in 2025 because Mark Zuckerberg, Josh Kushner and Nathan Blecharczyk turned 40 and aged out of the group. The ranking now belongs to founders in their 30s, with a single heir at the top.