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

By: Ariel Shapiro, Forbes

Photo by: Forbes

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.

Read the full article on Forbes.