Collectively, these trailblazers in their early 30s have raised over a billion dollars and are proof positive that perseverance and ingenuity cannot be quarantined. Which young people are we talking about? Let’s see who are the most notorious names in the media and whose accounts have the most zeros.
The 10 richest young entrepreneurs in the world
It is clear that business success is not a matter of long years of experience, nor is it a matter of gender. Here are the 10 richest young entrepreneurs in the world. Let the top 10 begin!
1. Kylie Jenner
What better way to open this selection of the richest young people in the world with the genre that is becoming more and more important in the business world? Model, socialite, influencer, and designer, Kyle Jenner is one of the richest young women in the world. But what made her hit the piñata of success was the cosmetics company Kylie Cosmetics and the powerful addition to the power of social networks.
At just 21 years old, the youngest of the Kardashian clan, she headed the list of the 10 youngest billionaires in the world. In 2019, the reality star sold 51% of Kylie Cosmetics to publicly traded company Coty, Inc. for $600 million.
However, the small print of the agreement revealed that Kylie’s business had been oversized by the family, both to the cosmetics industry and to the media. Even so, the young woman earned 590 million, enough to rank as one of the biggest celebrity earners of all time.
2. John Collison
What about the Irishman who set foot in Silicon Valley and is today one of the youngest self-made billionaires on the planet? How did he get to such a position? In 2011 he founded, together with his brother Patrick, Stripe: a technology company that developed software that allows payments to be made over the internet.
The value of his stake in Stripe, a closely held company, has almost tripled in the last 24 months thanks to three rounds of financing where he raised hundreds of millions of dollars. The most recent of those rounds, a series G that brought in $250 million in September, left Stripe valued at $35 billion.
Today, 30 years old and with a fortune of 3.2 billion dollars, John Collison is a genuine entrepreneur and one of the most praised by Forbes and other magazines. As they say out there, the classic example of yes, you can.
3. Evan Spiegel
What insurance do you use or have you ever heard of Snapchat? This app, used by more than 200 million people every day, is a fast and fun way to share photos and videos with your friends and family.
It was Spiegel who launched the company in 2011 with Bobby Murphy: a fraternity brother from Stanford University. More than a successful CEO, this young man is a leader par excellence and, therefore, a contributor to our quotes on business leadership.
Of the Forbes list of the 10 youngest billionaires in the world, only three managed to make themselves and… guess what? The co-founder and CEO of Snapchat is one of them. Today, at the age of 30, he enjoys a fortune of 12.6 billion dollars. How about?
4. Jonathan Kwok
The Asian continent also leaves nothing to talk about in the list of the wealthiest young people in the world. With a fortune of 2.5 billion dollars, Jonathan Kwok is the youngest son of the late property tycoon Walter Kwok: former chairman of Hong Kong’s largest developer, Sun Hung Kai Properties.
Following Walter’s death, Jonathan and his brother Geoffrey took over Empire Group Holdings, a property developer that Walter started after leaving SHKP.
Jonathan struggles to uphold his father’s legacy. He is the director of Empire Group Holdings and oversees the group’s real estate investments, project development, and asset management operations. The businessman tops the list of the 5 youngest billionaires in Asia.
5. Gustav Magnar Witzoe
The 27-year-old Norwegian owns almost half of Salmar ASA, one of the world’s largest salmon producers. His success does not come from his work, but he received half of his father’s salmon fishing company when he was only 19 years old.
Fish farming is now one of the largest industries in Norway. Salmar has led the industrialization of fish farming in that country, refining the product into more sophisticated cuts with higher margins. In 2016 the brand harvested around 130,000 tonnes of salmon.
But the firm is still run by the elder Witzoe. Gustav for his part prefers the world of modeling and tries to make his mark by investing in real estate and technology startups.
6. Lisa Draexlmaier
Once again, women give something to talk about in the wealthiest sector of the business world. With 30 years and a purse of more than 2 billion dollars, Lisa Draexlmaier is the sole owner of Fritz Draexlmaier Holding GmbH: a manufacturer of auto parts that sells to companies such as Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Tesla. The firm is chaired by the young German businesswoman and her father.
7. Pedro de Godoy Bueno
From Brazil comes one of the richest young entrepreneurs in the world. His fortune was not the only thing that Pedro inherited from his father, the latter was the wealthiest billionaire in the health sector of the South American giant and his son is today, at 29, the youngest billionaire in Brazil.
At just 24 years old, he became the CEO of the Brazilian laboratory company Diagnosticos da América SA and is currently the CEO. He is not doing badly at all, the firm’s shares have almost tripled in value in the last 12 months.
8. Andy Fang
Does Rappi sound familiar to you? Well, DoorDash works with a similar platform. The home delivery app was listed by Forbes as the third largest initial public offering of 2020.
Precisely the technical director and co-founder of the technology company is Andy Fang, a graduate of Computer Science from Stanford University. It was at that center that he met Tony Xu and Stanley Tang, with whom the DoorDash concept was born.
With more than 2 billion dollars, Andy Fang is part of Forbes’ real-time list of the world’s billionaires. It is he who leads the engineering team and is responsible for the product overview, technology roadmap, and architectural direction of the DoorDash platform.
9. Austin Russell
Once again he reaches the top of the richest and most successful young entrepreneurs in the world, a case that leaves university to go after his dreams. The young man we are talking about is the founder and CEO of Luminar Technologies: a startup focused on creating and commercializing technology for autonomous vehicles.
The boy is an optical prodigy. He developed his business idea at just 17 years old while studying physics at Stanford University. Receiving a scholarship funded by billionaire Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel, he says goodbye to college and decides to give his entrepreneurship free rein.
As a Generation Y billionaire, the founder and CEO of Luminar are one of the few who have managed to amass a fortune in the world of self-propelled cars. At 25, he is one of the world’s youngest self-taught billionaires.
10. Whitney Wolfe Herd
Just a couple of weeks ago, the young entrepreneur became the youngest founder in history to go public with her company. After it went public, the firm far exceeded expectations in the stock market, raising $2.15 billion. Which company are we talking about? Bumble, in case you haven’t heard of it yet, is a dating app that pioneered the idea of allowing women to “make the first move.”
At just 22 years old, Wolfe Herd co-founded the well-known dating app Tinder, for which she was vice president of marketing. But it didn’t end well, and she decided to say goodbye in 2014. Later, with the support of Badoo’s founder, Russian tech billionaire Andrey Andreev, she created Bumble, an app created to revamp old-fashioned ways of dating.
Thus, the latest technological unicorn is a woman, a businesswoman, and a mother, and she is only 31 years old. How about? We are talking about the co-founder and CEO of Bumble Inc., a firm that today manages two online dating applications: Bumble and Badoo. Together they operate in 150 countries with 42 million monthly active users as of the third quarter of 2020.
Final words
While most of the world’s richest people are old enough to collect Social Security—not that they need it, of course—a very small number are barely in their twenties.
It is true that from the list of the richest young people in the world, some inherited their wealth, while others, despite being born in a golden cradle, work to maintain their fortune. But there is a small fraction that made their billions by creating their own companies.
In such a way the name of Mark Zuckerberg already surprises us so much, because the list of those who become rich in just 20 years, begins to grow! So what do you think? Do you put the batteries or what?
