Who are the ten youngest billionaires this year?

These billionaires have not yet turned 40, but have already been included in the list of the 400 richest people in the United States.

Daniela Amodei, Brett Adcock, Palmer Luckey. Image source: ILLUSTRATION BY NEIL JAMIESON FOR FORBES

Original title: "The 10 Youngest Billionaires on the 2026 Forbes 400 List"

If you want a glimpse of the future, the best way is to observe young people. This is particularly obvious on the Forbes 400 list: the artificial intelligence revolution is reshaping the pattern of the list, sending a group of extremely young wealthy people into the top wealth circle of the United States at an alarming speed.

Last year, only 4 billionaires under the age of 40 had a net worth that reached the entry threshold for the list. This year, this number has increased to 10.

Although the entry threshold for this year's list has risen to a record $4.4 billion, 7 wealthy people in their thirties have made their debut on the list, and all of their wealth comes from the artificial intelligence boom without exception.

Four of these seven people come from the same company — Anthropic. In 2021, seven OpenAI employees left the company and co-founded Anthropic, believing that the company was advancing artificial intelligence R&D too fast without considering safety and credibility. Now, four of them are among the 10 youngest members on this year's list; the other two are in their early 40s and are also new to the list, and the remaining one is a Canadian citizen. The seven co-founders of Anthropic, including 39-year-old Tom Brown, 39-year-old Daniela Amodei, 37-year-old Jack Clark and 36-year-old Sam McCandlish, currently have an estimated net worth of $15.5 billion each, ranking 75th on the list side by side. Anthropic developed the AI model Claude; after completing a $650 billion financing in May this year, the company's latest valuation reached $9.65 trillion. Earlier this year, all seven co-founders promised to donate 80% of their personal wealth in the future.

OpenAI is no slouch either. 38-year-old co-founder and president Greg Brockman is the richest new member on this year's list. In May this year, during the court hearing of the legal dispute between OpenAI and Elon Musk, Brockman testified under oath and disclosed that the value of his shares in OpenAI exceeded $20 billion; since then, he has been included in this list. In March this year, OpenAI's valuation reached $8.52 trillion; this summer, both OpenAI and Anthropic have submitted confidential applications for initial public offerings (IPOs).

Take Palmer Luckey of Anduril as an example. In May this year, the autonomous drone manufacturer he founded raised $5 billion from venture capital institutions at a valuation of $610 billion; after the financing was completed, 33-year-old Luckey became the second youngest member on the list. The youngest member is 30-year-old Steven Hao. He is the co-founder and CTO of Cognition, which developed the AI software engineer Devin. In September this year, Cognition, which was established less than three years ago, announced the completion of a $2 billion private placement financing, making the company's valuation reach $48 billion.

Only 3 of the 10 youngest people on the 2025 Forbes 400 list retained their seats this year.

Edwin Chen (38 years old), founder of Surge AI, Vlad Tenev (39 years old), co-founder of trading app Robinhood, and Lukas Walton (also 39 years old), heir to the Walmart fortune. Walton is the only one of these 10 people who acquired wealth through inheritance. His net worth is estimated at $44.4 billion, ranking first among the 10 people; Brockman, with an estimated net worth of $25.5 billion, ranks second.

The total net worth of the 10 youngest billionaires on this year's list is $169 billion, down from $357 billion in 2025. This decline is almost entirely due to the fact that several extremely wealthy people have "graduated" from this group of 10 as they grew older, including 42-year-old Mark Zuckerberg (co-founder and CEO of Meta, with an estimated net worth of $212 billion), 41-year-old venture capitalist Josh Kushner ($16.7 billion), and 43-year-old Nathan Blecharczyk (co-founder of Airbnb, $11.9 billion). Looking at the complete 400-person list, the average age of the listed people is 70 years old, with a wide span: the youngest is 30-year-old new entrant Steven Hao, and the oldest is 97-year-old timber tycoon Archie Aldis Emmerson ($6 billion).

The following are the 10 youngest members on the 2026 Forbes 400 list, ranked from oldest to youngest. (Net worth statistics as of September 4, 2026)

#10. Lukas Walton

Age: 39 years old

Net worth: $44.4 billion

Source of wealth: Walmart

Lukas Walton is the grandson of Walmart founder Sam Walton (who died in 1992) and the only son of Sam's son John Walton (who died in 2005). He inherited about one-third of his father's estate, most of which is Walmart stock. Walton is in charge of managing Chicago-headquartered Builders Vision, an investment and philanthropy organization with more than $15 billion in assets under management, covering clean energy, sustainable food and marine conservation. In June this year, he purchased a minority stake in the Chicago Bulls of the National Basketball Association (NBA).

#9. Vlad Tenev

Age: 39 years old

Net worth: $7.1 billion

Source of wealth: Robinhood

Tenev was born in Bulgaria, and both of his parents worked at the World Bank. He met his future co-founder Baiju Bhatt (41 years old, also a member of the Forbes 400 list) at Stanford University. In 2013, the two jointly launched Robinhood. This app eliminated stock trading commissions, forcing other securities brokerage firms to follow suit one after another.

Robinhood went public in 2021, and the approximately 6% stake held by Tenev constitutes the main part of his wealth. Currently, the fastest-growing business of Robinhood is the prediction market, where users can buy contracts linked to the results of future events such as elections, Federal Reserve decisions, sports events and even the weather. In the second quarter of this year, the prediction market brought Robinhood more than $156 million in revenue, far exceeding the stock and cryptocurrency trading businesses. Tenev also serves as the chairman of Harmonic, an AI startup he founded in 2023 that focuses on mathematical reasoning.

#8. Tom Brown

Age: 39 years old

Net worth: $15.5 billion

Source of wealth: Anthropic

Brown studied computer science and cognitive science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was one of the first 20 employees of OpenAI. In 2020, he published a paper introducing GPT-3 as the first author. This language model proved that such systems can write fluently, which triggered the current artificial intelligence investment boom. In 2021, Brown left OpenAI with 6 other colleagues to jointly found competitor Anthropic. The company developed the chatbot Claude, and Brown is currently responsible for the computing infrastructure used to train Claude.

#7. Daniela Amodei

Age: 39 years old

Net worth: $15.5 billion

Source of wealth: Anthropic

Amodei graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Before joining OpenAI, she worked at the payment company Stripe; during her tenure at OpenAI, she was responsible for security and policy work. In 2021, she left OpenAI with her brother Dario Amodei and 5 other colleagues to found Anthropic. Dario, who is currently the CEO of Anthropic, is 43 years old and is also a new member of the 2026 Forbes 400 list. Daniela currently serves as the president and chair of the board of directors of Anthropic, responsible for research, engineering, products and business operations.

#6. Edwin Chen

Age: 38 years old

Net worth: $18 billion

Source of wealth: Surge AI

Edwin Chen grew up in a small town in Florida with only 3,400 residents, where his immigrant parents from Taiwan, China ran a Chinese-Thai restaurant. After that, he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study mathematics, linguistics and computer science, and successively worked at Google, Facebook and Twitter.

In 2020, he founded Surge AI. The company hires people to label data, score and correct errors for AI-generated answers to train models. Surge AI has clients such as Google and Anthropic, and its annual revenue has exceeded $1 billion without seeking venture capital support. It is estimated that Edwin Chen holds about 75% of the shares of the company.

#5. Greg Brockman

Age: 38 years old

Net worth: $25.5 billion

Source of wealth: OpenAI

Brockman studied at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology successively, but did not complete his undergraduate studies. At the age of 25, he became the CTO of the payment company Stripe; in 2015, at the age of 28, he co-founded OpenAI, which adopted a non-profit model at that time, with Elon Musk and Sam Altman, the current CEO of OpenAI. As the president of OpenAI, Brockman is responsible for the underlying infrastructure for the company's models to run; since July this year, he has also taken charge of the product business and has become the second-in-command after Altman as the company is likely to go public.

In 2024, Musk sued Brockman and Altman over OpenAI's shift to a for-profit structure. This lawsuit eventually prompted Brockman to disclose his shares in OpenAI in May this year. He also disclosed that he held nearly $500 million worth of Stripe stock and made small investments in semiconductor manufacturer Cerebras and computing power service provider CoreWeave; both of these companies are suppliers of OpenAI.

#4. Jack Clark

Age: 37 years old

Net worth: $15.5 billion

Source of wealth: Anthropic

Before joining OpenAI as the head of policy, Clark was a Bloomberg reporter covering the artificial intelligence field. In 2021, he left OpenAI with several colleagues who later co-founded Anthropic. Since then, he has become one of the more influential government regulation advocates in the artificial intelligence industry. Currently, Clark is in charge of managing Anthropic's internal think tank to study the social impact of artificial intelligence technology, and also writes an industry newsletter with a large number of readers.

#3. Sam McCandlish

Age: 36 years old

Net worth: $15.5 billion

Source of wealth: Anthropic

McCandlish obtained a doctorate in theoretical physics from Stanford University, and then joined OpenAI to study the scaling laws of artificial intelligence — that is, as the investment in training data and computing power increases, the capabilities of artificial intelligence systems will improve in a predictable way. After co-founding Anthropic, he served as the company's CTO until October 2025 when he transferred to the position of chief architect. Currently, he is responsible for overseeing the construction and training of the company's models.

#2. Palmer Luckey

Age: 33 years old

Net worth: $5.9 billion

Source of wealth: Anduril

Luckey built an early virtual reality headset when he was a teenager. At the age of 21, he sold Oculus, the company he founded, to Facebook for $2 billion in cash and stock; but due to the controversy caused by his public support for US President Donald Trump, he left the company, which was later renamed Meta, in 2017.

In the same year, Luckey founded Anduril to produce autonomous drones and sensors, as well as artificial intelligence software for coordinating the operation of these devices. In March this year, the US Army awarded Anduril a 10-year contract with a maximum value of $20 billion, covering the company's software, hardware and related services. Two months later, Anduril completed a $5 billion financing, making the company's valuation reach $610 billion.

#1. Steven Hao

Age: 30 years old

Net worth: $5.8 billion

Source of wealth: Cognition

Steven Hao and the other two co-founders of Cognition have all won gold medals in the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), a global programming competition where Hao won the gold medal in 2014. After that, he worked as an engineer at Scale AI, a data labeling startup co-founded by Alex Wang, a 29-year-old billionaire with an estimated net worth of $3.2 billion; since 2025, Meta has held 49% of Scale AI's shares. Before Meta took a stake, Hao left Scale AI and founded Cognition in 2023. The main product of Cognition is Devin, an AI agent that can write and fix code, with clients including Citibank and fintech company Ramp.

In September this year, Cognition completed a $2 billion financing at a valuation of $48 billion, making all three co-founders billionaires. Hao is the CTO of Cognition and holds the largest stake in the founding team; among the three, only his net worth has reached the entry threshold for this year's Forbes 400 list.

This article is translated from:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/aliciapark/2026/09/15/the-10-youngest-billionaires-on-the-2026-forbes-400-list/

This article comes from the WeChat official account "Forbes" (ID: forbes_china), written by Alicia Park, translated by Jason, and released with authorization from 36Kr.