World’s 5 Youngest Self-Made Billionaires
They did not inherit it. They waited for no one’s permission. They just built—and redefined what it means to be young, brilliant, and impossibly rich.
In 2026, the world’s youngest self-made billionaires are: Surya Midha, Brendan Foody and Adarsh Hiremath (all 22, co-founders of AI startup Mercor, $2.2B each) followed by Alexandr Wang (28, Scale AI, $3.2-3.6B), and Lucy Guo (31, Scale AI co-founder and Passes CEO, $1.3B). All five made their fortunes in artificial intelligence and tech businesses.
Most 22 year olds are still trying to figure out their major. Surya Midha was already a billionaire. Not because he was born into wealth. Not because he was lucky. But because he and two friends saw a problem that a billion dollars in corporate hiring budgets couldn’t fix and they built the solution from a dorm room. Within two years they had achieved $500 million in annual revenue. Their company, Mercor, was worth $10 billion. And three college students became the youngest self-made billionaires in history — younger than Mark Zuckerberg was when he rang the bell for Facebook.
But Surya and his co-founders aren’t the only ones bending the rules. In Silicon Valley—and far beyond—a small, remarkable band of founders has done what most people spend their entire careers trying to do. They classified themselves as billionaires before they could rent a car without a surcharge.
Here are the world’s five youngest self-made billionaires today. They have different stories. Their industries are different.” But they have one thing in common. They didn’t wait for the world to be ready for them.
Who is the youngest self-made billionaire in the world?
The title of youngest self-made billionaire as of 2026 belongs to 22-year-old Surya Midha, co-founder of Mercor, an AI hiring platform. He and his co-founders, Brendan Foody and Adarsh Hiremath, are the youngest self-made billionaires ever to crack the Forbes World’s Billionaires list, each with an estimated net worth of about $2.2 billion.
No. 1 · Youngest self-made billionaire in the world
Surya Midha
Age 22
Net Worth ~$2.2B
Mercor · AI Hiring
Born and raised in San Jose, California, Surya Midha was the son of parents who left Delhi to follow their American dream. He was a national debate champion in high school, the kind of kid who could walk into a room and make you feel like the argument was over before it even started.
He studied Foreign Service at Georgetown University, but the classroom could not contain him. In 2023, he took a leave of absence from academia to co-found Mercor with debate-teammate-turned-business-partner Brendan Foody and Harvard student Adarsh Hiremath. The idea: leverage AI to do what HR teams were spending billions failing to do – find the right person for the right job, quick.
The first version of the product was built during a hackathon in São Paulo. It was at $1 million a month run rate in nine months. Two years later, it had $500 million annualised revenue, operations in 25 countries, and a $10 billion valuation after a $350 million Series C led by Felicis Ventures — with Benchmark and General Catalyst also in the room.
Surya, who’s a few months younger than his co-founders, has the individual record: the world’s youngest self-made billionaire ever, breaking a record that had stood in Mark Zuckerberg’s name since 2012. Each of the co-founders has a roughly 22% stake, each worth around $2.2 billion. Not bad for a person who cannot even have a decade of work experience.
No. 2 & No. 3 · Co-founders · Youngest self-made billionaires
Brendan Foody & Adarsh Hiremath
Age 22
Net Worth ~$2.2B each
Mercor · CEO & CTO
Before Mercor, Brendan Foody and Adarsh Hiremath were two competitive debaters who happened to be unusually good at solving hard problems together. Foody took economics at Georgetown. Hiremath was at Harvard . They fought over policy. They took national trophies. And somewhere in those late-night cramming sessions they realised they thought of business the same way they thought of arguments: find the weakness in the system, then exploit it better than anyone else.
Foody is the CEO of Mercor. Hiremath is CTO. By all measures, they are the engine and the architecture of one of the fastest scaling AI startups of the 2020s. “It’s definitely crazy,” Foody told Forbes when the billion-dollar valuation rolled in. “It feels very surreal. “Beyond our wildest dreams.
They all received $200,000 from Peter Thiel’s Thiel Fellowship — money that was meant to give just this kind of founders the permission to skip the diploma and go build something real. They needed little persuasion. All three are proof that the world’s youngest self-made billionaires didn’t take the traditional route. They designed their own
“Very surreal feeling it is. “Beyond our wildest dreams by far, anything we could have predicted 2 years ago.” — Brendan Foody, Co-founder, Mercor”
Who was the youngest self made billionaire before Surya Midha?
The youngest self-made billionaire was Alexandr Wang of Scale AI, until Surya Midha broke the record in 2026. He dropped out of MIT in 2021 to start Scale AI, the data labelling infrastructure behind many of the world’s top AI models, and became a billionaire at 24. He is Meta’s Chief AI Officer and has an estimated net worth of $3.2-$3.6 billion.
No. 4 · Former record holder · Youngest self-made billionaire at 24
Alexandr Wang
Age 28–29
Net Worth ~$3.2–3.6B
Scale AI → Meta
Alexandr Wang is the son of two physicists who came to the U.S. from China to work at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where they helped build the atomic bomb. Apparently growing up in a culture of extreme scientific ambition leaves a mark. In high school, Wang earned places in the best physics and math competitions. He went to MIT and quit after freshman year to start a company.
That was Scale AI. The idea was deceptively simple: AI models need huge quantities of labelled, clean data to learn from. No one wanted to do that work. Wang built a platform that did it at scale—and charged the biggest AI labs in the world for the privilege. OpenAI. Google. Microsoft. The US government. They all became customers. Scale AI was valued at billions in 2021, and Wang, 24, became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire.
In June 2025, Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI for a 49% stake, doubling the company’s valuation to $29 billion overnight. Wang stepped down as CEO and joined Meta as Chief AI Officer, where he now heads the company’s Superintelligence Labs. He is currently worth between $3.2 billion and $3.6 billion. He is twenty-eight years old. He was the youngest self-made billionaire of all time, a record he held for five years. It was taken from him by the next generation. And he’s fine with that.
No. 5 · Youngest self-made woman billionaire in the world
Lucy Guo
Age 30–31
Net Worth ~$1.3B
Scale AI co-founder · Passes CEO
By the time she was in second grade, Lucy Guo was flipping Pokémon cards on the playground and running virtual Neopets trades for real money in Fremont, California. She learned PayPal before she learned how to do long division. Both of her parents were electrical engineers. Before she learned to drive she learned to code. She had already made more money online than most college students see in a year by the time she enrolled at Carnegie Mellon.
She dropped out of college, went to work at Quora, met Alexandr Wang and co-founded Scale AI with him in 2016 when both were just 21. Two years later, she was pushed out in a disagreement that has never been fully explained publicly. She retained her 5 percent stake in the company. In her place most people would have thought that the end of the story.
It was the start. In 2025, Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI, valuing the company at $29 billion, meaning Guo’s 5% stake is worth more than $1.3 billion. She knocked Taylor Swift off the top spot as the youngest self-made woman billionaire in the world — and she did it from a company she no longer works for, which might be the most quietly extraordinary detail in any billionaire origin story of the decade.
Today she runs Passes, a creator monetisation platform she founded, and Backend Capital, a VC firm she started to fund promising engineers. She still buys from Shein. Her assistant drives her in an old, beat-up Honda Civic. “Stay rich, pretend poor,” she told Fortune. She means it.
So, what do they all have in common?
“Look at these five people and you may see different stories. “Different ages, different companies, different ways.” But step back and there’s one pattern you can’t miss.”
They all dropped out of or left a traditional institution without finishing it. One and all made their fortunes in AI, the most disruptive tech wave of the 21st century. Each and every one of them moved before the market told them to. And none of them waited for someone older, richer or more established to give them permission.
They are living proof of something the startup world has been saying for years, but rarely seeing at this scale: the youngest self-made billionaires in the world didn’t get there by following the playbook. They wrote another. They were also all very very good at spotting a real, expensive, unsolved problem and building the simplest possible version of a solution before the rest of the world caught on.The youngest self-made billionaire is 22 today. 19 may be the next one after them. The rules are always changing. And the builders keep getting younger.
What industries are the youngest self-made billionaires in?
Nearly all of the world’s youngest self-made billionaires in 2026 made their money through startups in artificial intelligence and technology. Mercor is an AI hiring platform founded by Surya Midha, Brendan Foody and Adarsh Hiremath. Alexandr Wang is the founder of Scale AI, an AI data infrastructure company. Lucy Guo, a Scale AI co-founder. The AI boom of the early 2020s enabled some incredibly rapid wealth creation — several of these founders went from launch to a billion-dollar valuation in less than three years.
At what age did the youngest self-made billionaire become a billionaire?
Surya Midha became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire in 2026, at the age of 22. He became a billionaire in October 2025, along with his co-founders Adarsh Hiremath and Brendan Foody of Mercor. That broke the previous record set by Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang, who became a billionaire at age 24. Previously, Mark Zuckerberg had been the benchmark at age 23 when Facebook went public in 2012.
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