According to Fortune, a Forbes analysis reveals there are more self-made billionaires under 30 than ever before. In 2025, the number hit a record 13 people, smashing the previous high of 7. Shockingly, 11 of those 13 new ultra-wealthy individuals became billionaires within just the last three months. Names like Polymarket’s Shayne Coplan, Loveable’s Fabian Hedin, and AI entrepreneur Arvid Lunnemark are on the list. The surge is overwhelmingly driven by AI, with eight of the eleven new billionaires making their fortunes from AI innovations like the Cursor editing tool and the Mercor recruiting platform. The group also includes Luana Lopes Lara, who, at 25, became the world’s youngest female self-made billionaire after her prediction market startup Kalshi reached an $11 billion valuation.
The AI Gold Rush Is Real
Here’s the thing: this isn’t just about smart kids getting lucky. It’s a perfect storm of timing, tooling, and a specific generational mindset. These founders grew up with smartphones and the app store economy as a given. They don’t see building a global software company as a monumental, decade-long endeavor. It’s something you can prototype in a dorm room and scale with cloud credits. And right now, the single biggest lever you can pull is AI. Look at the examples: Sualeh Asif (25) with the Cursor AI editor, or Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha (both 22) with their Mercor AI recruiting platform. They’re not inventing the base AI models. They’re the agile builders creating the indispensable, user-friendly tools and applications on top of them. They identified a hot market and executed at lightning speed. That’s the playbook.
Beyond AI: The Prediction Market Phenom
But it’s not all AI. Luana Lopes Lara’s story with Kalshi is fascinating because it shows a different, but equally modern, path. A former professional ballerina pivoting to MIT engineering? That’s a wild career arc. Her billionaire status came from a prediction market—a platform for betting on real-world events—hitting an $11 billion valuation. This speaks to another trend: the financialization of everything. We’ve seen it with crypto and now with prediction markets. It’s about creating a new asset class or trading venue for things people are already obsessed with, like elections and sports. The key was navigating the regulatory nightmare with the CFTC to become the first federally regulated platform. That barrier to entry, once cleared, created a monstrous moat and a valuation that seems straight out of science fiction.
The Glaring Inequality Of It All
So we have to talk about the obvious dichotomy, right? The same Fortune article points out that many in Gen Z are struggling to land entry-level jobs because AI is automating those roles. Yet for a tiny, lucky, and brilliant sliver of that same generation, AI is the rocket fuel to unimaginable wealth. It’s the ultimate amplifier of inequality. The gap isn’t just between the rich and the poor anymore; it’s between those who can harness AI to build and own capital, and those whose labor is being displaced by it. These young billionaires are capital owners in the purest sense. Their wealth isn’t from salary; it’s from owning a huge chunk of a company that the market believes will define the future. That’s a power shift happening in real-time.
What Comes After The Boom?
Now, the big question is sustainability. We’ve seen tech bubbles before. Remember the crypto and NFT billionaire teens? Some of those paper fortunes evaporated pretty quickly. Valuations based on future AI potential are incredibly frothy. Will Cursor or Mercor or Kalshi be worth these staggering sums in five years? Maybe. But probably not all of them. The real test will be which of these companies can build durable, profitable businesses, not just ride a hype cycle to a big funding round. Still, you can’t argue with the data point. A record-breaking cohort just crossed a line that used to take a lifetime. It proves that the velocity of wealth creation in tech, especially when you hit the right trend, is absolutely insane. And right now, that trend is AI.
