Fueled by AI, prediction markets and online gambling, there are more self-made billionaires under 30 than ever before, 13 up from a previous record of 7. ON October 7, Intercontinental Exchange (the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange) invested $2 billion into Polymarket, pushing up the prediction market platform’s valuation to $9 billion. That made Polymarket’s 27-year-old founder, Shayne Coplan, the world’s youngest self-made billionaire. His reign was short: 20 days later, he was overtaken by the three cofounders of AI startup Mercor. That trio of 22-year-olds became the youngest self-made billionaires ever, gaining 10-figure status even earlier than Mark Zuckerberg did 17 years ago at age 23. “It’s definitely crazy,” Mercor’s Foody told Forbes in October. “It feels very surreal. Obviously beyond our wildest imaginations, insofar as anything that we could have anticipated two years ago.” Then, in a remarkable stretch from November until December, another seven entrepreneurs under the age of 30 became billionaires, including Kalshi cofounder and former ballerina from Brazil Luana Lopes Lara, 29—now the youngest self-made woman billionaire on Earth and the only self-made woman billionaire in her 20s. (She turns 30 in May.) That means there are now a record 13 self-made billionaires under 30. For all the hand-wringing about artificial intelligence killing off entry-level jobs, it’s creating something else at mind-blowing speed: billionaires barely old enough to rent a car. Industries and innovations that didn’t meaningfully exist a decade ago, including prediction markets and AI, now mint entrepreneurs with three-comma fortunes with astonishing speed. The last time Forbes counted anywhere close to this many young self-made billionaires was in 2022, when there were just seven self-made billionaires under age 30. Back in April when Forbes published our annual World’s Billionaires list, there were only two under 30 entrepreneurs in the ranks: Alexandr Wang, 28, who sold a 49% stake in his AI startup Scale AI to Meta this summer for about $14 billion and left to become Meta's chief AI officer, and Australian online casino mogul Ed Craven, 29, who is one of six on this list that hail from outside of the U.S. (including American citizen Tarek Mansour, 29, of Kalshi, who was born in California but grew up in Lebanon). Craven and Fabian Hedin, the 26-year-old cofounder of Swedish AI coding startup Lovable, are the only self-made billionaires under age 30 who have built and run their businesses outside the U.S. Wang and Craven are the two richest entrepreneurs under 30, worth $3.2 billion and $2.8 billion, respectively. Beyond these 13 are an even larger and growing group of 17 Under 30 billionaires who inherited fortunes from their families, the youngest of which is 20-year-old German pharmaceuticals heir Johannes von Baumbach (estimated fortune: $5.8 billion). Altogether, there are 30 billionaires in their 20s. Despite this relative youth boom, these young entrepreneurs continue to be extraordinary outliers in a billionaire class that remains overwhelmingly older; there are at least 500 billionaires aged 80 or older and the average age of the world’s more than 3,100 billionaires is 67. Plus, even in a year defined by unprecedented youth, the clock keeps ticking. Three of these self-made billionaires are already 29, meaning their stay on the Under 30 list will be brief. Read the full story on Forbes: By Matt Durot https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2025/12/22/why-there-are-suddenly-so-many-self-made-billionaires-under-30/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices