7 of America's 10 youngest billionaires got rich from AI

The quickest way to join America's most exclusive group of wealthy people now goes through artificial intelligence (AI). Forbes set a record-high minimum net worth of $4.4 billion for its 2026 Forbes 400 list of the richest people in the country. But that high bar has not stopped a growing group of AI founders in their thirties from making the list. A year ago, only four people under 40 were wealthy enough to qualify. This year, there are 10.

The change is clear in Forbes' ranking of the 10 youngest billionaires on the 2026 Forbes 400. It lists members under 40 from oldest to youngest, using their net worths as of September 4, 2026. Seven of the 10 are appearing on the Forbes 400 for the first time. Forbes connects all seven of their fortunes to the AI boom.

Anthropic accounts for four of these people. The company, which makes the Claude AI models, was founded in 2021 by seven people who left OpenAI because they worried that their former employer was developing powerful technology too quickly without paying enough attention to safety. Each of the four younger cofounders on the list is estimated to be worth $15.5 billion. OpenAI has the richest newcomer on the full 2026 list. Defense technology company Anduril and coding startup Cognition account for the two youngest people on the list.

Only three people from the 2025 group of billionaires under 40 remain: Surge AI founder Edwin Chen, Robinhood cofounder Vlad Tenev, and Walmart $WMT -0.04% heir Lukas Walton. Walton is the only person in the group who inherited his wealth.

Although the group has grown, its members' combined wealth has fallen. Forbes estimates that the 10 youngest members are worth $169 billion in total, less than half the $357 billion total in 2025. Most of the decline comes from older, wealthier business leaders turning 40 and leaving the group. The biggest example is Meta $META +0.47% cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is now 42. Forbes estimates his fortune at $212 billion. Venture capitalist Josh Kushner and Airbnb $ABNB -1.84% cofounder Nathan Blecharczyk have also aged out of the group.

This list offers a picture of where new wealth in America is growing fastest. Here are the youngest billionaires on the 2026 Forbes 400, listed from oldest to youngest.

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Lukas Walton, 39, ranks No. 10 on Forbes' 2026 list of its youngest Forbes 400 members. His estimated net worth is $44.4 billion. He is the richest person in the group under 40 and the only one whose wealth came from an inheritance rather than a business he built.

Walton's wealth comes from his grandfather, Sam Walton, who opened the first Walmart $WMT -0.04% store in Rogers, Arkansas, in 1962. Walmart grew into the world's largest retailer by revenue. Its headquarters remain in nearby Bentonville. Sam Walton died in 1992, but his family remains one of the richest in the United States because family members still own a large amount of Walmart stock.

Lukas is the only child of John Walton, one of Sam Walton's sons. John died in 2005 when the small, lightweight plane he was flying crashed in Wyoming. Forbes says Lukas inherited about one-third of his father's estate, most of which was Walmart stock. As a result, Lukas's net worth still depends heavily on Walmart's share price.

Instead of working for the family company, Walton runs Builders Vision, a Chicago-based firm that combines investing with charitable work. Forbes says the firm manages more than $15 billion. It focuses on clean energy, sustainable food systems, and protecting the oceans. This is a type of investing called impact investing, which aims to earn money while also helping the environment.

In June 2026, Walton bought a minority stake in the NBA's Chicago Bulls basketball team. Jerry Reinsdorf has led the team's ownership since 1985. The Bulls are best known for winning six championships in the 1990s with Michael Jordan.

Walton stands apart from the other nine people on this list. Every other person earned a place through a company they started or helped start. Walton's position reflects his inheritance and age instead.

His wealth also has a big effect on the group's total. His estimated $44.4 billion makes up about one-quarter of the $169 billion Forbes estimates that all 10 youngest members own together. Greg Brockman of OpenAI, the next-richest person in the group, is worth less than 60% of Walton's fortune.

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Vlad Tenev, 39, ranks No. 9 among the youngest members of the 2026 Forbes 400. His estimated fortune is $7.1 billion. Most of his wealth comes from his roughly 6% ownership stake in Robinhood, the trading app he cofounded in 2013.

Tenev was born in Bulgaria. Both of his parents worked for the World Bank, and he grew up in northern Virginia after his family moved to the United States. He studied mathematics at Stanford, where he met Baiju Bhatt. Bhatt, now 41, is also on the Forbes 400 list.

Robinhood began with a simple idea: let people buy and sell stocks without paying a commission for each trade. Other brokerage firms followed its lead. By late 2019, major competitors such as Charles Schwab $SCHW +0.08%, TD Ameritrade, and E*Trade had stopped charging commissions on online stock trades.

The company faced strong criticism in January 2021 after it temporarily stopped customers from buying GameStop $GME -4.39% and other heavily traded meme stocks. Tenev testified before Congress about the decision the next month. Robinhood later went public on the Nasdaq $NDAQ +1.39% in 2021, using the stock symbol HOOD.

Robinhood's newest source of growth is very different from its original business. Forbes reports that prediction markets are now its fastest-growing business. Customers trade contracts based on what they think will happen in the future, including election results, Federal Reserve decisions, sports events, and the weather. In the second quarter of 2026, prediction markets brought Robinhood more than $156 million in revenue, more than either stock trading or cryptocurrency trading.

This change has put Robinhood at the center of a fast-growing part of finance that is receiving close attention. Prediction markets allow customers to make bets on real-world outcomes through regulated contracts. Their growth has attracted attention from regulators and competing platforms.

Tenev is also involved in AI. In 2023, he founded Harmonic, a startup focused on mathematical reasoning, and became its chair. This work connects to his studies. Tenev left a mathematics Ph.D. program at UCLA to start his first company with Bhatt.

He is one of only three people who were among the 10 youngest Forbes 400 members in 2025 and remained in that group in 2026. The other two are Walmart $WMT -0.04% heir Lukas Walton and Surge AI founder Edwin Chen.

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Tom Brown, 39, ranks No. 8 among the youngest members of the 2026 Forbes 400. As an Anthropic cofounder, he has an estimated net worth of $15.5 billion. His career follows the growth of large language models, from his early work at OpenAI to the computer systems that power Anthropic's Claude models.

Brown studied computer science and cognitive science at MIT. He joined OpenAI when it was still a small research lab and was one of its first 20 employees, Forbes reports.

His best-known work came in 2020. Brown was the lead author of a research paper called "Language Models are Few-Shot Learners," which introduced GPT-3. It showed that a large enough language model could write natural-sounding text and learn to handle new tasks from a few examples in a prompt, without being retrained for every task. The paper won a best paper award at NeurIPS, one of the leading academic conferences in the field. GPT-3 also helped lay the groundwork for products that started the current wave of AI investment.

In 2021, Brown was one of seven OpenAI employees who left to start Anthropic. At the new company, he is responsible for computing power, or the huge groups of specialized chips needed to train and run models such as Claude. This work has become one of the industry's most expensive and important areas. Anthropic uses hardware from several suppliers, including Google's $GOOGL -1.62% tensor processing units, Amazon's $AMZN -0.10% Trainium chips, and Nvidia's $NVDA +2.54% graphics processors.

Brown has the same ranking among his fellow cofounders on the full Forbes 400. Forbes estimates that each of the seven is worth $15.5 billion, tying them at No. 75 on the full list.

Their fortunes depend on Anthropic's value as a private company. After a $65 billion funding round in May 2026, the company was valued at $965 billion. Forbes also reports that Anthropic confidentially filed paperwork this summer to prepare for a possible public stock offering, as OpenAI did.

This valuation helps explain how an engineer who left OpenAI in 2021 became one of America's richest people just five years later. Brown's wealth comes from owning an early stake in a research lab that grew into one of the world's most valuable private companies.

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Daniela Amodei, 39, ranks No. 7 on Forbes' 2026 list of the youngest Forbes 400 members. Her estimated fortune is $15.5 billion. She cofounded Anthropic and is its president. She is also the only woman among the 10 youngest people on this year's list.

Amodei did not begin her career in AI or computer science. She graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and later worked at Stripe, the online payments company, before joining OpenAI. At OpenAI, she managed safety and policy work. These issues later became important parts of the company she helped create.

In 2021, she left OpenAI with her brother, Dario Amodei, and five other colleagues to start Anthropic. Dario, 43, is the company's CEO. He also joined the Forbes 400 for the first time this year, but he is too old to appear on the under-40 list. Forbes says two other Anthropic cofounders in their early forties are also newcomers to the list this year.

Forbes says Daniela Amodei is Anthropic's president and board chair. She oversees research, engineering, products, and business operations. Her job covers much of the work needed to turn Claude from a research project into a business that serves companies and individual users.

Anthropic is legally set up as a public benefit corporation. This type of company must consider its stated public mission as well as the financial returns it delivers to shareholders. Since it was founded, Anthropic has made AI safety a major part of its identity. That focus also helps it compete with OpenAI, Google $GOOGL -1.62%, and other companies for customers and researchers.

The cofounders have also promised to give away much of their wealth. Earlier in 2026, Amodei and the other six cofounders pledged to eventually donate 80% of their fortunes. Based on an estimated $15.5 billion per person, 80% would be worth more than $12 billion for each founder at current valuations.

On the full 2026 Forbes 400, Amodei shares the No. 75 ranking with her fellow Anthropic cofounders.

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Edwin Chen, 38, ranks No. 6 among the youngest members of the 2026 Forbes 400, with an estimated fortune of $18 billion. He built his wealth through Surge AI, a company that provides data created by people to help train AI models. He did this without raising money from venture capital investors. Forbes estimates that he owns about 75% of the company.

Chen's background is very different from that of many people in Silicon Valley. He grew up in a Florida town with about 3,400 residents. His parents, who had moved from Taiwan, ran a restaurant serving Chinese and Thai food. He later studied mathematics, linguistics, and computer science at MIT. After that, he worked at Google $GOOGL -1.62%, Facebook $META +0.47%, and Twitter $TWTR 0.00%.

Chen founded Surge AI in 2020. The company pays people to label data and rate or correct answers produced by AI systems. This feedback from people is an important part of training modern AI models. One method, called reinforcement learning from human feedback, or RLHF, asks people to judge which answers are better. The model uses these judgments to learn to give more useful and accurate answers.

According to Forbes, Surge's customers include Google and Anthropic, and the company has passed $1 billion in yearly revenue. It is unusual for an AI company to reach this size without outside venture funding. Many companies in the industry raise billions of dollars before making a profit. Because Chen did not sell large portions of the company to investors, he kept control of a large stake. This helps explain why his fortune is larger than those of some founders whose companies have much higher valuations.

Surge competes with many other companies that provide training data for AI. Its best-known rival, Scale AI, became 49% owned by Meta in 2025. After that deal, some AI labs reconsidered sending sensitive training work to a company partly owned by a competitor.

Chen is one of three people who were among the 10 youngest Forbes 400 members in 2025 and remained in the group in 2026. He is returning to the list, not joining for the first time. His company is an important part of the AI supply chain: Surge helps other companies improve their models. Its business therefore depends directly on how much the major AI labs spend on training.

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Greg Brockman, 38, ranks No. 5 among the youngest members of the 2026 Forbes 400. He is also the richest newcomer on the full list. Forbes estimates his net worth at $25.5 billion, most of which comes from his ownership stake in OpenAI, the company he cofounded and now leads as president.

Brockman grew up in North Dakota and enrolled at both Harvard and MIT, but he did not finish a degree at either school. He joined Stripe early and became its chief technology officer at age 25. In 2015, he cofounded OpenAI with Sam Altman and Elon Musk as a nonprofit research lab.

The size of Brockman's OpenAI stake remained private until it became public during a court case. Musk sued Brockman and Altman in 2024 over OpenAI's move to a for-profit structure. During the trial in May 2026, Brockman testified under oath that his OpenAI holdings were worth more than $20 billion. He also revealed that he owned nearly $500 million in Stripe stock, along with smaller stakes in chipmaker Cerebras and cloud computing company CoreWeave. Both companies provide services to OpenAI.

OpenAI's growth helped make these fortunes possible. The company released ChatGPT in November 2022, and the chatbot quickly became one of the fastest-adopted consumer products ever. Forbes valued OpenAI at $852 billion in March 2026.

Brockman's time at OpenAI has included breaks. When the company's board removed Altman as CEO in November 2023, Brockman resigned on the same day. He returned a few days later after Altman was brought back. Brockman also took an extended leave in 2024 before returning to work.

His responsibilities have since grown. Brockman has long overseen the computer systems and infrastructure that run OpenAI's models. In July 2026, he also took charge of the company's product business. Forbes says these combined duties have made him OpenAI's second-in-command as the company considers a possible public stock offering.

Brockman's estimated $25.5 billion fortune makes him the second-richest person in the under-40 group, behind Walmart $WMT -0.04% heir Lukas Walton. Among those who built their own fortunes, Brockman is the richest member of the group.

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Jack Clark, 37, ranks No. 4 among the youngest members of the 2026 Forbes 400. As an Anthropic cofounder, he has an estimated fortune of $15.5 billion. He used to be a journalist and has become a well-known voice in discussions about AI policy.

Clark reported on AI for Bloomberg before joining the industry himself. He became OpenAI's policy director, working on how governments and the public should respond to increasingly powerful AI systems.

In 2021, he left OpenAI with six colleagues to start Anthropic. Forbes notes that Clark has since become a strong public supporter of government rules for AI. This makes him different from many technology leaders who have opposed new regulations. He has spoken to lawmakers and international organizations. In July 2023, he briefed the United Nations Security Council during its first meeting focused on artificial intelligence.

Outside Anthropic, Clark is known for Import AI, a weekly newsletter that explains and discusses new AI research. Researchers, investors, and policymakers widely read it. He has also helped lead the AI Index, a yearly report from Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence that follows changes and progress across the field.

Clark now leads an internal think tank at Anthropic that studies how AI affects society. This work builds on his experience as a journalist and policy director: explaining a fast-changing technology to people outside research labs and helping shape the rules that govern it.

Like each of Anthropic's seven cofounders, Clark is estimated to be worth $15.5 billion. He shares the No. 75 position with the other cofounders on the full 2026 Forbes 400.

His route to becoming a billionaire is unusual for someone in technology. Clark did not build AI models or write the company's code. His fortune comes from the ownership stake he received as a cofounder of a company whose value rose to hundreds of billions of dollars. He is the second-youngest of the four Anthropic cofounders on the under-40 list, older only than Sam McCandlish.

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Sam McCandlish, 36, ranks No. 3 among the youngest members of the 2026 Forbes 400. He is the youngest of the four Anthropic cofounders on the list. Forbes estimates his fortune at $15.5 billion.

McCandlish trained as a scientist. He earned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics at Stanford before joining OpenAI, where he studied what are now called scaling laws. These describe how AI models tend to improve in predictable ways when researchers give them more training data, build larger models, and use more computing power.

This research became one of the most important ideas in modern AI. A 2020 OpenAI paper about scaling laws for neural language models listed McCandlish and future Anthropic cofounder Jared Kaplan among its authors. The work helped companies estimate how much better models might become after larger training runs. It also helped justify the huge amounts of money now spent on chips and data centers.

McCandlish was also the lead author of a 2018 OpenAI study about training models with large batches of data. The paper looked at how much data a model processes at each training step and how this affects learning efficiency. This is a practical question for anyone training very large AI models.

Physics is a common background among Anthropic's founders. Jared Kaplan was a theoretical physics professor at Johns Hopkins University. CEO Dario Amodei earned a Ph.D. in biophysics at Princeton. Their shared scientific background helps explain why the company first focused on measuring and predicting how AI models behave as they grow.

After cofounding Anthropic in 2021, McCandlish became its chief technology officer. In October 2025, he moved to a new position as chief architect. In this role, he oversees how the company's models are designed and trained.

His estimated $15.5 billion fortune matches those of his fellow cofounders. At 36, McCandlish is younger than every other person joining the Forbes 400 for the first time except Palmer Luckey and Steven Hao. All three built their fortunes through companies founded within the past decade.

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Palmer Luckey, 33, ranks No. 2 among the youngest members of the 2026 Forbes 400. His estimated fortune of $5.9 billion comes from Anduril, the defense technology company he founded in 2017. He is the second-youngest person on the entire list.

Luckey first made his fortune through virtual reality. As a teenager in Southern California, he built early headset designs in his parents' garage. His company, Oculus, raised about $2.4 million on Kickstarter in 2012. Facebook $META +0.47% bought Oculus in 2014 for $2 billion in cash and stock, when Luckey was 21.

He left Facebook, now called Meta, in 2017 after controversy over his political support for Donald Trump. That same year, he started Anduril with several cofounders, including former employees of Palantir $PLTR +4.74% and a partner from the investment firm Founders Fund. The company's name comes from a sword in J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings."

Anduril builds self-operating drones and sensors, along with AI-powered software that helps coordinate them. Its main software platform, Lattice, gathers information from many systems so people can monitor and control them through one interface. The company is based in Costa Mesa, California.

Anduril had a strong first half of 2026. In March, the U.S. Army awarded the company a 10-year contract worth up to $20 billion for software, equipment, and related services. Two months later, Anduril raised $5 billion from investors at a company valuation of $61 billion. This funding round helped Luckey join the Forbes 400 for the first time.

Luckey has since repaired his relationship with his former employer. In 2025, Anduril and Meta announced a partnership to develop mixed-reality headsets for the U.S. military. This brought together Luckey's early work in virtual reality and his current defense business.

His success reflects a wider change in the relationship between Silicon Valley and the U.S. military. A decade ago, many large technology companies avoided military projects. Anduril built its business around them, betting that cheaper self-operating systems and software would win contracts traditionally held by defense companies such as Lockheed Martin $LMT +6.86% and Northrop Grumman $NOC +2.81%.

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Steven Hao, 30, ranks No. 1 among the youngest members of the 2026 Forbes 400, making him the youngest person on the entire list. His estimated fortune is $5.8 billion. He cofounded Cognition and serves as its chief technology officer. The company makes Devin, an AI tool that can help write computer code.

Hao comes from the world of competitive programming. In 2014, he won a gold medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics, a leading worldwide programming competition for high school students. His two Cognition cofounders, CEO Scott Wu and Walden Yan, also won gold medals in the same competition.

Before joining Cognition, Hao worked as an engineer at Scale AI, a startup that labels data and was cofounded by Alexandr Wang. Wang, 29, is also a billionaire, with an estimated fortune of $3.2 billion. But that is below the $4.4 billion needed to make the Forbes 400. Meta $META +0.47% bought 49% of Scale AI in 2025. Hao had already left the company to start Cognition in 2023.

Cognition introduced Devin in 2024, describing it as an AI software engineer that can plan and complete coding tasks on its own. Devin writes and fixes code for customers including Citibank and the financial technology company Ramp. Cognition grew in 2025 by buying Windsurf, an AI coding tool, after Google $GOOGL -1.62% hired Windsurf's CEO and key employees.

Cognition's value has risen quickly. In September 2026, it raised $2 billion at a valuation of $48 billion, less than three years after the company was founded. The funding round made all three cofounders billionaires.

Hao owns the largest share of the company among its founders. He is the only one of the three whose fortune is large enough to meet the Forbes 400 cutoff.

The ages on this year's Forbes 400 show how quickly the AI boom has changed the distribution of wealth in America. At 30, Hao is 67 years younger than the oldest member of the list, 97-year-old timber businessman Archie Aldis Emmerson. Forbes estimates Emmerson's fortune at $6 billion.