No longer do business leaders need to spend decades building the next big thing to join the ranks of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos at the top of the billionaires club; they just need to build an AI company.
There are now some 498 AI unicorns, or private AI companies, valued at $1 billion or more, with a combined value of $2.7 trillion, according to CB Insights.
A complete 100 of them were founded since 2023. There are more than 1,300 AI startups with valuations of over $100 million.
Take Mira Murati, the former CTO of OpenAI, for example. Her startup, Thinking Machines Lab, has just closed a $2 billion seed round at a $12 billion valuation.
We’ve not seen a tech boom like this since the late 90s and early 2000s, which propelled many of the tech giants of today, from eBay to Google, into the mainstream. While the dot-com boom can’t be directly compared because the “unicorn” label didn’t exist then and billion-dollar private valuations weren’t tracked, AI is creating billionaires at a record pace—and could even ring in an era of trillionaires.
The AI billionaire boom
With a boom in company valuation also comes hefty paydays for its founders, investors, and C-suite.
In March, Bloomberg reported that four of the largest private AI companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Safe Superintelligence, and Anysphere, have created at least 15 billionaires with a combined net worth of $38 billion. More than a dozen unicorns have been crowned since then.
AI startups are receiving massive investments, resulting in high valuations and wealth for founders and early investors. According to data from Crunchbase, global venture funding in 2024 edged above 2023’s totals, with AI showing the biggest leap in amounts year-to-year.
For the founders of Anthropic, including CEO Dario Amodei, reports indicate the Claude chatbot maker is in talks to raise $5 billion at a valuation of $170 billion. Amodei’s net worth is now over the billion-dollar mark.
Also joining the billionaire club is Liang Wenfeng. The founder and CEO of Chinese AI company DeepSeek is likely worth over $1 billion based on the estimated value of the low-cost AI company.
And as investments into AI continue to boom, so do the net worths of billionaires working in them. Nvidia’s CFO Colette Kress and EVP Jay Puri have become billionaires, joining its CEO Jensen Huang after its market cap surpassed $4 trillion. Similarly, Palantir’s first billion-dollar quarter is dramatically increasing the wealth of the company’s cofounders and C-suite. Peter Thiel and Alex Karp have each seen their net worth jump by $17 billion collectively.
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