10 of the US' youngest billionaires in 2026 — and how they got their fortunes

Palmer Luckey, founder of Anduril Industries, is one of the US' youngest billionaires. Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC New money is in for America's young and rich.Forbes released its annual list of America's 400 richest billionaires in September, and a record $4.4 billion net worth was required to make the cut.Just 10 of those billionaires are under 40, up from four on last year's list. And most of them didn't inherit their wealth. The majority of the US' youngest Forbes 400 billionaires — seven of them — got their money from the AI boom as founders. Of those seven, four come from one company: Anthropic, the AI company founded only five years ago and now valued at $1.5 trillion in the secondary market. Anthropic's seven cofounders all vowed earlier this year to donate 80% of their personal wealth to philanthropic causes. The other three are founders of Surge AI, OpenAI, and Cognition.Only one billionaire on the list — Lukas Walton — inherited their wealth from a family fortune. Walton is the grandson of Walmart founder Sam Walton and is also one of two young billionaires who do not live in California. The other, Edwin Chen, lives in New York.Here are the 10 youngest billionaires in the US. Lukas Walton Rob, Alice, and Jim Walton are part of America's richest family. Lukas Walton, who is not pictured, leads a private life, with few photos of him available online. Rick T. Wilking/Getty Images Age: 39Net worth: $44.4 billionState: IllinoisLukas Walton, Illinois' richest person, also runs an impact-investing group called Builders Vision and is chair of the Walton Family Foundation's environment program committee.As of 2024, Walton has donated at least $150 million of his own fortune to his family's environmental program foundation.After his father, John T. Walton, died in a plane crash in 2005, Lukas inherited roughly a third of his fortune. Forbes' data shows that the Walton family has a combined net worth of $475.6 billion. Tom Brown Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown, 39, has a net worth of $15.5 billion. Sean Rayford/Getty Images Age: 39Net worth: $15.5 billionState: CaliforniaTom Brown is one of Anthropic's seven cofounders and serves as the company's chief compute officer.He recently mediated Anthropic's standoff with the US over Claude's AI models Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Claude is Anthropic's conversational AI assistant.Before Anthropic, Brown worked at OpenAI as a research engineering lead and helped introduce the company's GPT-3 language model.Brown graduated from MIT in 2010, having studied computer science and cognitive science. He cofounded his first company, social club Grouper, in 2011. Daniela Amodei Anthropic president and co-founder Daniela Amodei, 39, also has a net worth of $15.5 billion. Bloomberg/Getty Images Age: 39Net worth: $15.5 billionState: CaliforniaDaniela Amodei is Anthropic's president and board chair.Amodei, like Brown, left her job at OpenAI in 2021 alongside her brother, Dario, to found Anthropic.Amodei also worked at Stripe, the financial services company, and graduated from UC Santa Cruz in 2009 with a B.A. in English Literature and a minor in politics.She's previously stated that she doesn't regret her college major, arguing that artificial intelligence will only increase the importance of humanities majors."The ability to have critical thinking skills will be more important in the future, rather than less," she said in an interview earlier this year. Vlad Tenev Vlad Tenev, chief executive officer of Robinhood Markets, founded the stock trading app at 26 years old. Bloomberg/Getty Images Age: 39Net worth: $7.1 billionState: CaliforniaVlad Tenev, who was born in Bulgaria, co-founded stock trading app Robinhood in 2013 with Stanford colleague Baiju Bhatt, who is also on Forbes' 400 list this year.Robinhood went public in 2021 and is now leaning much of its business toward prediction markets, where participants buy and sell contracts on future events related to the weather, sports, elections, Federal Reserve decisions, and more.The company has a market cap of $107.7 billion. According to Forbes, Tenev owns about 6% of the company.Tenev is also the cofounder and executive chairman of Harmonic, which builds AI systems that excel at advanced mathematical reasoning. Edwin Chen Edwin Chen founded Surge AI, a data-labeling and AI training firm, in 2020. Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for Village Global Age: 38Net worth: $18 billionState: New YorkChen is the founder of Surge AI, a data labeling and AI training company with an annual revenue exceeding $1 billion. Chen owns about 75% of the company and counts customers such as Google and Anthropic.He is an MIT graduate, having studied math, linguistics, and computer science. Before founding Surge AI in 2020, he worked at Google, Facebook, and Twitter.He is the son of Taiwanese immigrants and is from Florida. Greg Brockman President and co-founder of OpenAI Greg Brockman, 37, has a net worth of $25.5 billion. Bloomberg/Getty Images Age: 37Net worth: $25.5 billionState: CaliforniaGreg Brockman is a Harvard and MIT dropout.Before completing his studies, he traded in schoolwork for the role of Stripe's chief technology officer at 25.Three years later, in 2015, Brockman cofounded OpenAI alongside Elon Musk and Sam Altman. He currently serves as the company's president, overseeing its models' infrastructure.His stake in the company is nearly $30 billion, he said earlier this year. Jack Clark Jack Clark, Anthropic's cofounder, joined the artificial intelligence industry in 2016. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images Age: 37Net worth: $15.5 billionState: CaliforniaJack Clark was first a Bloomberg reporter covering artificial intelligence before becoming one of the industry's best-known founders.Clark joined OpenAI as its policy director in 2016. Five years later, he cofounded Anthropic and now runs the company's in-house think tank operations, studying AI's effects on society.He is a widely respected advisor on AI safety, and also writes the email newsletter "Import AI," which many field researchers follow. Clark has coauthored several AI research papers. Sam McCandlish Sam McCandlish, Anthropic's cofounder, leads a private life, with limited pictures of him available on the internet. Carlos Barria/Reuters Age: 36Net worth: $15.5 billionState: CaliforniaSam McCandlish is another Anthropic cofounder who first worked at OpenAI.There, he worked on scaling laws, the idea that AI systems become more capable as they are trained with more data and computing power.Now, as chief architect at Anthropic, he oversees how its models are built and trained. He previously served as Anthropic's chief technology officer.McCandlish earned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Stanford in 2017. Palmer Luckey Palmer Luckey was 19 years old when he founded the virtual reality company Oculus VR in 2012. Bloomberg/Getty Images Age: 33Net worth: $5.9 billionState: CaliforniaPalmer Luckey got his career head start as a teenager when he built a virtual reality headset and, in 2012, founded a company to sell it. He sold the company, Oculus, to Meta two years later for $2 billion in cash and stock.Meta fired Luckey in 2016 after he made a political contribution to a pro-Donald Trump group. Meta denied that his departure had anything to do with his politics.Since then, Luckey co-founded Anduril, a defense-tech company that builds AI software and autonomous military hardware. As of May, the company is valued at $61 billion. Steven Hao Steven Hao, who has limited pictures of himself available on the internet, is the youngest billionaire in the US. Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images Age: 30Net worth: $5.8 billionState: CaliforniaSteven Hao, the youngest billionaire in the US, left Scale AI, a data-labeling startup, to found Cognition in 2023.Cognition makes AI software that writes and repairs code. Its customers include Citibank and fintech Ramp, and the company is valued at $48 billion.Hao, alongside fellow cofounders Scott Wu and Walden Yan, is a former competitive programmer, having won a gold medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics, the global competitive programming championship. Read next Tristin Hoffman is a Life Fellow on Business Insider’s Editorial Partnerships team. Her reporting focuses on retail, travel, business, and more through a visual storytelling and lifestyle lens. She has previously reported on Oregon’s economy for The Oregonian and Pennsylvania litigation for Law.com. Her stories have inspired policy changes, shed light on public officials’ misconduct, and gained national awards. She graduated from the University of Oregon, where she studied journalism and law while serving as editor-in-chief of The Daily Emerald. Billionaires Anthropic OpenAI More