Thanks to artificial intelligence, DeepSeek’s founder, Alphabet’s CEO, four CoreWeave execs and a bunch of other tech tycoons have joined Forbes’ billionaires list for the first time.
Awash in venture capital money and investor delirium for all things AI, no group has gotten richer (adding $600 billion) or gained more billionaires (46) over the past year than the planet’s tech moguls. As a group, they’re the wealthiest industry on Forbes’ World’s Billionaires list, worth a collective $3.2 trillion.
The AI arms race, prompted by ChatGPT’s release in 2022, is in full swing. Investor excitement, new large language model releases and a growing list of business applications for AI have pushed up tech valuations—and minted a batch of new billionaires. The seven former OpenAI employees who left to cofound Anthropic in 2021 are now billionaires, thanks to a massive $3.5 billion funding round at a $61.5 billion valuation, announced in March. Elon Musk’s xAI raised $6 billion at a $50 billion valuation in December. (After we locked in net worths for the list, Musk merged xAI and X, formerly Twitter, in a late March deal valuing the latter at $80 billion.) And DeepSeek, founded by Chinese hedge fund manager and new billionaire Liang Wenfeng, took the world by storm with the release of its R1 reasoning model in January—claiming it’s cheaper to train yet still rivals the performance of OpenAI’s latest models. On the business applications side: translation services entrepreneur Phil Shawe of TransPerfect, Duolingo cofounders Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker, and AI game creator Yao Runhao have gone all-in on AI and reached billionaire status in the process.
Other tech startups are dealing with literal arms. Alexandr Wang briefly became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire after the 2021 list launched but fell from the ranks after private markets contracted in 2022. Fittingly for a child of weapons physicists, he’s back, this time with weapons, after his data labeling startup Scale AI raised $1 billion from private investors at a nearly $14 billion valuation in May 2024. In March 2025, Scale AI announced a deal with the Department of Defense to use the company’s AI models in U.S. military applications. Venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, meanwhile, landed on the Forbes list for the first time this year, thanks to his estimated stakes in Palantir, which has seen its stock soar by 225% over the last 12 months, and Anduril, which is in talks to raise money from private investors at a $28 billion valuation (up from $14 billion in August 2024). Both of those companies also contract heavily with the Department of Defense.
Of course, AI research and applications need nearly-unfathomable amounts of computing power, so those willing and able to provide it have gotten a lot richer. On the startup side, the poster child is CoreWeave, which sells computing power out of its 32 data centers to companies ranging from small startups to Microsoft. The firm’s valuation exploded from $2 billion in 2023, to $23 billion when it went public on Friday; its three cofounders and one early investor are all new billionaires.
“This was the perfect timing for us, driven by client demand” for AI, says CoreWeave cofounder and chief development officer Brannin McBee. “We're advancing the penetration of AI across every sector on the planet.”
Don’t count the tech world’s “old money” out, though. The cash-rich magnificent seven are making big bets on AI—from large language models to data centers. Thanks in part to excitement around a $500 billion collaboration between Oracle, SoftBank, OpenAI, Nvidia and Microsoft, among others, dubbed “Stargate,” Oracle cofounder and CTO Larry Ellison and Nvidia cofounder and CEO Jensen Huang are $51 billion and $21.7 billion richer, respectively. Alphabet’s release of Gemini 2.0 in December also led to an uptick in the company’s share price that propelled CEO Sundar Pichai onto Forbes’ billionaires list for the first time, and pumped up the fortunes of Alphabet cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page by around $30 billion apiece. Investors are excited about Meta’s AI prospects too; shares of the company formerly known as Facebook surged enough to make cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg the world’s second-richest person for the first time, worth an estimated $216 billion (up $39 billion since last year).
The AI bubble hasn’t burst yet—and there’s no telling when, or if, it will. For now, here are some of the most notable new tech billionaires that made Forbes’ World’s Billionaires list for the first time in 2025, listed from “poorest” to richest:
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Liang Wenfeng
Net Worth: $1 billion | Source of Wealth: AI, hedge fund | Citizenship: China
His AI firm DeepSeek took the world by storm when it released its latest model in January, claiming to rival the performance of OpenAI’s ChatGPT at a much lower cost. Liang, who hasn’t taken on any outside investors, funded DeepSeek in part with his profits from High-Flyer Capital Management, the quantitative trading hedge fund he cofounded in 2015 with two college classmates.
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Sundar Pichai
Net Worth: $1.1 billion | Source of Wealth: Google | Citizenship: United States
The Chennai, India native, who has served as CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet since 2019 owns just 0.02% of its stock. But with shares surging nearly 30% over the last year to a record high, thanks in part to Google’s new AI model Gemini 2.0, that’s enough to make him a billionaire for the first time—when combined with his hundreds of millions in (pre-tax) share sales.
Michael Nemeth for Forbes
Luis von Ahn, Severin Hacker
Net Worth: $1.1 billion (each) | Source of Wealth: Duolingo | Citizenship: United States (von Ahn); Switzerland (Hacker)
More than 100 million people use their Duolingo app each month to learn 40-plus languages, from Arabic to Yiddish. Born to a single mother in Guatemala City, von Ahn came to the U.S. to study at Duke and Carnegie Mellon, where he became a professor, invented the CAPTCHA online verification system, then launched Duolingo with his Swiss grad student, Severin Hacker in 2011—three years before Hacker finished his PhD program.
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Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Tom Brown, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish, Christopher Olah
Net Worth: $1.2 billion (each) | Source of Wealth: Anthropic | Citizenship: United States; Canada (Olah)
Anthropic, which created ChatGPT competitor Claude, raised $3.5 billion at a $61.5 billion valuation in March. CEO Dario Amodei cofounded the company in 2021 with his sister, Daniela, and five others; all seven came from OpenAI and are now billionaires, including a former Bloomberg journalist Clark and a theoretical physics professor Kaplan.
Yao Runhao
Net Worth: $1.3 billion | Source of Wealth: Online games | Citizenship: China
Roughly six million people play Yao’s popular AI dating simulation game Love and Deepspace each month. Launched in January 2024, it already accounts for over 80% of his privately held Shanghai studio Paper Games’ $850 million in revenue. An avid gamer since he was a kid, Yao and his now-wife once launched a mobile fashion game together.
Phil Shawe
Two Elk Studios
Net Worth: $1.8 billion | Source of Wealth: Translation services | Citizenship: United States
Shawe and his then-girlfriend cofounded translation services firm TransPerfect out of an NYU dorm room in 1992. After a messy corporate battle lasting more than three years, a Delaware judge approved Shawe’s buyout of his former fiancée and co-CEO in 2018 due to the “complete dysfunction” between the pair. Today, the $1.3 billion (2024 revenue) AI-powered outfit counts Microsoft and the Department of Justice among its clients.
Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg
Joe Lonsdale
Net Worth: $2 billion | Source of Wealth: Tech investments, Palantir | Citizenship: United States
A onetime PayPal intern, longtime Peter Thiel disciple and big time Trump backer, the Palantir cofounder is a billionaire after the data mining firm’s shares soared 225% over the past year. He also cofounded government budgeting tool OpenGov, which sold a majority stake to Cox Enterprises at a $1.8 billion valuation in February 2024.
Christie Hemm Klok for Forbes
Alexandr Wang
Net Worth: $2 billion | Source of Wealth: Artificial intelligence | Citizenship: United States
The youngest self-made billionaire in the world, at age 28, his Scale AI—which does data labeling for AI juggernauts including OpenAI, Google and Meta—raised $1 billion at a nearly $14 billion valuation in May 2024. The New Mexico native landed full time engineering jobs in Silicon Valley at age 17, with fintech Addepar and then question-and-answer site Quora. At 19, Wang dropped out of MIT after a brief stint studying machine learning to attend the Y Combinator accelerator and launch Scale.
CoreWeave
Michael Intrator, Brian Venturo, Brannin McBee, Jack Cogen
Net Worth: $3.1 billion (Intrator), $2 billion (Venturo), $1.5 billion (McBee), $1.2 billion (Cogen) | Source of Wealth: Cloud computing | Citizenship: United States
With two other commodity traders, the CoreWeave CEO initially stockpiled Nvidia chips to mine cryptocurrency. In 2019, the trio shifted to selling computing power, and now serves both small startups and large firms like Microsoft. Their firm raised $1.1 billion from private investors at a $19 billion valuation in May 2024 and went public on March 28. (Net worths above are as of March 7, the day we locked in valuations and share prices for our billionaires list; CoreWeave ended its first day of trading at an approximately $23 billion valuation, around the same value as in CoreWeave’s private share sale last October.)