Patrick Collison — Stripe

At 19, Patrick Collison dropped out of MIT and built Stripe into the internet's payment backbone—now valued at $65 billion, processing over $1 trillion annually. By age 31, he became Ireland's youngest self-made billionaire, with the brothers teaching themselves to code in a village of 300 people. Stripe's $65 billion valuation outperforms #6 Michael Dell's initial buyout of $24.9 billion, though Dell Technologies is now worth over $100 billion. Still, Stripe's payment volume dwarfs Snapchat's 2023 revenue of $4.6 billion by over 200 times, showing Collison's infrastructure play dominates the digital economy.