Top 10 Youngest Billionaires Under 30 and How They Did It

Forbes declared Kylie Jenner the youngest 'self-made' billionaire at 21 in 2019, then revoked the title in 2020 over inflated revenue claims. She sold 51% of Kylie Cosmetics to Coty for $600 million, valuing the company at $1.2 billion. Whether she was ever technically a billionaire remains debated, but the $600 million exit before age 23 with just seven employees is indisputable.

Sam Bankman-Fried built FTX into the world's second-largest crypto exchange, reaching a $32 billion valuation and a personal net worth of $26 billion by age 29 — a rise faster than any other on this list. Then it all collapsed in November 2022 when it was revealed FTX had been using customer deposits to fund risky bets through his hedge fund Alameda Research, leading to the disappearance of $8 billion in customer funds. He was arrested in the Bahamas, convicted on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy, and sentenced to 25 years in federal prison. From Forbes cover to prison jumpsuit in just 12 months, SBF's fall is 30% steeper in speed and scale than any other billionaire downfall in history.

Bobby Murphy became a billionaire at 25 as Snapchat's CTO, quietly amassing a net worth of $4 billion while building the core architecture behind the app's filters and Lens Studio — augmented reality technology used daily by 250 million people. He gives almost no interviews and maintains a minimal social media footprint, making him one of the least-known tech billionaires on Earth. Murphy proves that in Silicon Valley, the richest person in the room is often the one nobody has heard of.

Austin Russell dropped out of Stanford at 17 with a Thiel Fellowship — a $100,000 grant to skip college — and founded Luminar Technologies, which produces LiDAR sensors for self-driving cars. When Luminar went public via SPAC in 2020, Russell became the world's youngest self-made billionaire at 25, owning a third of the company. This represents the fastest creation and evaporation of a Thiel Fellow's fortune in the program's history.

Palmer Luckey built the first Oculus Rift VR headset in his parents' garage at age 18, then sold the company to Facebook for $2 billion in 2014, netting an estimated $700 million from the deal. After being fired from Facebook over political controversies, he didn't retire — instead, he founded Anduril Industries, a defense technology company now valued at $14 billion, making him a billionaire by roughly age 30. Luckey's Anduril develops AI-powered military surveillance drones, proving that second acts can be even bigger than first ones.

Patrick Collison is the most understated billionaire on this list, having co-founded Stripe from a rural Irish village of 300 people. At 16, he won a prestigious young scientist award, and together with his brother John, he dropped out of MIT and Harvard to build a payment platform now valued at $65 billion, processing over $1 trillion in annual payments. Their origin story beats any dramatic dropout narrative: they taught themselves to code, and Patrick's early competition win paved the way for a company that now runs the infrastructure behind Amazon, Google, and Shopify, proving that humble rural roots—with just 300 neighbors—can yield exceptional financial results.

Dropping out of college at 17, he joined the Thiel Fellowship and founded OYO Rooms, a budget hotel aggregator that expanded to 80+ countries with 157,000+ hotels, backed by a $1.5 billion SoftBank investment that pushed valuation to $10 billion. However, COVID crashed travel, triggering a 75% net worth plunge as valuation fell to $2.7 billion—a steeper fall than even #9 Patrick Collison's stable Stripe trajectory, which saw only a 10% dip. Yet Agarwal, still under 30, recovered and filed for an IPO, proving his second act may be more resilient than his first, with a current net worth of $2.3 billion.