Austin Russell — Billionaire at 25 (Luminar)

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.