29 New Billionaires Who Got Rich from the AI Boom

The sums of money that the artificial intelligence boom has created in the span of a few years border on unthinkable.

OpenAI, which debuted ChatGPT in late 2022, is poised to become one of the world’s most valuable startups with a $300 billion valuation. Anthropic, created in 2021 by a team of former OpenAI employees, is worth more than $60 billion. Safe Superintelligence launched in October and has already notched a $32 billion valuation.

This vast wave of enthusiasm has also minted a new generation of billionaires.

The Bloomberg Billionaires Index calculated that across four AI companies, 15 founders have amassed stakes worth a cumulative $38 billion. Those ranks are poised to swell based on funding rounds reported to be in the works. If those close, at least another 14 individuals with collective holdings worth $33 billion will be added to the group, including at Thinking Machines Lab, a brand-new startup already reported to be seeking a $9 billion valuation.

All of the companies declined to comment or didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Silicon Valley is no stranger to tech booms, from the dot-com bubble to the social media craze to the rise of the sharing economy. But even wealth advisers who’ve seen the booms and busts up close say the speed of the AI revolution — from startup idea to attracting mega backers and billion-dollar valuations — stands out.

“The velocity is different,” said Rick Gordon, a Silicon Valley-based senior managing director at Citizens Private Wealth. “It’s happened, I don’t want to say overnight, but it’s happened very quickly.”

However, cracks may be starting to emerge. CoreWeave Inc., a former crypto mining company that pivoted to AI, priced its initial public offering at a $23 billion valuation Thursday night, well below the more than $35 billion it sought, and shares closed unchanged in its market debut Friday. Still, its three founders were billionaires after the IPO.

To quantify the skyrocketing wealth, Bloomberg used a combination of PitchBook and Bloomberg data to calculate investor ownership and deducted a standard-sized employee pool based on Carta data to determine the founders’ stakes. That’s divided by the number of founders to determine the average value of their holdings. At many companies, the split is unequal.

To be sure, most of the money remains on paper and many of the companies could go to zero overnight. Their status as private companies — or startups nestled inside nonprofits in the case of OpenAI — has made many fortunes too opaque to calculate. In other cases, such as Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek, the company could be worth anywhere from $1 billion to more than $150 billion — making its founder either a mere billionaire or one of the world’s richest people.

Read More: DeepSeek Founders Are Worth $1 Billion or $150 Billion Depending Who You Ask

Here are the companies minting the next wave of billionaire founders: